What Trump Said About Elon Musk in his TIME Person of the Year Interview

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President-elect Donald Trump tells TIME in his Person of the Year interview that he may reject spending bills sent to him from Congress if they do not match the cuts prescribed by a cost-cutting plan being drafted by billionaire advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The potential threat may give the pair the juice they need to force lawmakers to take their recommendations seriously, avoiding the irrelevance that met so many of their predecessors.

In an interview with TIME journalists published Thursday, the former and future President also discounted potential conflicts of interest for Musk, whose private businesses have received more than $15 billion in federal contracts going back a decade and stand to have billions more funneled their way in years to come. Musk, the world’s richest man and an omnipresent figure in Trump’s planning for a return to power, is to most objective observers far from a neutral player in the deep-pocketed intersection of government and private partners.

But that appearance matters little to Trump, he tells TIME. 

“I think that Elon puts the country long before his company,” Trump says. “He considers this to be his most important project, and he wanted to do it. And, you know, I think, I think he's one of the very few people that would have the credibility to do it, but he puts the country before, and I've seen it, before he puts his company.”

As the owner of SpaceX, Musk effectively controls when NASA launches its rockets. The Defense Department has paid SpaceX more than $3 billion to get its satellites into orbit. Last year alone, SpaceX and Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer, had deals with 17 federal agences—organizations that, as Trump has proposed, are at the mercy of an outside review panel known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Asked directly about the potential dueling priorities, Trump doubled-down on Musk, one of the most generous fiscal backers of his campaign and affiliates.

“Look, we have a country that is bloated with rules, regulations and with, frankly, people that are unnecessary to do. We are going to need a lot of people in a lot of other jobs. We're looking to get people into private sector jobs where they can do better and be more productive,” Trump said. “We're going to see what happens. But this country is bloated.”

But Congress, ultimately, controls the purse, a fact that has bedeviled Presidents of both parties. Asked if he would veto spending plans that didn’t match the Musk-Ramaswamy proposals, Trump said he would consider it. But he also added he could move unilaterally. 

“There are many things you can do without Congress,” Trump said.

During his unsuccessful campaign, Ramaswamy made executive action one of his biggest pitches to voters and has a novel framework for getting that job done. From the outside, Musk, too, has advocated a leaner government and offered to run the program for Trump during a campaign chat on X, which was known as Twitter when Musk bought it in 2022. Trump, never one to be burdened by details, has been more than happy to look at the big-picture goals and leave the annoyances to underlings. 

For instance, Trump tells TIME he wants “a virtual closure” of the Department of Education. A few folks would remain to make sure subjects like English and math are being taught but otherwise would offload responsibilities to states. In this vision, Trump sees spending per student to be cut in half but outcomes would improve. (TIME’s Solcyré Burga has a breakdown of Trump’s full plan and its implications on civil rights, student loans, and standardized tests here.)

“A lot of these states … are well-run states,” Trump says, pointing at Iowa and Indiana, two states that, according to the federal dataset commonly called The Nation’s Report Card, outpace the national average.

In that data-driven approach to government, the Musk-Ramaswamy cost-cutting agenda has already drawn some begrudging support from Democrats. But that worry—especially in the hands of mercurial billionaires like that pair—remains that the cuts would be a vehicle for an ideological agenda. The pair visited Capitol Hill last week to start their sales job for a project that, to be clear, only has teeth if Trump gets behind it. For now, at least, the DOGE ambition has the President-elect’s attention. But the political will to make big cuts often comes up well short of action. Just ask how well the recommendations from the Barack Obama-commissioned Simpson–Bowles framework turned out. If the DOGE is going to dodge that fate, they’re going to need a consistent champion in Trump.

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