Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez branded Elon Musk a “leech on the public” in her latest jab at the tech billionaire-turned-senior adviser to the president.
Musk has been behind the Department of Government Efficiency sweeping staff cuts, reduced real estate footprint and slashed contracts as the Trump administration aims to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.” But the New York Democrat, along with some of her colleagues in Congress, have expressed concern about Musk’s unwieldy overhaul of the federal government.
“This guy is a leech on the public. No matter how many billions he gets in tax cuts and government contracts, it will never be enough for him,” the representative wrote on X Saturday.
“Now he’s going after the elderly, the disabled, and orphaned children so he can pocket it in tax cuts for himself,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “It’s disgusting.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks were in response to Musk’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast where he called Social Security the “biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Roughly 69 million Americans — retired workers and people with disabilities — receive Social Security benefits each month.
Musk also repeated a false claim made by President Donald Trump, stating that “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” are receiving Social Security benefits. The tech billionaire told Rogan: “We found just with a basic search of the Social Security database that there were 20 million dead people marked as alive.”
In reality, a 2024 report showed that from 2015 through 2022, only 1 percent of the payments made by the Social Security Administration were improper — and most of those improper payments went to living people, the Associated Press first reported.
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments Saturday are part of a long-standing feud with the Tesla CEO. Days earlier, she called Musk a “billionaire conman.”
After the DOGE-led effort to lay off dozens of employees from the FDA’s medical devices division — some of whom were later reinstated, the New York Congresswoman told her colleagues last week in the House Energy and Commerce Committee: “Elon Musk is not a scientist. He is not an engineer. He is a billionaire conman with a lot of money.”
She then pleaded: “I sincerely ask you all to examine what expertise he has in medical devices…These are people’s lives that are on the line.”
Last month, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out Musk’s companies’ contracts with the U.S. government. “If you want to start with waste, start with Elon’s defense contracts at the Pentagon,” she wrote. “In fact, we should start with transparency around defense contracts in general, which take up an enormous sum of public funds. But they won’t do that, will they?”
In response, the SpaceX founder said: “Do you actually write these or am I replying to your intern?”
