Billionaire Tesla Elon Musk, after surprising the market with a crypto endorsement earlier this month, has continued his campaign to rein in the issue of $35 trillion US spending.
Musk, now a close advisor to US President-elect Donald Trump, has called for the appointment of some of the most optimistic bitcoin and crypto investors to Trump's cabinet.
Now, after a series of warnings, the US may be on the brink of bankruptcy, Musk has predicted that it could happen 'super fast'—joking that he would 'fix' it with an 'agency named after a meme coin.'
The US is currently heading towards super fast bankruptcy,' Musk posted on X, the social media platform he has acquired and rebranded from Twitter.
Musk is responding to a post on X from the Doge Department of Government Efficiency warning that 'the US government spent $6.16 trillion while only bringing in $4.47 trillion' in 2023. 'This trend must be reversed, and we must balance the budget,' the Doge account posted.
The US national debt has soared in recent years, surpassing $34 trillion by early 2024, primarily due to Covid and stimulus measures that have caused inflation to spike out of control and forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates at a historic pace.
Musk then responded 'literally,' along with a laughing emoji to a humorous post on X describing Musk telling Trump: 'We're going to fix America with an agency named after a meme coin.'
Musk's campaign against excessive US spending has led to the establishment of the Doge Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk claims could cut $2 trillion from US spending.
The Doge Department is a nod to the shiba inu doge meme also associated with the cryptocurrency dogecoin, which Elon Musk has called his 'favorite' cryptocurrency and is accepted as a payment method by his electric car company Tesla.
The connection of Doge with its rival bitcoin dogecoin has caused the price of dogecoin to triple in the past month, with billionaire Mark Cuban joking that Musk could bring dogecoin to the US Treasury.
Tesla continues to hold about 10,000 bitcoin—sometimes referred to as digital gold—worth nearly $800 million on its balance sheet.
Earlier this year, Trump suggested that he could use bitcoin to 'pay off our $35 trillion debt—give them a little crypto check, right? We’ll give them a little bitcoin and wipe out our $35 trillion,' he said.
In July, Trump promised to create a 'national strategic bitcoin reserve fund' and predicted that bitcoin could surpass gold's market cap of $16 trillion during an appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference.
