Epic Real Estate Investing - “Before I Go…” Musk Drops the Final DOGE Reveal | 1486

Episode Date: May 10, 2025

In this captivating episode, we delve into an unexpected and groundbreaking revelation by Elon Musk at the end of an interview. Musk introduces 'Doge,' an initiative that in just 100 days uncovered $160 billion in federal waste, fraud, and mismanagement. This exposé reveals egregious spending abuses, such as taxpayer money being spent on leisure and frivolous items, and calls out systemic failures in financial oversight. Musk emphasizes the importance of transparency and accountability, advocating for the Doge program to continue cleaning up federal expenditures despite bureaucratic resistance. This episode offers a shocking view into government waste and the necessity of stringent financial scrutiny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Let's go. He was already walking out the door, hand on the night, interview done, cameras shutting down, and then Elon turned around and dropped the bombshell no one saw coming. This isn't a stunt, he said. This is just the beginning. That's when we knew Doge wasn't a joke. It wasn't a meme. It wasn't politics. It was the most aggressive federal cleanup operation in U.S. history. And the numbers? In just 100 days, Doge uncovered more waste, fraud, and pure stupidity than every audit agency combined over the last 20. years. How much? $160 billion. Gone. Misplaced. Misspent. Stolen. And while the media has been

screaming about elections, indictments, and student loans, Doge has been gutting the swamp in total silent. Let me show you how deep this really goes. They started with layoffs. First, 2,000 federal workers fired by Zoom. Then 77,000 took buyouts. U.S. AID, frozen. Treasury flipped inside out. And when the Doge team opened the vaults, they found hell. No one could explain where trillions were going. There were no tracking codes, no systems, no receipts, just billions flying out the door. They found a $4 billion COVID fund at the Department of Education. Not a single receipt was ever required to spend it. So what did people spend it on? $86,000 at Caesar's Palace, $393,000 to rent a major league baseball stadium.

Yes. They're like basically partying of the texture of money. Stadiums. Yes. Leasing stadiums. For what? For parties, basically. For parties.

Yes. $60,000 on pool passes. And yes, an ice cream truck. There's no exaggeration here. This isn't conspiracy theory. It's in the records. It's all real. It's all documented.

Those forced the receipts into day. That's all. And when they added just one rule, upload a receipt before you spend. Entire departments stopped drawing money. And so the one change that Doge made with our education is we had the simple requirement that if you draw down money, you must first upload a receipt. That was the only change that was made. You must upload your receipt. And upon doing so, nobody drew down any money anymore.

But we didn't say that we'd check the receipt. You could send a fake receipt. You could send a picture of your dog. Anything. Anything. That's all it took. All it took was accountability, and people stopped spending. Not because they were scared, because they couldn't even fake a reason fast enough.

They knew they were wrong. But that was just the surface. Doge found $20 million sent to Iraq to recreate Sesame Street. They found $2 billion in lost HUD funding. That money could have backed $100,000 first-time homebuyer loans. Instead, it sat in a forgotten account. For years, they found $27 million spent on gift bags for deported Central Americans. And that's not the crazy part.

Here's the crazy part. Some agencies were pushing carts of paper into a literal cave, not a basement, a cave. Inside, filing cabinets from the 1960s, paper folders thicker than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and six-month wait times just to retire one person. Doge went in and launched the first fully digital retirement system in 2025. We're just now digitizing retirement after 50 years of paperwork in limestone mines. And there's more. At the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federal agency with a $55 million budget.

By far the least peaceful agency that we've worked with, ironically. Of course. Doge found an actual armory, loaded weapons inside the Institute of peace. I mean, any given company, any given organizational name is going to kind of be the opposite of the title. Because irony isn't dead. They also found a $130,000 contract paid to a former Taliban official. What was the money going to the Taliban for? So it was a contractor. They received $130,000 for generic services. And to Elon's point, there was not actually a clear description of what the contractor services were for. No explanation, no oversight. And when Doe showed up,

The agency's accountant deleted a terabyte of financial data on the spot. So you'd have to ask a question, well, why would somebody do that? The Doge team, fortunately, was able to recover that data with the help of a few great employees at the Institute of Peace. And I think the most troubling thing was they received $55 million a year from Congress. And any money that went unspent, instead of returning that to Congress, they would sweep it into a private bank account, which had no congressional oversight. And that's what they would use to fund things like events at their headquarters and the private jets.

And so I think it's a great example because most Americans don't know what's going on at a lot of these smaller agencies. And this is, I think, the most extreme case of some of the wasteful spend that we're finding. Sounds like a cover-up, right? This one, you say cover-up, yeah. It's a cover-up. They delete a vast amount of financial information. That's really a definition of a cover-up. Isn't that illegal to delete evidence?

Yes. Shred documents? It is. It's certainly illegal to delete accounting records that Congress would certainly want to know where the congressionally-appropriated funds are going for. from taxpayers. Now we get to the punchline. They found loans sent to people born in the year 2165. They found payments to children under 11. They found checks going to dead people. So just by sharing a database and looking at social security numbers that showed that at the time of the loan, they had listed as over 115 years old or actually under 11. We didn't even check for under 18.

Under 11 years old. That's pretty clear. Babies dead people who were getting loans. That was $660 million. And when they followed the money, it didn't go to families or teachers or nurses or veterans. It went to contractors, D.C. consulting firms, social programs like fruit jam in Guatemala, and one mythical panda that never even existed. These programs, these grants are going to be like along the lines of Save the Baby Pandas.

And it's like, well, of course, who wouldn't want to save the baby pandas? And, you know, in some cases, they've got a show panda, which they will try it out for special occasions. In a lot of cases, they don't even have a show panda. No panda. There's not even one panda because we asked for bictors, and we don't even get one panda. Where's a billion dollars get you? It does not even get you one panda? This isn't satire.

It's the U.S. budget in 2024. And according to the Government Accountability Office, 75% of improper payments came from just five programs. Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, tax credits, and the SBA. It's like peeling an onion and finding nothing in the middle. There's layers of stealing. There's the first layer of stealing, second layer of stealing, third layer of stealing. Subcontractor, subcontractor.

Yeah, exactly. Contractor, subcontractor, subcontractor. It's like peeling an onion. And then maybe. And sometimes it's zero. Just flat, you get to the bottom of the onion. help them there. So maybe no one got a sex change in Guatemala. It's possible that no one got a sex change Guatemala. And Doge just dropped new numbers. 401 federal contracts terminated.

Sealing value, $2.1 billion. Another $613 million saved last month alone. Here's an example, a 276,000 treasury contract for a Kenya program coordinator. Another covered multiple African nations. And yet, we have veterans living in tents on freeway off-ramps. This is how your taxes get spent. Musk may be leaving, unfortunately, but fortunately, Doge isn't winding down. It's a long-term operation. Because if they stop now... If we take our eye off the bowl, the waste and fraud will come roaring back.

Doge already triggered 283,000 job cuts in the bloated federal workforce. And most of those people, they're now collecting two paychecks, one from their new job, and one from the government, until September. If they stop, we resume sending out trillions of dollars with no tracking, paying people who aren't even born yet, losing billions in spreadsheets. And you actually have to ask the question, well, how did we get here? When the country was founded, there were only four agencies.

Today there are over 400. So there's been a 100x increase in the number of agencies since the founding of the nation. And thanks to President Trump, he's now signed two executive orders to start to reduce the number of agencies in the government. Call out what you want, but you can't call it politics. You can call it ineptitude and waste at the very least. Fraud and corruption at the most. When you find these things, do you guys get mad?

And you were like, yes, I got one. How does it make you feel? It's so calm. It's so wrong. I mean, you just get. Unfortunately, like the hundredth time you heard it, it's hard not to get a little numb. You know, like, and by the 200th time, you're like, well, okay.

It's just another day up the office. Elon Musk's team exposed more in 100 days than Congress has in 20 years. Doge, they trimmed the fat, canceled the nonsense, and made enemies in every direction. On his way out the door, Musk made one thing crystal clear. Doge must endure, no matter who wins in 2008. Because if it doesn't, it's not just waste that comes back. It's everything that we thought he fixed. So generally, the fraud starts out small and they try to hide it.

But then year after year, if nobody stops the fraud, it gets more and more brazen and every year it gets bigger until they were literally renting out stadiums. And still, people protested. Property was vandalized. Lawsuits were filed. The machine turned out to be bigger, meaner, and more protected than anyone expected. They ran him out of town. The bureaucrats, the insiders, the media mob, all because one man walked into a room and asked questions like, Why does this cost so much?

Where is this money going? What did you do last week? Simple questions that no one had the guts to ask. Yet, they're the same questions everyone asks when it comes to their own household. Musk pulled back the curtain and gave taxpayers a glimpse of where their money was really going. He did with transparency. He posted it publicly for everyone to see. It makes you wonder, what's left to see that we didn't get to?

And to support and cheer for his exit is to support. and cheer for fraud and corruption. To be happy he's gone is to be happy for waste. To celebrate the machine that turned on Musk is to celebrate that it can be turned on you. And what does this have to do with real estate? Nothing. Just a break. Back to real estate tomorrow.

Take care. And that wraps up the epic show. If you found this episode valuable, who else do you know that might too? There's a really good chance you know someone else who would. And when their name comes to mind, please share it with them and ask them to click the subscribe button when they get here and I'll take great care of them. God loves you and so do I. Health, peace, blessings, and success to you. I'm Matt Terrio. Living the dream.

Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. You didn't know home for us. We got the cash low. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.