Niamh Shackleton
Elon Musk has raised eyebrows once more.
On Thursday (February 20), Musk made an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and was met with cheers from activists in Washington.
While this isn't the typical event you'd expect to see him at, Musk, best known for being the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, has moved his attention to politics of late after being appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
He's also struck up quite a friendship with President Trump, with the pair even doing a joint interview with Fox News in recent days.
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While at the conference, Musk appeared onstage wearing shades and his trademark black Make America Great Again hat, he said Argentina’s President Javier Milei had a gift for him.
The president walked onstage with the red chainsaw - engraved with Milei’s slogan 'Viva la libertad, carajo' which is Spanish and roughly translates to 'Long live liberty, damn it' - and passed it to Musk.
"This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy," Musk said of the unusual prop while wielding it in the air.
It's thought that the chainsaw was a metaphor for all the government spending cuts he's made in the last month.
As per the DOGE website, the organization says it's saved $55 billion.
This sum has been saved from 'a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings'.
And these savings could see as much as $5,000 back in taxpayers' pockets.
Trump declared the amount of money saved as 'incredible' and suggested that 20 percent of it would be given back to Americans, while another 20 percent would be used to pay off some of the country's debts.
As of last week, the US was in $36.22 trillion worth of national debt, says Fiscal Data.
The site says that over the past 100 years, the country's federal debt has increased from $395 billion in 1924 to $35.46 trillion in 2024.
Elsewhere at yesterday's conference, Musk criticized the previous Biden administration for its immigration policies, specifically naming an app that was used by nearly one million people to be allowed into the US on two-year permits with eligibility to work.
He accused former president Joe Biden and Democrats of doing that as an 'investment' to get more support in swing states.
"A lot of people don’t quite appreciate that this was an actual real scam at scale to tilt the scales of democracy in America," Musk claimed.