Musk cannot rely on dodgy Doge accounting at Tesla

The US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) isn’t quite losing its king, but Elon Musk has promised that his time commitment will drop “significantly” from next month.

- JAMES MOORE

It can hardly be a coincidence that Tesla, his flagship electric carmaker, reported a 70 per cent fall in profits for the first quarter of its financial year. Deliveries declined by 13 per cent, revenues by 9 per cent. Those numbers were well short of Wall Street’s forecasts.

Musk’s high-profile work at Doge is at least partly to blame. Tesla’s brand has taken a battering as a result of his antics there. Being President Trump’s BFF also goes down like a broken battery with much of the world and at least half of the US.

But has it been worth it to the American taxpayer? Has Musk managed to reduce the nation’s debt mountain? During the US election campaign, the Tesla boss boldly promised to cut at least $2 trillion (£1.5bn) from the federal budget. That figure has come down rapidly since Trump took office. Last month, Musk told Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News that he was confident Doge could unearth $1 trillion in savings. As things stand, it isn’t even halfway there.

The much-ballyhooed “Wall of Receipts” quotes estimated savings of $160bn, made up of a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions”. However, doubts have repeatedly been cast over the veracity of that number.