‘Best Cabinet Ever’ in the US, gushes Elon Musk

Making an unusual appearance at US president Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting on 26 February, billionaire Elon Musk — who owns X, Starlink and Tesla, among others, and who is the richest man on earth — declared that it was the "best cabinet ever" put together in the United States.

Musk, who cartoonists and comics have started calling ‘President Musk’, knows of course that most of the cabinet ministers and several other ministers were confirmed by the US Senate just days ago — which explains why the first cabinet meeting was held five weeks after the inauguration of the second Trump presidency on 20 January 2025.

Musk indicated that he felt humbled in the presence of this room full of remarkable people and added that he saw himself merely as the ‘tech support’ guy who was merely doing the bidding of the ‘Commander-in-Chief’.

He is duty-bound to do what the President asks him to do, he added.

The president had asked him to be more aggressive, he revealed, and he had asked if he could send out mails to government employees and the president had said ‘Yes’.

Trump, for his part, was equally effusive and said that Musk has been working ‘incredibly hard’ as head of DOGE (the department of government efficiency) and has already saved the nation ‘billions and billions of dollars’.

The POTUS also pointed out that Musk also has ‘businesses to run’ and is making ‘sacrifices’ for the country.

Musk confirmed that half the federal employees, numbering 1 million, had responded and sent emails explaining what they had done in the previous week in response to his email demand.

While the mails sent out by DOGE were seen as a ‘performance review’, they were more like a ‘pulse review’ to check whether employees still had a ‘pulse and two neurons’ and could reply to emails... apparently.

Asked whether he planned to sack the other half — the other 1 million federal employees who had failed to reply — Musk said that DOGE did not want to be ‘unfair’.

Everybody who is ‘essential’ and ‘doing a good job’ would be retained, he added. The exercise was meant to check whether the employees were real people, were actually alive and were accessing their email.

Trump interjected to add that those who had failed to reply were living in a ‘bubble’. They could be dead, or working for two or more companies or at two or more stations while collecting their salary from the government, he added.

A news reporter referred to Trump claiming that everybody was happy with Musk and asked if that was true. The US president came to Musk’s rescue and said, ‘Let the Cabinet speak’.

He asked, ‘Is anybody here unhappy with Elon? If anybody is, we would throw him out’, evoking laughter and clapping.

Trump also elaborated on his ‘Gold Card’ scheme under which US citizenship would be made available to people paying 5 million US dollars (INR 8.71 crore) up front. Companies too would be eligible to pay the amount and retain employees they prefer.

In a rare moment of humility, Musk said, "We (DOGE) will make mistakes. We are not perfect, but when we make mistakes, we'll fix it very quickly.

“We restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption,” said Musk.

The claim was being debunked within hours, with former employees saying that the department had actually been devastated.