Elon Musk once said he could save taxpayers $2 trillion by slashing away at government agencies with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Then it was $1 trillion. Most recently, he has revised that estimate significantly downward to $150 billion. And even if he could prove he has reduced the federal budget by that amount (which he hasn’t), it doesn’t account for the nearly equal wasteful expenditure that his rampage has incurred, including legal fees arising from hundreds of lawsuits against DOGE.
But it seems that Musk, for all the mayhem and suffering he has visited upon Washington and the country, managed to look out for his own bottom line.
On Monday, Democrats holding the minority position in the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), led by ranking member Sen. Richard Blumenthal, issued a report estimating that at the time of President Donald Trump‘s 2025 inauguration, Musk’s corporate entities were facing at least $2.37 billion in liabilities stemming from “at least 65 actual or potential actions by 11 different federal agencies.” These included everything from an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation into racial harassment at a Tesla facility to a Securities and Exchange Commission probe into allegedly misleading statements about product risks from the biotech outfit Neuralink. Such enforcements and fines are highly unlikely to move ahead now that DOGE has infiltrated the agencies responsible, with Trump’s blessing. In February, for example, the Department of Justice dropped a discrimination case against Musk’s SpaceX, sparing it up to $46 million in civil penalties, according to the congressional report. Early in the second Trump administration, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee warned that DOGE was specifically targeting regulators that oversaw and often investigated various parts of Musk’s business empire.
The biggest-ticket item on the PSI list concerns technology that Musk has long held up as critical for Tesla and the future of the automotive industry: “Full self-driving,” or FSD, a software system that allows a car to pilot itself autonomously, without the need for an attentive human ready to take control of the wheel. Musk is known for promising, year after year, that fully autonomous Teslas are just around the corner, only to inevitably extend the timeline yet again, even as rivals like Google‘s Waymo have unveiled driverless robotaxi services in several metro area markets. In the meantime, he and Tesla have aggressively marketed less advanced driver-assistance features called “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” — the latter was renamed “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” — earning criticism from safety advocates who argue that these are misleading terms which have led customers to overestimate the tech’s capabilities, causing preventable accidents.
In 2022, it emerged that the DOJ had opened a criminal investigation into the way Tesla and Musk had advertised Autopilot and FSD, exposing them to possible charges of wire and securities fraud related to misleading consumers and investors about their technology as far back as 2016. The PSI memo notes that violations of these federal statues can be held criminally liable for “twice the gross gain” associated with the offense. FSD is a subscription service for Tesla customers, and the company reported $596 million in revenue from the feature for the 2024 fiscal year — which means, the Senate Democrats noted, that it could be on the hook for a minimum of $1.19 billion were the DOJ to bring and win a fraud case. Of course, this is an improbable scenario under Trump’s DOJ and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has been more focused on going after people alleged to have damaged Tesla properties in recent months as “domestic terrorists.”
By 2023, the DOJ had reportedly expanded their Tesla probe and subpoenaed records to examine “personal benefits, related parties, vehicle range and personnel decisions” at the company, it said in a quarterly SEC filing that year without offering additional details. Tesla has also been the subject of multiple investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) pertaining to FSD as well as issues with “loss of steering control,” “sudden unintended acceleration,” “steering wheel detachment,” “unexpected brake activation,” and whether a mandated recall had remedied the Autopilot problem it was intended to address. The Democrats on the Senate subcommittee who submitted the memo on the prospective savings for Musk’s companies thanks to lax regulation did not speculate on the amount of fines he might have successfully dodged in those matters.
“While the $2.37 billion figure represents a credible, conservative estimate, it drastically
understates the true benefit Mr. Musk may gain from legal risk avoidance alone as a result of his
position in government,” they wrote. “In addition to the 25 pending matters the Subcommittee has not yet been able to quantify, Mr. Musk and his companies could gain millions or even billions more simply by avoiding the time, legal fees, and risk of being ordered to undertake remediation efforts or change labor practices.” The senators added: “The truth is that the breathtaking scope and scale of benefits Mr. Musk is gaining from his present position may never be known, and that is by design. The silence is strategic, and it is dangerous.”
While a billion dollars in savings is nothing to sneeze at, it may not be enough for Tesla to weather the storm ahead. Beset by a falling stock price, plunging sales, and mounting competition, it has become a focus of backlash and protest thanks to Musk’s toxic political presence on the national scene, which has alienated a liberal customer base. The company is meanwhile at risk from Trump’s chaotic tariffs policy. Last week, it reported a 71 percent drop in quarterly earnings compared to the same period last year, only eking out a profit by selling carbon emissions tax credits to other automakers. On that earnings call, Musk once again teased a “pilot” Tesla robotaxi program to be rolled out in Austin, Texas, in June, using upgraded Model Y vehicles as opposed to the two-door “Cybercab” model he unveiled at an event last fall. While he remained light on specifics, he offered typically unrealistic predictions, envisioning that there “will be millions of Teslas operating autonomously — fully autonomously — in the second half of next year,” and that Tesla will take “90-something percent” of the rideshare market.
During that same call, Musk announced that his “time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly” in the weeks ahead so that he can devote more attention to Tesla, no doubt pleasing investors alarmed by its dismal performance since Musk threw himself into the project of gutting the U.S. administrative state. Yet his ongoing association with Trump and role as key GOP megadonor are bound to hamper the brand even if he puts some distance between himself and the White House. Whatever regulatory headaches he has spared his businesses in the short term, the public may not be so quick to forgive and forget.
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