Hey Elon, I hope you learned your lesson.

Like so many CEOs before him, Elon Musk offered up engineering solutions to political problems and discovered the federal government is an entirely different beast from a globe-spanning corporation. Creating policy is an emotional process, not a mechanical one.

The world’s richest Texan returns to Austin chastened for his naivete.

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On Wednesday, Musk was still shocked, SHOCKED!, to learn President Donald Trump was not serious about reducing government spending or reducing the deficit. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a sideshow to distract supporters from what the administration was really doing, which was reducing services to the poor to cut taxes on the rich.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” he told CBS Sunday Morning. “I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful … but I don’t know if it could be both.”

Musk always overpromises, but he had incredibly audacious goals when he appointed himself Trump’s “first buddy.” After all, the Tesla and SpaceX boss had spent $225 million of his own money to elect Trump, and he expected power that reflected his contribution.

Almost a third of the U.S. government’s spending was fraud, waste and abuse, Musk declared. Cutting $2 trillion from the budget would be easy, he promised.

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