On Monday local time, Elon Musk, head of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), claimed in a live interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz that his team's "Magic Money Computers" in several government departments can "make money out of thin air."
Musk claimed that the DOGE team discovered 14 "magic money-printing computers" with blank check authority. He added: “I call any computer that can send money out of thin air a ‘magic money computer’.”
Musk said about 5% to 10% of payments executed by these computers go unreported.
"You would think that the government computers are all talking to each other. They're in sync. They add up where the money is going and it's coherent, and the numbers that you put forward as a senator are actually real numbers. They're not," he said.
Musk claimed that most of these computers are in the U.S. Treasury Department, with some in the Departments of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense.
According to Musk, the government's systems make it difficult to coordinate payments and address waste and fraud.
"If you want to know what's going on with accounting, and you want to reconcile accounting and eliminate waste and fraud, you have to be able to analyze a computer database. Otherwise you can't figure it out," he said. "Because what you do is ask one person, and then he'll ask another person, which usually ends up asking some contractor who will ask another contractor to do a query on the computer. So there are many layers to it. The only way to reconcile the database and avoid waste and fraud is to go to the computer and see what's going on."
Musk said: "When I cryptically refer to reprogramming the Matrix, you have to understand how the computer works. In order to find waste and fraud, you have to check the computer database."