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Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Wednesday, July 02, 2025

"In retrospect, it lacked empathy."

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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.

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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."

#1 | Posted by Corky at 2025-07-02 10:43 PM | Reply

This is what happens when government is run by people and not a system. People are erratic and emotional. The whole point of the "deep state" is to keep things on an even keel. Instead we have chaos.

#2 | Posted by TFDNihilist at 2025-07-02 11:50 PM | Reply

Maybe he means it, maybe not. The boy who cried wolf too many times? Maybe Pinocchio? Old Grimm could spin a tale about this mess we are in.

#3 | Posted by shoeless at 2025-07-03 08:03 AM | Reply

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