As his time in DC disintegrated this week, Musk intimated to the Washington Post that he was very surprised by what he saw in American government — but not as surprised as he was by everyone’s reaction.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” the billionaire told the newspaper. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.”
That “uphill battle” apparently included getting people on board with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the cost-cutting agency that Musk was seemingly gifted in exchange for his help getting Donald Trump elected.
While the boy-brained billionaire wasn’t exactly popular before his debut in American politics, he and his agency have become downright detested in 2025. From its iffy mandate and its enormous failure to reach its savings goals to its massive professional and competence breaches, DOGE has been a major dud — and Musk’s companies are bearing the brunt.
But ask Musk, and he has no idea why everybody is so mad. As he told it to WaPo, the agency mysteriously became the “whipping boy for everything.”
“Something bad would happen anywhere,” Musk said, “and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”
Despite his attempts at a breezy reboot this week, it’s clear the uber-wealthy memelord is aware that the public hates him and his politics — but the alleged “free speech absolutist” can’t seem to figure out why people would want to take their righteous anger out on his company’s cars.
“People were burning Teslas,” he lamented. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”
This isn’t the first time Musk has searched around dumbfounded, like a confused John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction,” looking for the reason people are taking their anger out Teslas.
In March, the world’s sometimes-richest man took to the social network he purchased to claim that an “investigation” had found five individuals, along with a liberal-leaning fundraising platform, were behind the widespread protests against his electric vehicle company.
He didn’t acknowledge, of course, the crux of those protests: that even Republicans and former fanboys consider the mass firing of civil servants toxic, and that his own poor approval ratings were bringing down Trump’s.
Despite his unceremonious exit from government, DOGE’s work will go on in Musk’s stead, and the agency will soon be “tackling projects with the highest gain for the pain, which still means a lot of good things in terms of reducing waste and fraud.”
Today in Washington, as in South Texas, it’s business as usual as the White House prepares to send a new slew of DOGE cuts to Congress in a spending bill and SpaceX launches more than two dozen Starlink satellites aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
Life in DC has gone on after Musk has left the building — not with a bang, but with a whimper.
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