Back when Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan’s “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast in February of 2025, shortly after the Trump inauguration and beginning of DOGE as an important branch of the Trump government, he and Rogan discussed the extremely important matter of Democrat-connected NGOs and how they’re using money like that provided by Soros to push propaganda.
As background, at the time Elon appeared on the podcast, he was still the head of the Department of Government Efficiency and a key part of what he was doing was searching through the entirety of the federal spending to discover how much of it was being sent to various leftist NGOs and like organizations that use taxpayer dollars to push awful ideas and policies on America.
In one of the more noted parts of the interview, Elon sounded off on how Soros has managed to weaponize taxpayer dollars against conservative taxpayers, saying, “I think it was a total number of NGOs, probably millions. But in terms of large NGOs, tens of thousands. I mean it’s actually, it’s kind of a hack to the system where someone can get an NGO stood up for a fairly small amount of money. Like George Soros was really good at this. George Soros is like a system hacker. Like he figured out how to hack the system. He’s a genius at arbitrage. I mean these days he’s pretty old, but a genius at arbitrage.”
Continuing, Elon explained, “So he figured out that you could leverage a small amount of money to create a nonprofit, then lobby the politicians to send a ton of money to that nonprofit. So you can take what might be a $10 million donation to a nonprofit to create a nonprofit and leverage that into a billion dollar NGO. Nonprofit is a weird word. It’s just a non-governmental organization. And then the government continues to fund that every year. And it’ll have a nice sounding name like the Institute for Peace or something like that, but really it’s a graft machine.”
That then led to Rogan, stunned, asking how they are able to get away with sucking up so much taxpayer money and if there are at least requirements. He asked, “And what are their requirements with that money? What do they have to do?” Responding, Elon noted, “Just really no requirements at all.”
Rogan, still stunned, asked, “So they just get grants and the government just assumes that they’re doing good work?” Elon, in response, noted that the point is not to do “good work” but rather to keep the “graft machine” going so bureaucrats, leftists, and officials can profit. He said, “I think a lot of people in the government know that they’re not doing good work, but they. It’s a giant graft machine. I mean, but surely people online are like unpacking this. You know, it almost seems fake.”
Rogan was obviously infuriated by the whole situation, and took the opportunity to comment on how those tens of thousands of NGOs, many of them at least partly taxpayer-funded, have been used to push along Democrat causes and campaigns. He said, “Like when you’re seeing how we were covering this article that said 55,000 Democrat NGOs were discovered that had been contributing to campaigns and moving things around and doing pushing propaganda and they were all connected and they found it through AI that you have to go through steps and steps and steps to figure out where the money’s coming from.”
