Musk Unpacks DOGE’s War on NGO Funding — in Layman’s Terms
“Government funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if it were the government, but are somehow made legal if it’s sent to a so-called nonprofit.”
Podcast host Joe Rogan asked Elon Musk what it was like to spend $44 billion on a company and then have people call him a Nazi on that platform. Musk replied with a smile, “I did Nazi it coming.”
The two sat down for a three-hour interview which aired on Friday. The topics ranged from the strange square formation picked up on photographs from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Musk’s so-called “Nazi salute” to President Donald Trump’s cabinet which Musk called the “most revolutionary” in American history and the role of government funded non-government organizations.
Musk addressed the Left’s “coordinated propaganda,” how they all use the exact same words to characterize things, such as their frequent reference to former President Joe Biden as being “sharp as a tack” until his devastating performance in the June debate with Trump proved otherwise.
“Like hundreds of people saying it simultaneously, they just got their instructions,” he said. The Democratic leadership “issue[s] their instructions and their puppets carry it out.”
Regarding the Left’s insistence that Trump and Musk represent a threat to our democracy, he noted:
If you just substitute “threat to democracy” with “threat to bureaucracy,” it makes total sense. The reality is our elected officials have very little power relative to the bureaucracy – until DOGE. DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It’s the first threat to the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they’re not. That the revolution might actually succeed. Then we can restore power to the people.
Small decisions result in multi-billion dollar outcomes.
The two transitioned into a discussion about government-funded NGOs—the often misunderstood and frequently overlooked organizations— that play a crucial role in funding progressive causes both in the U.S. and abroad.
[Note: Musk uses the terms NGO and nonprofit interchangeably.]
The term “NGO is a misnomer,” he told Rogan. “If you have a government-funded non-government organization, you’re simply a government-funded organization. It’s an oxymoron.”
He explained that “Government-funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if it were the government, but are somehow made legal if it’s sent to a so-called nonprofit.”
Americans were stunned last month when DOGE exposed USAID’s funding of numerous nonsensical – and some even nefarious – projects worldwide using U.S. taxpayer dollars. This is how they were able to do it.
“People cash out [through] these nonprofits,” Musk remarked. “They become very wealthy through nonprofits. They pay themselves enormous sums through these nonprofits.” He called it “a gigantic scam, maybe even the biggest scam.”
“There are millions of NGOs, but in terms of large NGOs, probably tens of thousands.
According to Musk, “George Soros is really good at this.” He said:
He’s [Soros] figured out how to hack the system. He’s a genius at arbitrage.
He figured out that you can leverage a small amount of money to create a nonprofit, then lobby the politicians to send a lot of money to that nonprofit. So you can take what might be a $10 million donation to create a nonprofit and leverage that into a billion dollar NGO. Nonprofit is a weird word, it’s just a non-government organization.
And then the government continues to fund it every year. And it will have a nice-sounding name, like the institute for peace. … But really, it’s a graft machine.
Rogan asked what is required of nonprofits to receive government funding. Musk replied, “There are really no requirements at all. … They use five or ten percent of their funding to do some good,” but the rest is up to them.”
Recalling a report he’d recently seen, Rogan said, “55,000 Democrat NGOs had been contributing to campaigns and moving things around and pushing propaganda. They [investigators] found it through AI. You have to go through steps and steps and steps to figure out where the money’s coming from. ‘Oh, it’s all funneling down to this place.’ … It’s a giant propaganda machine. A giant regime change machine.”
Rogan asked if there was a way to determine which NGOs are doing “some good” and which are not.
“If there’s even the “flimsiest” reason to believe an NGO is doing some good – ‘like send me a picture’ … they [the government] will continue funding it,” Musk said. “But if you’re not even willing to try to trick me, then we’re, like, not gonna send the money.”
Musk offered the hypothetical example of an NGO that claims it funds ebola research, then you learn that they’re actually funding a lab that is creating a new virus. “We shouldn’t be sending taxpayer money to dubious enterprises overseas.”
The two discussed the huge differences between Trump’s first and second terms. Rogan noted, “This is nothing like the first term. He had a bunch of neocons in the cabinet, and there was a bunch of shady people that he didn’t know.”
Musk agreed saying, “This is a revolutionary cabinet and maybe the most revolutionary cabinet since the first revolution.” He added, “This is why some of the standard confirmations were quite challenging because when you try to appoint people who are gonna change the system, the system doesn’t wanna let them through.”
All in all, it was an illuminating interview and I’ve only covered a quarter of it.
Elon Musk says Trump’s cabinet is one of the “most revolutionary” in U.S. history.
Joe Rogan: “With Trump back in after all that happened to him, and with you there, and with RFK Jr, Tulsi, and Kash Patel, this is a wild time.”
“This is nothing like the first term. He had a… pic.twitter.com/YDmpXulkSL
— End Tribalism in Politics (@EndTribalism) February 28, 2025
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Comments
Fascinating. We’ve had (millionaires) billionaires in government before but they were all birthed by the system. It probably took a billionaire recent immigrant (20+ years) with no allegiance to the system to really take it on.
Yeah, a podcast about 2 billionaires fantasizing about having sex with robots. Even Trump had the decency to at least cheat on his wife and have sex with prostitutes and porn stars.
I don’t think most people understand how this podcast of Trump supporters is reinforcing stereotypes of women as sex objects. This is not what Trump needs at this moment.
They spent about two minutes talking about that at the beginning of the video. That was it. I think it was a very substantive conversation. I learned something.
I was commenting on the article JeRkoff and especially on the grifting NGOs provide for, Your fascination with robot sex is noted though.
Musk is right about Soros being a brilliant arbitrageur. That is how he made his billions, and that is how he leverages his money for big political impact. While all his opponents are limited to making direct contributions to their favored causes from their own money, and possibly getting a tax deduction, Soros leverages vast sums from government grants and contracts to have impact 10x or 100x his initial investment.
IMO the key step to mitigate corruption is ending ALL Federal funding of any NGO or Charity. Can’t exploit the system if the system of payments doesn’t exist. Good programs will thrive on the donations of individuals who take the time and make the effort to send their own money. FWIW Ukraine has more than 40K NGO/Charities operating there today while as late as fall of ’23 they had just over 20K NGO/Charities operating. The opportunity for grift, graft and corruption with largely unaccountable Gov’t funding flowing to the NGO/Charity entities is too tempting to be overcome. See Stacy Abrams standing up a brand new NGO and a few weeks later getting nearly $2 Billion in funding from the Federal Gov’t.
Universities are technically NGOs and they do the bulk of scientific research, and that needs to continue. But there needs to be controls and audits, and government should never fund any organization that is involved in politics or is a “charity”. Foreign aid should be done through government personnel or regular for-profit contractors with tightly written contracts, not NGOs.
This has turned out to be doing everything I wanted to for decades. Not quite what I thought would happen, were both Dems and Republicans II was focused on RINOs) would be ousted by independents. Instead it was Trump hijacking the Republican party. While we still have RINOs who need to be put out to pasture with the View, things are shaping up nicely.
Business people are generally more competent than career politicians, this was why I opposed DeSantis for president. Trump was the right person for our times.
However I almost always prefer a governor to a congress critter for President because at least they’ve run something and haven’t spent all their time just pontificating.
It was an NGO, Eco health alliance, that gave us covid thanks to funding by Fauci
I have seen a few articles about how democratic governors are linked to NGOs through family members.
Democrats can smell out money spigots like a coyote can smell out jackrabbits.
NGOs do all the hard work of helping Democrats win close elections. They do the ballot harvesting/curing, registration drives, canvassing, phone banking. and all other non-advertising electioneering that actually gets their candidates over the finish line. Every Dem elected official knows all about NGOs, and certainly has their people inside them. Some like the Clintons, have their own NGOs.
Anyone can create an NGO by filing some forms with the IRS and your state’s corporation commission (or equivalent), and by putting up a few thousand dollars to rent office space and buy a website. Then you are a bona-fide charity that can take tax-deductible contributions from the public. But it takes real genius to hack the system well enough to get billions in government grants and contracts your NGOs. Soros isn’t the only one who did this, but he is certainly the best at it.