‘Making Stuff Up As He Goes’: Jonah Goldberg Rips Elon Musk’s Hunt for Government Waste

Conservative CNN contributor Jonah Goldberg ripped Elon Musk for “making stuff up as he goes” in his search for federal waste, and slammed the billionaire for pushing DOGE findings about government expenditure that turned out to be nothing.

Goldberg, who is editor-in-chief at The Dispatch, appeared on CNN on Wednesday alongside other panelists to compare spending exposed by President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting initiative to “the search for WMDs in Iraq” and warn that the way in which the project is being conducted will lead to a collapse of trust in what the president is doing.

“Elon Musk is just making this stuff up as he goes along, right? And it’s sort of it’s a little someone was saying, comparing it to the search for WMDs in Iraq,” said Goldbert. “He’s constantly looking for stuff and then declaring he’s found something. And it turns out he didn’t find what he’s declared.”

Host Jim Sciutto interrupted to detail some of the false DOGE claims, including a “misreading of the data” that led to Musk promoting the idea “that millions of people who are 150 years old” were claiming social security and the claim that $50 million worth of condoms were being shipped to Gaza.

Goldberg, continuing his point, argued that if Musk keeps pushing revelations that turn out not to be “what he declared” Americans will soon question his expertise:

So my point is, is that right now, anybody who knows anything about public policy can see where he’s getting stuff wrong. And eventually that will become manifest outside. Eventually they’re going to start doing stuff that, like normal people will realize is just wrong. And it will take the veneer of expertise off of all this.

The writer then highlighted how this would lend credibility to protest from the MAGA loyalists on the right — led by Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — who regard Musk as a “fraud.”

“At the same time, there is a serious rift on the MAGA, right? Steve Bannon, who I am not a fan of, wants a New Deal-style big welfare state kind of government.,” said Goldberg. “He’s anti-libertarian, he’s sort of nativist. And he sees Musk as basically a globalist libertarian. And those two things are hard to reconcile. And every day Bannon is saying more and more: ‘This guy is a fraud’ and all that kind of stuff. Those tensions are eventually going to play out within Trump’s coalition.”

Watch above via CNN.