Musk Unpacks DOGE’s War on NGO Funding — in Layman’s Terms
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.
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