Some may knock the more recent books by bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson as corporate myth-making topped with a thin layer of serious journalistic or literary flavor sprinkles in the form of featherweight criticism of plutocrats’ personal lives. Okay I, in particular, may do this. But did Isaacson get Elon Musk to like him enough to talk to him a whole lot for his Musk biography? Yes. That at the very least is a point I’ll chalk up in the Waltmeister’s column.

Consequently, in the debut episode of Isaacson’s (sigh) podcast, called the Builders, we get Musk, and he’s being surprisingly candid about his time in President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. In fact, if you didn’t relish Musk’s time in DOGE—that is if you’ve heard about the team of researchers who published in Nature about how DOGE’s USAID cuts were projected to lead to an annual child body count of 163,500, or the article in The Lancet that said millions are expected to die from DOGE cuts—you might not chuckle at Musk’s reflections on the DOGE days nearly as much as Musk himself does.

Bringing up DOGE, Isaacson asks, “Do you feel that that was too much of a distraction? That in retrospect it was misbegotten?”

He then explains his economically conservative reasons for supporting Trump, such as his hope that Trump would “steer things more in the direction of a free market economy,” and give us a government with “less bureaucracy ideally.”

“But then what I should have done I think was be more in the background,” Musk continues.

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