On Tuesday night, Elon Musk, donning a black midi-dress over One Direction-era skinny jeans, held a press conference with Donald Trump to assure the public not to worry because he’s investigated himself and has done nothing wrong.
On Tuesday evening, President Elon Musk and a decrepit, 78-year-old bag of racist meat held a 30-minute Oval Office press conference in which, among a range of other predictably bogus claims, Musk reasoned that we all voted for him and his crew of misshapen, neo-Nazi, Gen Z staffers. (An update on one of them shortly!) Throughout his remarks, Musk’s toddler son X, who he shares with singer Grimes (when he feels like it, that is), crawled around the room, or sometimes sat on Musk’s shoulders, effectively functioning as something between free PR and a human shield.
Musk, pupils visibly dilated and donning a black midi-dress over One Direction-era skinny jeans and his embarrassing “Dark Gothic MAGA” hat, joined Trump as he signed an executive order that further empowers Musk’s shadow agency, DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), to take a wrecking ball through the federal government. The order requires federal agency heads to work with DOGE and comply with its demands to shrink the federal government. DOGE, you’ll recall, is staffed by skeevy software engineers ages 19 to 25, who hold little to no prior professional experience beyond being racist online and sucking up to Musk.
Thus far, federal courts have pushed back on DOGE’s efforts to illegally dismantle federal agencies and programs that were established by Congress, in violation of federal impoundment laws. Musk, Trump, and Vice President JD Vance have all, at different points, suggested that the administration isn’t bound to follow these court orders. In violation of some of these rulings, the administration has continued to freeze funding for vital public programs—including, it seems, rape crisis centers and other victim resources. Democratic Congress members and federal workers report being locked out of federal buildings by what appear to be private security officers employed by Musk and DOGE.
Musk did the bulk of the talking to reporters on Tuesday and assured the public not to worry because he’s investigated himself and has done nothing wrong—or something along those dumb lines. “The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk said. “They’re going to get what they voted for.” I’ll say it: He’s right to the extent that every single person who voted for Trump on November 5, 2024, did, indeed, vote for white supremacy and pure, unfiltered stupidity and chaos. But even still, I’m willing to bet they didn’t vote for an unelected, South African-born billionaire whose companies have billions of dollars worth of contracts with the federal government, to be the single most powerful figure in the administration.
Nonetheless, Musk had the audacity to claim the career civil servants he’s indiscriminately axing are, themselves, the “unelected” fourth branch of government, whom he and DOGE are so graciously weeding out. Trump at one point chimed in and said, without any evidence, that DOGE has discovered “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse,” estimating it will soon find “close to a trillion dollars.” Musk, mind you, personally tanked the value of Twitter by 80% within two short years of buying it. OK, Mr. Efficiency!
Musk also fielded questions about the gaping conflicts of interest that lie with him auditing the government while leeching billions from it, via contracts to SpaceX. “You can see whether I’m doing something that’s benefitting one of my companies or not,” he said. “It’s totally obvious.” Cool! Guess that solves that! He was also asked about his idiotic and wildly offensive claim that the U.S.—which actually sends billions in aid and weapons to Israel!—sent Gaza $50 million in condoms. Musk shrugged this off: “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect.” He added, “We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we will fix the mistakes very quickly.”
Of course, these “mistakes” from a man who has repeatedly proven to be dumb as rocks will determine whether life-saving programs get funded and whether people live or die. Alas, a small price to pay for Musk and DOGE’s Twitter accounts to post epic memes about owning Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) by gutting a federal agency that’s saved consumers over $20 billion.
Speaking of DOGE: Since Friday, when Musk and Vance fired then un-fired 25-year-old Marko Elez, who three months ago said we should “normalize Indian hate,” we gained insight into another DOGE staffer’s digital history. In 2021, Edward Coristine, aka “bigballs,” launched an image-sharing website connected to URLs like “child-porn.store” and “kkk-is-cool.club.” Coristine is a 19-year-old college freshman, currently waist-deep in private citizen data, which makes me feel… a lot of things I can’t write here! Other DOGE staffers’ social media histories show them following and resharing posts from neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate.
Elon Musk on spreading misinformation about condoms for Hamas: “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect.” pic.twitter.com/McicZFxYzA
I think we all have a lot of questions about these DOGE staffers, who they are, and how much power they have. But all of their awful traits are only magnified in Musk, the 53-year-old amalgamation of them, who claims to be the busiest man in the world, all while spending seemingly all his time on Twitter calling people the R-word and, appallingly, facing zero questions about this.
Over the course of those 30 minutes, Musk’s son worked his way around the Oval Office floor, at one point visibly picking his nose and touching Trump’s desk as the figurehead president watched and grimaced. We now know that Grimes, the child’s mother, didn’t even know he was there. “He should not be in public like this. I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh,” she tweeted at one user Tuesday night. She made a similar comment in January, replying to someone who asked her about Musk parading X about in public: “I have made it clear I do not approve of that in every conceivable way I know how. I am desperate to solve it. It is a personal tragedy to me. But currently I don’t know how to do that.” Musk and Grimes are embroiled in an ongoing custody conflict, and Grimes has previously accused Musk of not letting her see her own child.
