Musk and Trump sit down with Hannity during primetime to talk about their affinity, DOGE goals and a vision for the future

President Donald Trump and mogul Elon Musk sat down with anchor Sean Hannity of Fox News to discuss their affinity as allies, the goals of DOGE, their views on the future, the media and a host of issues that cleared up any doubts about their relationship amid unconfirmed press reports that, according to Trump and Musk, seek to sow chaos between the two.

Trump was the first to shower Musk with praise, claiming he had a lot of respect for the mogul and that he tried to find a smarter person than him to run DOGE, but he found it impossible.

"Well, I respect him," Trump said. "I’ve always respected him. I never knew that he was right on certain things, and I’m usually pretty good at this stuff."

"You know, I wanted to find somebody smarter than him," the president insisted. "I searched all over. I just couldn’t do it."

"I couldn’t. I really tried hard. I couldn’t find anyone smarter," Trump joked. "We settled on this guy."

At the start of the interview, the two also discussed the $10 million X paid to settle a long-standing Trump lawsuit against the former Twitter executive. There, Musk claimed that, despite spending a lot of time with the president, "Not once have I ever seen him do anything mean or cruel. Not once."

In another relaxed moment, Trump joked about the dress code at DOGE, asserting that the men in the department under Musk are very smart, but dress "just as bad" as their boss.

"Elon Musk has some very brilliant young people working for DOGE. That dress much worse than him actually. They dress in just T-shirts. You wouldn't know they have 180 IQ," Trump said.

DOGE's pivotal role in the Trump administration

In the interview, taped last week in the run-up to the Super Bowl, Trump and Musk discussed DOGE and the tycoon's role as the president's collaborator as he leads the mega plan to de-bureaucratize the state and reduce the fiscal deficit by up to $1 trillion.

Musk, head of the department, asserted that beyond the plan, DOGE's most important goal is that bureaucracy fails to defeat President Trump's popular mandate.

"One of the biggest functions of the Doge team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out," Musk said. "The president is the elected representative of the people, so it’s representing the will of the people. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the one of the people, and preventing the president from implementing what the people want. Then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy."

Notably, in an attempt to assuage doubts, the president assured that Musk would not have any decision-making or advocacy powers where there is any risk of conflict of interest regarding the administration's decisions on the tycoon's companies, which have large contracts with the federal government, as is the case of SpaceX with NASA.

"I haven’t asked the president for anything ever," Musk reinforced, assuring that his mission with DOGE is to find resources that are squandered and significantly reduce the fiscal deficit.

"Well, the overall goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit. And if the deficit is not brought under control, America will go bankrupt. This is a very important thing for people to understand," Musk said.

"A country is no different from an individual, in that if an individual overspends, an individual can go bankrupt, and so can a country. And the massive wage-toward-abuse that has been going on, which is leading to a $2 trillion year deficit, that's what the president was handed on January 20th, a $2 trillion deficit. It's insane."

Trump immediately showed confidence in Musk, saying he believes he will find $1 trillion to reduce the deficit.

Media bias

During the conversation, Trump and Musk also questioned the traditional media for seeking to generate discord among them and maintaining a noticeable ideological bias in their view.

"CNN, likewise (...) I watched them asking questions with, you know, the hatred with the question. Why are you asking the question with such anger? You're asking me a normal question."

The president then recalled the controversy on CBS's "60 Minutes" program for editing a controversial response from former vice president Kamala Harris.

"PBS is bad, AP is bad, CBS is terrible. I mean, CBS now, they changed an answer. In Kamala, they asked her some questions. She answered them like, you know, a low IQ person, the opposite of it, the absolute opposite. But she gave a horrible answer. They took the entire answer out, and they put another answer that she gave 20 minutes later into the- I've never even heard of that. I thought I heard of it all."

Trump, Hannity and Musk also talked about the accomplishments of SpaceX, Musk's aerospace company.

Trump highlighted one of SpaceX's latest missions, which recovered a spacecraft. This historic and unprecedented event that could forever change space missions.

They also talked about the planet Mars and Musk's dream of getting there.

At that moment, the tycoon was also encouraged to joke: "They ask me: Do you wanna die on Mars? And I say, 'Well, yes, but not on impact.'"