Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday when SpaceX went public and pushed his net worth past 1.1 trillion dollars, less than a year after he spent his stint in Washington celebrating the DOGE cuts that stripped jobs, services, and lifesaving aid from millions of people who will never see a fraction of his fortune. Sit with the sequence. The same man who stood on a stage waving a chainsaw at the federal government just crossed a wealth threshold no human being has ever reached. The cruelty and the payday are not separate stories. They are the same story.
For anyone who tuned it out, here is what DOGE actually was. In early 2025, Trump handed Musk the Department of Government Efficiency and a mandate to slash the federal government. Musk took to it with open glee. At a conservative conference in February, he literally hoisted a chainsaw over his head and called it the chainsaw for bureaucracy. He bragged about putting USAID, the agency that delivered food and medicine to the poorest people on earth, through the woodchipper. This was not a reluctant budget hawk making hard choices. This was a man performing the destruction like it was entertainment.
The DOGE cuts landed like a wrecking ball on working people. Federal employment fell by more than 270,000 workers in 2025, with DOGE linked to the elimination of nearly 290,000 public sector jobs. In March alone, the government shed about 216,000 workers, the third highest monthly layoff total ever recorded in this country, behind only the worst months of the pandemic. These were not faceless bureaucrats. They were veterans at the VA, where as many as 80,000 jobs were targeted, IRS staff, Social Security workers, food inspectors, and scientists. Many were probationary employees, meaning newer and often younger hires, fired so abruptly that courts later ordered the government to bring waves of them back.
Then came the DOGE cuts aimed straight at the checks people live on. Musk went on Fox Business and called entitlements the big one to eliminate, floating five to seven hundred billion dollars a year in supposed savings from Social Security, Medicare, and the rest. To justify it, he claimed staggering levels of fraud, including payments to dead people and benefits funneled to immigrants. The actual numbers expose the lie. The Social Security Administration’s own watchdog found about 71.8 billion dollars in improper payments across seven full years, less than one percent of benefits paid, nowhere near the fantasy figure Musk used to justify taking an axe to the program.
The damage to Social Security was not theoretical. Under the DOGE cuts, the administration pushed office closures, staffing reductions, and new restrictions that hit the most vulnerable hardest. Research shows that when Social Security field offices close, the number of people receiving disability benefits drops by around 13 percent, not because they stopped qualifying but because they could no longer navigate the system. Over a million people are already stuck waiting on disability appeals, and tens of thousands die every year before a decision ever comes. One proposed rule alone threatened to strip benefits from roughly 170,000 vulnerable people based on who helps them manage their money. This is what Musk was laughing about on stage.
The cruelest line item in the DOGE cuts is USAID. Musk did not just trim it, he destroyed it, cancelling 83 percent of its programs. That agency had been providing roughly 40 percent of the world’s humanitarian funding, and a study in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that USAID programs prevented 91 million deaths over two decades. The same researchers projected that the cuts could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. Other analyses estimate that somewhere between half a million and a million people may have already died in 2025 alone because the aid stopped. Those are not jobs lost or budgets trimmed. Those are funerals, many of them for small children, traceable to a decision Musk celebrated.
Now here is the part that turns disgust into rage. All of that suffering was sold as fiscal responsibility, as cutting waste to save the country money. It did not even do that. Independent analysts at the Partnership for Public Service found the cuts produced minimal net savings once you count the legal battles, the rehiring, the lost tax revenue from gutting the IRS, and the chaos. One estimate put the real savings somewhere between 100 and 200 billion dollars, a tiny fraction of what Musk promised, and some individual cuts actually cost taxpayers money. Musk himself later shrugged that DOGE was only a little bit successful and admitted he would not want to do it again. The people whose lives were upended do not get to shrug it off.
So weigh it honestly. A man went to Washington, tore lifesaving programs out by the root, cost workers their jobs and children their lives, called it efficiency, achieved almost no real savings, walked away in May, and then became the first trillionaire in human history. He did not get rich by fixing the government. He got rich on SpaceX and Tesla stock while the government he gutted is still digging out from the wreckage. The trillion dollar milestone and the chainsaw belong in the same sentence, because the same worldview produced both. It says some people are worth a trillion and others are worth nothing, not even the price of the medicine that would have kept them alive.
