Musk's Interview With Bret Baier

In a remarkable interview with Bret Baier on Fox, Elon Musk and members of his DOGE team put on a surprisingly grounded performance. Musk sometimes comes off as having a little too much fun trolling his opponents, but this interview gives a clear idea of why he's gotten so rich -- he actually understands business and IT, something most business and IT people don't.

However, it's difficult to find a single written transcript. The best I can come up with is in this post at Red State, which quotes extensive excerpts, for instance,

MUSK: We're talking about elementary financial controls, that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. The changes we're putting in place will enable the federal government to pass an audit, it will enable taxpayers to know where the money is going and know that their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent well.

I spent most of my career on the controls side of IT, security, procedures, contingency planning, and related areas. Part of my function was to be audited almost constantly. Internal and external auditors and bank examiners would come in and want to see in detail how the company, for instance, made sure that only the people who were specifically authorized to sign checks outside the computer system were also exclusively permitted to issue equivalent payments through the computer.

Another issue was how the company identified confidential customer and employee data and made sure it was kept confidential. That would include medical and medical insurance data, financial information, social security numbers, personnel actions, legal strategies, and so forth.

Another issue was ensuring that the company could maintain critical operations that relied on the availability of its IT systems and data. Just as an example, several major financial companies had both their executive offices and their IT facilities in the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed on 9/11. How did they react to losing their major officers and their whole IT operation? Recognize that if there were no way quickly to recover customer accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars would be inaccessbile for weeks or months, or possibly just disappear forever.

(As it happened, in that case, the brokers and so forth typically had mirror-image backup operations already running in places like New Jersey, because the auditors had recognized the potential problem for decades and had long since insisted the companies plan for it.)

These are the sorts of things auditors ask about. They report directly to the corporate board of directors, in large part because as Musk puts it, if such controls aren't in place, the company would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. Failing an audit in the private sector is a big deal; it leads high-level managers to get fired.

Via the Red State summary,

Another manipulation of the fraud gap discovered by engineer Steve Davis is over $300 million in Small Business Administration loans had been given out to people under the age of 11 and over $300 million distributed to people over the age of 120. Musk discussed how this gap occurred, lamenting how fraudsters exploit the Social Security numbers of newborn babies.

It had been reported weeks ago that there were people over 200 years old still in the Social Security files who weren't flagged as "deceased". This was pooh-pooed at the time as being unimportant, since it involved relatively few cases, and they weren't actually receiving benefits. But if the numbers are active, people can steal them, whether they're getting benefit checks from that account or not. This was the reason for the large-scale marking of accounts for 120-year-old-plus people as "deceased". Quoted in the Red State piece,

[DOGE member Anthony] ARMSTRONG: The reason this is happening is that the two systems are not talking to each other. Right? So, you don't know at the Small Business Administration that you're giving a loan to a nine-month old, which happened in one case, because you're not cross-referencing that with the Social Security Administration data that has birth dates. So, that very, very simple fix eliminates tremendous fraud. There are multiple systems across the government where the systems are not speaking with one another, and if you just solve that simple problem, you would solve a huge amount of fraud.

The piece quotes another DOGE engineer, Steve Davis:

As an example, there are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system.

BAIER: And that's an accurate figure?

DAVIS: Correct. Correct. This is something that has been identified as a problem, a pre-existing problem since 2008, at least from an IG report. So, there are some great people working at the Social Security Administration that found this, 2008, and nothing was done about it. And so, 15 to 20 million Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that could be used only for bad intentions, there would be no way to use those for good intentions. So one of the things the DOGE team is doing is carefully, and very methodically, looking at those and making sure that any fraudulent ones are eliminated.

There are other problems that can also grow in private and NGO environments that can easily get out of control, for instance, quoted in a Fox News link:

Davis brought up federal credit cards, which he labeled a "mundane" but "illustrative" example of DOGE's work.

"There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn't make sense. So one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we've worked for the agencies and said, 'Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?'" Davis explained.

Corporate credit cards can be used for all sorts of things, not least motel rooms for office trysts, something I've seen come up in my own experience. There can be no question that this sort of thing is going on -- even if it could be claimed that the amounts are negligible, it shouldn't be allowed, and controls should be in place to eliminate the problem.

My impression of Musk, even though in certain areas he's not a serious guy -- remember the frozen embryos with Amber Heard? -- has gone up. He dresses as badly as Bill Gates, but while Gates is just a flake, Musk is an eccentric with many redeeming features.