What actually happened was that a zillionaire who knew nothing about government marched in claiming that he could cut $2 trillion from the $6 trillion federal budget by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. This was obvious nonsense, but Musk has never showed any signs of being willing either to admit his mistakes or learn from them. The wild claims just kept coming, like his insistence that millions of dead people were getting Social Security.

Claims about budget savings by DOGE — the Musk-run not-actually-a-government department that has been running wild since Donald Trump took office — have rapidly shrunk over time. Still, DOGE has continued to put out “walls of receipts” purporting to document some of its achievements. Again and again, investigators going through these reports have found them full of ludicrous errors — the same canceled contract listed three times, an $8 million saving reported as $8 billion, and more.

Seriously, would any of Musk’s tech-bro friends have invested in a venture run by someone with such a record of making extravagant but completely unfilled promises, then following up with false claims of success?

Meanwhile, the Muskenjugend, the extremely young and utterly unqualified acolytes DOGE parachuted into government agencies, disrupted the federal government’s operations. In some cases they summarily fired crucial workers without making any effort to understand their jobs, while encouraging many others to take early retirement. Those workers who remained have found themselves devoting a lot of time and effort to justifying their existence rather than doing their jobs. And although it’s hard to quantify, the DOGE presumption that government workers are worthless unless proven otherwise must have done large damage to morale and efficiency. In the end, DOGE has almost surely increased the budget deficit.

The one area where DOGE really has managed to make big cuts is foreign aid, a very small part of the budget but one it has virtually shut down. The savings have been tiny, but the human impacts immense — as I said, thousands have died as a result of Musk’s actions, and many more will die in the future.

Aside from the special hostility Musk and co. seem to have toward helping the world’s poor, the big driver behind Musk’s whole role in Washington seems to have been the belief that the federal government is a bloated bureaucracy that wastes vast amounts of money. Yet Musk kept not being able to find all that waste. This is despite the fact that he had months to dig up the wasted billions, along with unprecedented, almost surely illegal, access to government data.

A better man might have said to himself, “Hmm. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the federal government is actually a pretty well-functioning organization, with many workers trying to do their jobs well.”

But Musk isn’t that kind of man. In denouncing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he calls it a “pork-filled Congressional spending bill.” Hey, Elon, where’s the beef pork? You’ve spent months trying to find it, with basically zero success. And the reason this bill will explode the deficit is that savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps aren’t enough to offset huge tax cuts for the rich.

Um, what cost savings? And what personal risks are we talking about?

In the end, Musk’s legacy will be a damaged federal government that has lost many of its best people and will have a hard time replacing them. Oh, and a lot of dead children.

In a just world Elon Musk wouldn’t be heading back to run Tesla. He would, instead, be retreating to a remote monastery somewhere, to spend the rest of his life in poverty and penance.