NBC News reports:

After his election, Donald Trump told NBC News that “we’re not touching Social Security,” other than to make it more efficient. But Elon Musk, who now wields enormous power in his role cutting government spending, has recently made comments critical of the program that are coming into conflict with Trump’s promise and worrying members of the president’s own party.

Those concerns have prompted some Trump allies to question whether the billionaire should continue to do so many media interviews, four people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

A particularly problematic remark came during Musk’s conversation with media personality Joe Rogan in late February, in which he described Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” A couple of weeks later, the billionaire once again went after Social Security, this time in an interview with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow. Musk, when discussing entitlement spending he deemed wasteful or fraudulent, said the program was “the big one to eliminate.”

Musk pointed to a 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office that estimated the entire federal government could lose between “$233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.”

“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending, which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements, so that’s the big one to eliminate,” he said.

A Trump adviser acknowledged that they were aware of “outside concern” around Musk’s comments. Trump allies — including some on Wall Street, in corporate America and Congress — have conveyed to the White House and even the president directly that Musk either has to be taken off air or needs to be more scripted. [Continue reading…]