Tesla

CEO Elon Musk recently appeared on CNBC’s “Power Lunch”, where he found himself in a heated argument with the host

David Faber

. The nearly 30-minute long interview centred around Tesla and autonomous vehicles, before becoming tense toward the end. During the interview, Faber questioned Musk about his involvement in the Trump administration, particularly his role in reducing federal spending under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) taskforce. After answering a series of questions regarding the actual impact of

DOGE

, Musk told Faber, “We are advisers. We are not — we’re not kings here.”“I get it,” Faber replied as Musk quipped, “So why are you attacking this? Given that we’ve made so much progress?”“Not me,” Faber replied, “I’m not attacking. I’m just asking questions.”

Questioning DOGE’s claim that it could save up to $1 trillion dollars in government spending, Faber said:“You’re nowhere near that. It’s not really making the dent I think you may have thought you may have been able to achieve in terms of a true problem. Would you agree?”To this, Musk responded:“Well, first of all, it’d obviously ridiculous to assume that we could achieve that on Day 1. So, it’s only been four months,”

The Tesla CEO goes on to state that DOGE has so far cut nearly $160 billion in spending. Faber interjected: “That’s your number that’s out there. A lot of people take issue with it”. He further added that he asked Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok about how much DOGE saved, which responded between $5 billion and $32 billion.As Musk began to explain how the DOGE team got to this number, Faber said, “Aren’t there more effective ways we ultimately could have gotten at it?”. “I mean by changing the retirement age or really going after some other parts of the budget?,” he added.“We’re trying to go after every part of the budget that’s … just some parts are more boring than others,” Musk replied, to which Faber said, “You’re about efficiency. I mean, that would take an act of Congress to really make changes [to the] significance I’m talking about.”Musk responded: “In our opinion, we’ve created a $160 billion delta [fiscal] 2025 to [fiscal] 2026, very significant. That’s 16 percent of the way towards a trillion in five months. And in order to make progress, we just need the consent, obviously, of not just the executive branch but also the legislative branch and the judicial branch.”