Elon Musk’s interview with CBS Sunday Morning seemed to get off to an awkward start when reporter David Pogue asked the SpaceX CEO what he thought of his ally Donald Trump’s policies, including increasing restrictions on foreign students.
“I think we want to stick to the topic of the day, which is spacecraft, not, you know, presidential politics,” Musk said.
Pogue responded in surprise: “Oh, okay, they told me: “Anything is good.”
“No,” Musk said, looking off into the distance. “Well … no.”
He did, however, comment on the controversy surrounding his Department of Government Efficiency, which has been making aggressive cuts across federal agencies and which Musk said has become “the whipping boy for everything.”
“If there were any cuts, real or imagined, everyone would blame DOGE,” he said.
Musk also suggested that he is “a little bit stuck in a trap” when it comes to the Trump administration, where “I don’t want to oppose the administration, but I also don’t want to take responsibility for everything the administration does.”
Pogue’s interview was conducted before SpaceX’s Starship test flight on Tuesday, during which the ship successfully launched but lost control during reentry. Asked if there is anything that connects his various companies – besides SpaceX, these are Tesla (which faces ongoing protests against Musk), xAI and X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, and The Boring Company – Musk replied: “I think you can think of businesses as things that improve the likely trajectory of civilization.”
By then, Musk had ostensibly stepped away from government work, but said he would remain involved “a day or two” a week. He told Pogue: “DOGE will continue, just as a way of life. And I will be involved in some way, but as I’ve said publicly, my focus right now is on the companies.”
Pogue noted that after their conversation, a video of an interview with comments by Musk criticizing the Trump-backed budget bill sparked its own news cycle – and shortly thereafter, Musk announced that he was ending his work as a special government employee. Trump, however, later claimed that Musk was “not really leaving.”
