Elon Musk put his tail between his legs and apologized to Donald Trump. In a tweet on X, Musk said, “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.”

For those who missed it, Musk said that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” was a complete disaster. He also said that Trump was withholding the full release of the Epstein files because he was in them. He also said Trump should be impeached and held out the possibility of using his money to support a new political party.

Trump warned Musk that giving money to Democrats would be dangerous for him. He was presumably alluding to the possibility that he would cancel the billions of dollars of government contracts with Musk-owned companies. Trump could also bring back some of the regulatory investigations of Musk companies that he allowed Musk to cancel as head of DOGE.

The neat thing about Trump is that he makes zero effort to hide his corruption. If someone gets him angry, he says that he will cancel their contracts and investigate them and their companies. He just assumes this is the normal course of events, even saying that he was surprised Biden didn’t cancel Musk’s contracts.

Faced with this threat, Musk naturally backed down. He has hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth to protect, and as he always tells us, he loves every billion equally.

It’s very touching to see Musk apologizing to Trump to protect his vast fortune, but how about apologizing to the rest of us for what he did at DOGE? He thought it was really funny to constantly threaten millions of government workers with being fired.

And he did actually fire tens of thousands. It turns out that in many cases he had no idea who he was firing or what they did. The agencies where he was running wild with his chainsaw are now desperately trying to rehire some of these workers. In some cases, like air traffic controllers at the FAA, Musk made serious staff shortages even worse.

He also imposed absurd rules about normal spending requests, so now government employees may have to write memos justifying things like purchasing printer paper. It’s hard to believe this guy ever had anything to do with running a company.

But his biggest mistake was Musk’s absurd claims about the federal budget. He originally pledged to eliminate $2 trillion a year in waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s hard to believe that Musk even took five minutes to look at the budget before making this commitment. The overwhelming majority of the budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the military. Did Musk intend big cuts to these programs?

He never said so, if he did, but the more important point here is that the spending on these programs (maybe not the military) is for specific purposes that enjoy overwhelming political support across the political spectrum. Musk is welcome not to like these programs, but they are not “waste” by any reasonable definition of the term.

But his best gaffe along these lines was when he insisted that 20 million people, with birthdates that would put them over 115 years old, were getting Social Security benefits. This one was absurd on its face, which again Musk could have discovered with just a few minutes of research.

The Social Security Administration has very good records on the ages of people getting benefits, which I am sure they would have shared with Mr. Musk. He could have seen that the benefits paid out to people under age 100, and a few years older, sum to the full amount of benefits being paid. That means there is no room for the benefits being paid to 20 million people over age 115, unless his theory is that there are hundreds of billions going out the door that we don’t even know about, and which of course would not be counted in the budget or the deficit.

Anyhow, Musk will never apologize to the American people for the destruction and lies from his time at DOGE. He has nothing but contempt for those of us who don’t boast fortunes in the billions. But when it comes to protecting his own billions, Elon can give masterful apologies. At least the rest of us can enjoy his total humiliation.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.