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Elon Musk regrets DOGE more than any other professional decision in 2025. The Tesla CEO admits he would rather have spent the year building rockets than attempting to restructure the federal government. Musk called the Department of Government Efficiency only “a little bit successful” CBS News during a candid podcast interview Tuesday with Katie Miller, making it clear he wouldn’t repeat the experience if given another chance.
“I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically worked on my companies,” Musk told Miller, adding pointedly: “They wouldn’t have been burning the cars.” Washington Examiner
It’s a stunning reversal for the man who entered the Trump White House wielding a chainsaw, literally and figuratively, promising to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. What began as the most high-profile cost-cutting initiative in modern American government ended with Musk acknowledging that the backlash wasn’t worth the modest gains. The confession raises uncomfortable questions about whether disruptive innovation from Silicon Valley can ever translate to reforming Washington’s labyrinthine bureaucracy.
The Ambitious Promise That Became an Elon Musk DOGE Regrets Story
When President Trump appointed Musk to lead DOGE in January 2025, the initiative arrived with revolutionary promises. Musk would apply his corporate efficiency playbook to government waste, eliminating unnecessary spending and streamlining bloated agencies. Conservative think tanks cheered. Government watchdogs waited skeptically.
The reality proved messier than the vision. DOGE disbanded in November with eight months remaining on its charter Time, according to Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor. The agency that promised trillion-dollar savings claimed to have cut only $214 billion PBS, representing roughly three percent of the federal budget. Even those figures remain unverified because DOGE never provided transparent accounting of its methods.
Think of it this way: imagine a startup founder promising to revolutionize an entire industry, then quietly folding the company after six months while insisting the “principles” live on. That’s essentially what happened with DOGE.
Why Musk’s Government Experiment Went Wrong
The disconnect between Musk’s private-sector success and his public-sector struggles illuminates fundamental differences between running companies and reforming institutions. When Musk took over Twitter, he could fire executives immediately and remake the platform according to his vision. The federal government doesn’t work that way.
Legal challenges, bureaucratic opposition, poor press, and unfamiliarity with government operations hampered his efforts Washington Examiner, creating friction that never existed when Musk launched rockets or manufactured electric vehicles. Government reform requires navigating civil service protections, congressional oversight, judicial review, and public accountability in ways that corporate restructuring simply doesn’t.
The personal costs mounted quickly. Tesla dealerships faced vandalism and arson as public backlash against Musk’s government role spilled into attacks on his business empire. The world’s richest man found himself unable to appear in public without security concerns.
“If you stop money going to political corruption, they will lash out big time,” Musk told Miller, revealing a persecution complex that may have clouded his judgment about which battles were worth fighting.
The Illusion of Savings and the Reality of Disruption
DOGE’s claimed savings never held up under scrutiny. Critics pointed out that the agency inflated contract values wildly, such as claiming an ICE contract worth $8 million was actually valued at $8 billion. When independent economists examined DOGE’s February claim of $55 billion in savings, they estimated the real figure sat somewhere between $1 billion and $7 billion.
Meanwhile, the human costs proved substantial. Thousands of federal workers lost their jobs through layoffs and buyouts Yahoo! during DOGE’s first 100 days. The Partnership for Public Service estimated that 211,000 civil servants left federal employment PBS, representing nearly 10 percent of the workforce. Yet federal spending didn’t decrease. In fact, government outlays increased from $6.7 trillion in fiscal 2024 to $7 trillion in fiscal 2025.
What DOGE accomplished was creating chaos without corresponding savings. It’s the worst possible outcome for a reform initiative: maximum disruption, minimal results. Now Elon Musk regrets DOGE entirely, wishing he had focused on his companies instead.
The Toxic Relationship That Ended DOGE Prematurely
Musk’s relationship with President Trump, which began as a bromance fueled by campaign donations and shared populist rhetoric, deteriorated spectacularly by late spring. The two had a bitter public falling out around midyear over Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill CBS News, with Musk criticizing the president’s signature legislation and Trump threatening to cut federal subsidies to Tesla and SpaceX.
For a moment, it seemed like Musk might launch his own political party, positioning himself as an alternative to traditional Republican orthodoxy. The tension illustrated a deeper truth about Washington: even billionaires with enormous influence find themselves constrained by institutional forces they can’t simply disrupt away.
The relationship has thawed slightly, with Musk attending a White House dinner for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince last month. Trump told reporters, “I like Elon a lot,” while attributing their rift to electric vehicle subsidy cuts according to Reuters reporting. But the damage was done. DOGE lost its most powerful advocate right when it needed political capital to push through substantial reforms.
What Musk’s Failure Means for Government Reform
The DOGE experiment offers lessons that extend beyond Musk’s personal regrets. It demonstrates that applying private-sector disruption to democratic institutions requires understanding constraints that don’t exist in corporate boardrooms. Government reform demands patience, coalition-building, and respect for institutional knowledge—precisely the qualities that successful entrepreneurs often lack.
This doesn’t mean government efficiency is impossible. But it requires different tools than what Musk brought to the White House. Some DOGE initiatives, including the government-wide hiring freeze, have ended Time, according to Kupor. Former DOGE staffers have been reassigned to other agencies, suggesting that the Trump administration still values efficiency but recognizes that Musk’s approach wasn’t working.
The real question is whether anyone learned from this failure. Musk certainly did—he told Miller he’d rather have spent his time on SpaceX and Tesla. But did policymakers learn that slashing government requires more than chainsaws and viral social media posts? Or will the next efficiency czar make similar mistakes?
When Musk says he wouldn’t do DOGE again, he’s not just expressing personal regret. He’s acknowledging that some problems can’t be solved by the brute force methods that made him successful in Silicon Valley. That admission, coming from someone who rarely acknowledges limitations, may be the most valuable lesson from the entire DOGE debacle.
The federal government still needs reform. Social Security, Medicare, and the national debt remain unaddressed, as Musk himself noted. But meaningful change requires understanding government as something fundamentally different from a startup—an institution designed with friction built in, where democratic accountability matters more than quarterly profits.
Musk’s retreat from Washington leaves that work for others who understand what he apparently never did: that disruption without institutional knowledge creates chaos, not progress. The billionaire’s admission that Elon Musk regrets DOGE serves as a cautionary tale for future reformers who think Silicon Valley methods can fix Washington’s deepest problems.