Elon Musk Says He Is So Sorry for His Horrible Behavior

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."

The wake of chaos and destruction DOGE has left behind certainly underlines Musk's capacity to disregard the feelings of others — almost as if "cruelty is the point," as The Atlantic's Adam Serwer put it in a 2018 essay about Trump's first term.

But now that his once rosy relationship with Trump has exploded into a million pieces, metastasizing into an ugly feud rife with threats and personal attacks, Musk is trying to distance himself from his ruthless and ultimately fruitless endeavor to save the government money.

Is Musk coming to his senses? Was his latest tweet a brief moment of lucidity, or is he just trying to rally support among the political left? Now that he's alienated both the extreme right and the left, it certainly would be an enormous uphill battle.

Following his spat over Trump's "big, beautiful bill," Musk directly took aim at the Republican party in a Monday tweet, vowing that "they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth."

"Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people," he added.

Whether basic human empathy would be a core tenet of such a hypothetical party remains unclear at best.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Vows to Destroy Republican Party If Its Budget Passes