Former President Donald Trump’s biggest financial backer and top campaign surrogate, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, says he and Trump plan to inflict “temporary hardship” on American citizens if the Republican nominee wins the White House in November.
Trump has said Musk would lead a commission on how to reduce government spending, and Musk has said he would identify trillions in cuts.
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means. That necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity,” Musk said last week during a “Telephone Town Hall” hosted on his social media website.
Musk, the tech billionaire who has spent more than $130 million backing Trump and regularly spreads racist conspiracy theories about immigration and voting, acknowledged that steep cuts would trigger political opposition, but said Trump would support the idea of everyone “taking a haircut,” an informal financial term for when an asset loses value.
“President Trump is supportive that everyone’s taking a haircut here because America’s got to live within its means, and we can’t be a wastrel,” Musk said.
On Tuesday, Musk offered a similar sentiment. On X, the website formally known as Twitter until Musk bought it, a user wrote Trump’s plan for mass deportations, “combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit” could cause a “severe overreaction in the economy,” with markets tumbling, followed by “a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy.”
“Sounds about right,” Musk replied.
Economists in both parties say removing millions of people from the country abruptly and imposing tariffs would quickly lead to price spikes and reignite inflation. When coupled with Trump’s plans to further cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, his economic policy would in effect raise taxes on lower- and middle-income Americans to pay for high-income tax cuts.
Any tax changes or spending cuts, however, would need to be OK’d by Congress, and cuts of the magnitude Musk has suggested would be unlikely to win approval from lawmakers.
Presidential campaigns usually don’t tell voters their candidate’s policies will increase material hardship. Trump himself typically describes the prospect of him serving another term in the White House as something that will bring unparalleled prosperity to the American people.
“We will end inflation. We will stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country and we will bring back the American dream,” Trump said at a Monday rally in Atlanta, Georgia. “Our country will be better and bolder and richer and safer and stronger than ever before. This election is a choice between whether we will have four more years of incompetence and failure, or whether or not we will begin the four greatest years of the history of our country.”
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has said he would appoint Musk to a “government efficiency” commission that would identify wasteful spending. Musk suggested Sunday he could easily slash more than $2 trillion from the federal government’s annual $6 trillion in spending.
Trump has in the past often derided fellow Republicans for being too focused on balancing the budget — and especially for suggesting cuts to Social Security and Medicare, two of the biggest and most popular government programs. Musk’s budget-trimming plans would impose on Congress a politically impossible choice: Cut them, or make much sharper cuts to other programs in order to leave them alone.
“I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” Trump insisted in an interview with right-wing news site Breitbart in March. “We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”
(Trump repeatedly proposed cuts to Social Security’s disability insurance programs when he was in office.)
Musk did not say where he would start cutting if Trump wins and he were put in charge of government efficiency, but he sounded confident the task would not be difficult.
“The reality is there is so much government waste, it’s kind of like being in a room full of targets. You can’t miss. You fire in any direction, you’re going to hit a target,” he said.
Musk also compared government finances to those of individuals, a framing the overwhelming proportion of economists reject. Countries, unlike individuals, are not meant to have finite lifespans. The global economy does not rest on currency issued by private individuals but is reliant on the U.S. dollar as a commonly accepted means of trade, a status that has given the U.S. economy unique advantages.
“If you’re an individual and you’re racking up crazy debt, well obviously the thing to do is reduce some spending and you’ve got to start paying down that debt. The same is true of a country. So that’s what I’d like to do,” Musk said, adding if it were possible he’d like to balance the budget “immediately.”
“Obviously, a lot of people who are taking advantage of the government are going to be upset about that. I’m probably going to need a lot of security. But it’s got to be done.”
