In February, as the disastrous effects of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's gutting of federal agencies started to emerge, the agency's figurehead Elon Musk took to the stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference and waved a chainsaw in the air.
Standing alongside Argentinian president Javier Milei, Musk wielded the shiny metal-plated prop to send a blunt message: the federal government's budget was being slashed beyond recognition.
Many months later, the devastating consequences of those cuts are still coming into focus. From thousands of preventable deaths abroad due to Musk "feeding USAID into the wood chipper" to widespread chaos and a growing mountain of legal fees incurred by dozens of lawsuits, the results of Musk's approach to cutting costs have been disastrous, to say the least.
And yet, now Musk says he has major regrets. In a baffling tweet, the billionaire claimed that he wishes he'd never grabbed the chainsaw.
"Milei gave me the chainsaw backstage and I ran with it, but, in retrospect, it lacked empathy," he wrote.
Musk was responding to another user who suggested that he "could have gotten more done if you weren't so worried about looking cool" and "acted a fool."
On the one hand, Musk is probably trying to distance himself from his work at DOGE now that his bromance with president Donald Trump has devolved into a bitter feud.
But it also smacks of hypocrisy, considering that he previously complained that empathy is destroying society.
In late February, roughly a week after wielding the chainsaw on stage, Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan that "we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on."
"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit," he said at the time. "They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response."
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