Elon Musk Gets Awkward Laughs With ‘Tech Support’ Joke in Cabinet Meeting Address
After an opening prayer, President Donald Trump had Elon Musk address the press during the first Cabinet meeting of his second administration on Wednesday.
The world’s wealthiest man, a special advisor to the president, has business interests with multiple multimillion-dollar contracts with the federal government and is leading DOGE (but is not the administrator), and opened his remarks on Wednesday with a “tech support” joke that appeared to get a smattering of laughs.
“Well, I should just call myself a humble tech support here,” Musk said after thanking Trump. A few assembled Cabinet members laughed, but it would be inaccurate to say that the joke killed in the room.
“Because this is actually … It basically sounds like that, that is almost a literal description of the work that the team is doing is helping fix the government computer systems, but it is,” Musk further explained.
“Systems are extremely old. They don’t communicate. There are a lot of mistakes in the systems. The software doesn’t work,” he added.
“So we are actually tech support,” he continued. “It’s ironic, but it’s true,” before pivoting to a broader description of the controversial DOGE effort he is leading (but not leading). Musk said:
The overall goal here with the DOGE team is to help address the enormous deficit. We simply cannot sustain a country, a $2 trillion deficit. The interest rates, just the interest on the national debt now exceeds the Defense Department’s spending. We spend a lot on the Defense Department, but we’re spending like over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will go-, become de facto bankrupt. It’s not an optional thing. It is an essential thing. But that’s-,that’s the reason I’m here, and taking a lot of flak, and getting a lot of death threats, by the way. I mean, like stack’em up there. But if we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt, that’s why it has to be done. And I’m confident at this point — and knock on wood, you know, knock on my wooden head — that we can actually find a trillion dollars in savings. That would be roughly 15% of the $7 trillion budget. And obviously, it can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I’d like to thank everyone for their support. Thank you very much. This is can only be done with your support. So this is-, DOGE is really a support function for the president and for the agencies and departments to help achieve those savings, and to effectively find 15% in reduction in fraud and waste. And we bring the receipts. So people say like, “What, is this real?” Just go to doge.gov. We look at line item by line item and we specify each item. And I should say, we will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly. So, for example with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention, so we restored the prevention immediately. And there was no interruption. But we do need to move quickly if we’re if we’re to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026. It requires saving $4 billion per day every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it, and we will do it.
Watch above via Fox News
