Elon Musk, in an interview with The Economist, acknowledged becoming “a little too involved in politics” during his tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the Trump administration. The admission came as he defended the agency’s 18-month operation that forced out more than 272,000 federal employees and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He dismissed public health analyses linking the aid cuts to potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, asserting that “zero” people died as a result of DOGE’s actions—a claim contradicted by estimates published in The Lancet that USAID assistance saved 92 million lives over two decades.

Beyond the political fallout, Musk outlined a vision of the future shaped by artificial intelligence and robotics. He predicted that within a decade, AI systems would surpass all human intelligence, and money would become irrelevant in an era of “incredible abundance” driven by machine-produced goods and services. His companies, SpaceXAI and Tesla, are developing the infrastructure for this, including humanoid robots and space-based data centres. However, during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call, he acknowledged the “very complex problem” of building the Optimus robot, citing the unprecedented need to design every component from scratch and scale manufacturing—a challenge he described as the hardest Tesla has faced.

Views from Stockholm illustrate how the Doge model has reverberated. Sweden’s centre-right government has proposed a “waste commission” to scrutinise public spending, while the far-right Sweden Democrats call for an efficiency minister to purge what they label obstructive civil servants. Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson has distanced the Swedish approach from Musk’s “publicity stunt,” aiming for a more methodical reduction of state bureaucracy, targeting areas from prison food to communications staff. The debate underscores a broader European unease with Musk’s style, even as governments seek fiscal discipline.

Musk’s engagement in European politics continues to draw scrutiny. In the interview, he brushed off accusations of promoting far-right views, pointing to his diverse leadership and family background. Yet his interventions—such as amplifying content critical of migration—fuel perceptions, viewed from London, that he operates with the confidence of a man whose nearly 250 million-strong social media following both amplifies and insulates him. The next milestone will be the implementation or rejection of Sweden’s proposed commission, and the outcome of the lawsuits that shuttered DOGE, which challenge the constitutionality of its methods.