‘They’re going to kill me’: Question Elon Musk doesn’t want to answer

After months of spraying from the hip on social media, Elon Musk has been forced to keep it zipped on one particular DOGE finding.

Elon Musk admits he’s feeling the heat after being thrust into the enormous and unenvious job of scaling back the US government.

While his new position as Trump’s pet numbers nerd has sparked global criticism of “unelected tech oligarchs” in government, it appears the rabbit hole he voluntarily dived into is hiding more skeletons than he’d imagined.

After two months of copping it from left-leaning media sources and rusted-on establishment officials, Musk has admitted he’s had to carefully choose his words when speaking out against corruption in Washington.

In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, the business magnate claimed he was astonished to find out just how corrupt some of the inner workings of the US establishment are, and admitted speaking about certain details could put his life at risk.

“This is really going to get me assassinated…” Musk said on The Joe Rogan Experience when asked if he would crack down on insider trading and corruption in the capital.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief, who now leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President Donald Trump, was already under considerable risk as one of the world’s most high-profile figures. But after years of taking fire over his questionable decorum online and his sudden shift towards Trump, the 53-year-old has finally chosen to keep his mouth shut on an issue he believes is too dangerous to expose publicly.

Has he bitten off more than he can chew? (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)

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“It’s like I’m not lengthening my lifespan by explaining this stuff to say the least,” he told Rogan.

“I was supposed to go back to DC. How am I going to survive? They’re going to kill me for sure.”

While there were a few laughs in between his comments, Musk refused to delve deeper in front of Rogan’s several million viewers.

“I actually have to be careful I don’t push too hard on the corruption stuff, because it’s going to get me killed. I was thinking about that on the plane flight ... people get desperate.”

Musk offered rare insight into the final goal of DOGE and admitted the administration may have to make concessions when weeding out entrenched corruption.

In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, the business magnate claimed he was astonished to find out just how corrupt some of the inner workings of the US establishment are, and admitted speaking about certain details could put his life at risk.

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“Basically ... we’ll attack corruption enough to keep civilisation trucking along,” he said.

“But if I fully destroy the corruption and the graft ... they will kill me. It’s a real concern.”

Musk revealed he had been targeted twice in the past in Austin by two men who had travelled there to kill him.

“Two separate incidents. One thought I’d put a chip in his head,” he said.

“And, I mean, they’re both basically two guys that just very much had severe mental illness… This was before I was smeared as some sort of Nazi, before the current propaganda wave.

“The probability that any given homicidal maniac is going to try to kill you is proportionate to how many times they hear your name.

“And so they heard my name a lot. So I just got to the top of the list of two homicidal maniacs who were arrested, and both were in Travis County jail at the same time.”

What have Musk and Trump found?

America’s most talked about duo claim “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse” have been uncovered in the initial DOGE findings.

They have been scrutinised by US press over their definitions of fraud. On paper, aid sent to foreign nations can be seen as an essential part in stabilising less prosperous countries. But to Trump, the commitment to bettering nations on the other side of the planet is folly, given the shocking amount of domestic issues the US is currently facing.

During a White House news conference last, a reporter asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for evidence of fraud.

“I love to bring the receipts,” Leavitt said, iting three contracts for $36,000 for diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, $3.4m for the Council for Inclusive Innovation at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and $57,000 for battling climate change in Sri Lanka.

“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent,” Leavitt said. “They are wasteful and they are an abuse of the American taxpayer’s dollar.”

But several academics in the US have hit out at the current administration’s definitions.

America’s most talked about duo claim ‘billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse’ have been uncovered in the initial DOGE findings. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)

“Nothing they have identified is, to my knowledge, evidence of ‘fraud’ or ‘corruption’. Fraud and corruption are crimes,” Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University said via Al Jazeera.

“This administration simply has different spending priorities than the last administration. But to label all of it as fraud or corruption is extremely misleading.”

But some things Musk has raised are hard to argue against.

Last month, he exposed “a time warp” inside the US federal bureaucracy — one that quite literally operates out of a limestone mine.

The system is so outdated that it physically limits the number of federal employees who can retire each month.

“We were told, ‘No, the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000,’” Musk said in front of a trove of reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re like, ‘Well, why? Why is that?’”

Retirement paperwork for federal employees isn’t digitised — it’s written down, manually processed, and stored in boxes in a mineshaft dubbed the Iron Mountain.

“You look at a picture of this mine — we’ll post some pictures afterwards — and this mine looks like something out of the ’50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it’s a time warp,” Musk said.

The speed at which retirees can exit the system is quite literally determined by how fast the mine shaft elevator can move.

In a world inundated with cloud computing and high-speed data transfers, the issue of a broken mine cart stalling the processing of documents in the US government is a joke so bad it would have been cut from The Big Bang Theory.

The DOGE chaos continues.

Originally published as ‘They’re going to kill me’: Question Elon Musk doesn’t want to answer