Bulwark Takes - Elon’s Giant Head Melts Down and Blames Everyone But Himself

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Elon Musk appeared at the Qatar Economic Forum via giant screen, delivering vague and defensive remarks. He downplayed the impact of his political giving and defended controversial budget cuts, without offering clear justification. Pressed on his actions, Musk deflected criticism with weak responses and personal attacks, including jabs at Bill Gates. The interview highlighted his erratic behavior and lack of accountability for harmful policy decisions.

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Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller from The Bullwark here with managing editor Sam Stein. We're talking about Elon's recent remarks to the Qatar Economic Forum. He's doing this thing where he speaks like a weird Wizard of Oz, kind of voice of God, like man in the sky kind of thing with a vague background. So he might be coming to you out of the clouds where he issues like kind of petulant remarks and bon mots from on high. He did so to the folks gathered in Qatar.

And man, I got to say, he was prickly. He was defensive. He does not like Bill Gates. And I wanted to walk through a couple of the highlights. Sam Stein suffered through the whole 40 minutes. I just picked out a little bit. I watched it on 2.0 speed, just to be clear. So what was your takeaways? And then we'll get to a couple of the clips.

Well, I thought that there was a couple of things. One is you can't overstate how massive the screen was of him. It was not just a screen. It was like the entire auditorium is just Elon's big head. And yes, the fuzzy background made it a little bit mysterious. Maybe we'll do an Elon thing at the Sphere in Las Vegas where it's just like Elon's head. That's too much. I can understand it, but that's too much.

There was a defensiveness to it that clearly came through. I mean, that's just from start to finish, you know, very defensive, you know, and sort of combative, too, with the interviewer. He was insistent that he was going to be at Tesla for the next five years, got into a little bit about his compensation. You know, he mean, it seems like he's checked out and more in his business world than he is in politics. And we'll get into that in a little bit. Cause the main takeaways really were when the newsy ones were when they got into politics. And so, you know, he's asked to defend the Doge cuts and they were like, look, you promised

$2 trillion and you're going to end up with like 130 billion or something like that. Like, did you fail? And he's like, well, you know, it's up to the Congress to codify this stuff. It's not my job. And that was never, that's fucking bullshit. That was not how he presented it. And then, you know, they talked about, you know, did you get brand management problems, brand problems because of your political activities? And he said, no, it's just in Europe, you know, we're fine everywhere else. And then the big one was, you know, what are you, are you going to like step back and retreat from political giving? And we can play this video because this was actually quite interesting.

In terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future. And why is that? I think I've done enough. Is it, is it because of blowback? Well, if I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I do not currently see a reason. So, I mean, there you have it. He's like, you know, if I'm done with the – i'm not done completely politically giving but i'm stepping

back seriously uh there's some people who are skeptical that he'll actually be that restrained me okay i mean to me again this is i'm not saying this literally but like he's literally going on and off medication i don't know and i don't want to i don't want to hypothesize about what kind of medication that he's taking he's acting like somebody that's going on and off medication though like honestly like he's acting like somebody that is erratic you know that like sometimes he talks like this in this interview where he's very mellow and then he's like very hyper at other times and i mean you know humans contain multitudes but um it's it acts like somebody that's self-medicating and and maybe that's just his nature uh but to me

this reads like you know he might have a totally different whim because he sees a bleat you know from some congressman you know that offended him uh and then he goes on an adult rant against how he's going to primary that person and start spending a hundred million in a random district in North Carolina. To me, like that seems equally likely to him just backing out with it out. But you, you would, you acknowledge, I mean, it's just been obvious over the past three weeks, a month, whatever, he's like totally tamped it down and barely, he's barely talked up,

not barely talked about. He's talked about much less he's certainly at less public uh and his twitter activity is much more directed towards like weird tech stuff and business he's been kind of like the dog that was hit with the newspaper yeah i don't know if you want to do that yeah you know like he's been hit he was wild you know he's running around he was drooling. He was inviting children. And he's been kind of hit with the newspaper a few times. And now he's kind of backing off. I do think that that's definitely true. Back to a couple of the other things you mentioned.

The Doge in particular. This is just one of the best Doge facts I've learned recently. This was a couple of days ago. Eric Katz posted this. They've claimed that 40% of the phone calls into social security centers were fraud. And so they built a tool to track the calls. And it turns out it was actually 0.0018% that were fraud. And the tool slowed down the process of security payments for people significantly.

I love, like, that was one of my favorite Doge facts so far. And it's just, the whole thing was an utter failure. Like, it was across the board failure. Right. I'd be very curious. It's impossible to know the accounting because the numbers they put up are bullshit and they keep getting revised. But like, I wouldn't be totally shocked if it turned out that Doge ended up costing as much, if not more money than it saved. I mean, just between the lawsuits that they've had to deal with around Doge. I mean, even yesterday, there was a suit that said like shutting down US Institute of Peace was unlawful, and that they had to immediately reverse it. Like, why was Doge even fucking around with US Institute of Peace? Like, what difference did it make to them uh and then you had another story somewhat recently where the doge person who went into the va who's actually not an insane

doge person just sort of from the tech world and was super into management efficiencies and stuff went into the va and was like i was shocked to discover that things were pretty good like they were operating pretty well like yeah we could like streamline some of the stuff and get rid of some of the red tape. But I wanted more problems. He was expecting a 20-person DEI office where they're just sitting around drinking big gulps, watching TikTok all day, kind of scrolling their For You page. Yeah, it's like these people come here and they do they're not doing the government work because they're like it's lucrative like they

do it because they actually believe in the mission i guess doge just didn't understand that and then but the real legacy of doge ultimately i mean the one thing it did do really well was it just destroyed us aid i mean just destroyed it and and musk was pressed on that in this interview and he kept kind of deflecting. I actually thought the interview did a very good job because he'd be like, oh yeah, show me, show me instances where kids are dying of AIDS. And like, we have data from the UN that shows all these projects and these medications are not getting funded. And like, will you at least like call the UN and check it out? And he's like, I'll give, I'll give him a call. And it's like,

he did do that. Like the world's richest man went in and took an absolute hammer, sledgehammer, to an agency that does a lot of important work keeping the poorest people of the globe alive. That is his legacy of Doge. It is. And you can tell it's nothing that he's defensive about and that he's bristling about. And in the interview, he lashes out at Bill gates over his critique over it who does bill gates think he is to make comments about the welfare of children given that he was he frequented jeffrey epstein okay well yeah you know epstein island not great for bill gates so that is a big that is a big x mark uh but but again this is like elon can't defend what they did on the merits right now and and so he has to try to like do these,

like, like pretend like he's on Twitter. He's on X where he can just like do it, make fun of Bill Gates with like a childish meme. And then all of his fan boys would be like, yeah, Elon. Yeah.

And there were a few of the fan boys in the crowd. You can kind of hear some cheers. But like, it doesn't really work on the interviewer. Then when you're going back and like, but what about the, the substance of the critique of the fact that you're the world's richest man, you are taking away all these resources from

the poorest people in the world. Like there's no, that just happened. It's such a lame deflection. It's like, just own up to what you did. Just do it. Like, if you want to defend it on the merits, don't say, oh, Bill Gates and Epstein Ireland, and don't tell the interview, oh, show me the data. Like, you know the data.

You shut it down. Like, just defend it on the merits if that's what you want. But he can't do it. And it is honestly, you know, it should be a source of embarrassment. Because if you went into government and the only thing you substantially cut was USAID, it means you didn't know what the hell you were doing. Because that was the easiest target. And it also happened to deal with the most vulnerable people in the world.

Elon. Grumpy, prickly Elon. Any other thoughts? Speaking of Doge, speaking of the Qatari Economic Forum, didn't seem like he had any complaints about the inefficiencies of taking a 13-year-old Qatari plane and then having to refashion it and like having to put new security thing on having the taxpayers pay for you know making Trump's fancy plane secure did he have any did he have any notes on the efficiency

of that did not come up and he's a he's a transportation guy he does a lot of plane stuff so no didn't come interesting okay everybody subscribe to the feed we'll be monitoring lots happening today lots of stuff on the hill um so we'll be back here soon i've got david french on the pod today so make sure you check that out if you haven't he was awesome and uh we'll be seeing you guys soon peace