Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, after surprising the market with a crypto endorsement earlier this month, has continued his campaign to rein in the spiraling $35 trillion U.S. spending problem.
Musk, now a close advisor to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, has called for the appoint of some of the most bullish bitcoin and crypto investors to Trump’s cabinet.
Now, after a series of warnings the U.S. could be teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, Musk has predicted it could happen "super fast"—joking he will "fix" it with a "department named after a meme coin."
America is currently headed for bankruptcy super fast," Musk posted to X, the social media platform he bought and rebranded from Twitter.
Musk was responding to a Doge Department of Government Efficiency X post that warned "the U.S. 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.
U.S. national debt has skyrocketed in recent years, crossing the $34 trillion mark at the beginning of 2024, largely due to Covid and lockdown stimulus measures that sent inflation spiraling out of control and forced the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates at a historical clip.
Musk later responded "literally," alongside a laughing emoji to a tongue-in-cheek X post that depicted Musk telling Trump: "We're going to fix America with a department named after a meme coin."
Musk's campaign against excessive U.S. spending has resulted in the creation of the Doge Department Of Government Efficiency, which Musk has said he believes could strip $2 trillion from U.S. spending.
The Doge department is a nod to the shiba inu doge meme that's also linked to the dogecoin cryptocurrency, named by Elon Musk as his "favorite" cryptocurrency and accepted as payment by his Tesla car company.
Doge's association with the dogecoin bitcoin rival has caused the dogecoin price to more than triple over the last month, with billionaire Mark Cuban joking Musk could put dogecoin in the U.S. Treasury.
Tesla continues to hold around 10,000 bitcoin—sometimes called digital gold—worth almost $800 million on its balance sheet.
Earlier this year, Trump floated the idea he could use bitcoin to "pay off our $35 trillion—hand them a little crypto check, right? We'll hand them a little bitcoin and wipe out our $35 trillion," he said.
In July, Trump promised to create a "strategic national bitcoin reserve" and predicted bitcoin could eclipse gold's $16 trillion market capitalization during an appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference.
