The Ledger, every show

“We looked at the voter rolls. We found these people, thousands of them on the voter rolls, and we found many of those people had voted, right? In one state in particular, well over a thousand voted.”

“We found in the benefit programs that every benefit program that was being accessed by these people, you know, 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now, today.”

“We sent this data list to the National Targeting Center. They, and I don't want to get too far into the data, but I can tell you they found hard hits in the Targeting Center of very bad people. Criminals and people on terrorist watch list that are in this grou…”

“We have sampled a handful of states and in those handful of states we found people registered to vote, and we have found people who actually voted”

“We had already three arrests here in Florida, actually, and one indictment in New York.”

“It takes an engineer about a day to find 10 to 20 cases per state in sampling.”

“In the Biden administration, they raised the price, when I think about a dollar, an API call, to three dollars and change the API call, and all the states stop using it.”

“Man, this system's going bankrupt. It's going to be bankrupt in 23 to seven. The country overall, as you guys know, talked about many times, is on its way toward bankruptcy.”

“This is about 5.4 million people total. There were about 1.2 million people that the status is marked as unknown, and about 1.2 million people that were marked as general parole.”

“You've got to realize we gave 13 to fifteen billion dollars a year to human traffickers.”

“You get a Social Security number before we got here by walking in office. Answering, you know, with a medical record and a school ID that had your name and your date, the date of birth on it.”

“What I'm afraid of now is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy. I mean, a Latin American style kleptocracy.”

“It's a 100,000 GPU cluster. It's the most dense coherent cluster in the world, and it will just train faster and better. Than other clusters. And it's also built for the most cheaply, and the fastest. So, XAI will have the highest training capital, and I also …”

“SpaceX is an end of one. If you compare that to someone making an electric vehicle that, say, an electric airplane or electric VTOL, that will not be an end of one. It'll be an end of many. And in an end of many business, you're ultimately going to have margin…”

“I think if we had the political will, you'd easily get that 15%, no problem. Not without any problem at all, and without cutting the core entitlement programs.”

“I think it's 88% of the people that have left the government have taken packages. The packages are very lucrative. There's, you know, nine months or so of severance and they're voluntary.”

“Secretary of Homeland Security, I want to thank her, Secretary Noem, has just signed a memo, a policy memo, to make it free.”

“These programs, I've mapped the entire system now they go from DHS to State Department to labor. They're very disconnected, and they're hard to manage, so we are going to work on this. One of the things we are going to work on and hopefully leave behind is bot…”

“When we looked at the birth certificate data that was presented at the border, the number one birth date was one. And it was four times more likely to be born on one-on-one than any other day of the year.”

“We found that 23% of the records we looked at did not have fingerprints.”

“Both Border Patrol and Border Protection told me they had the highest suicide rates of all time during the surge. Okay, over 70, over 70 of these agents committed suicide in this period.”

“Ronald Reagan signed amnesty, and you know, some, four years later, it is now a solidly blue state, and I think some of us on this program, I know you, Jason, are a refugee from California because of that, because of some of those policies, and I want to be, I…”

“There is no control. There is no controller. There's no reconciliation. The reason they can't pass audits.”

“Yeah, I mean, look, Gavin could jump in here too, but the reality is once you could take that much mass to orbit, you can move anything around the planet very quickly. You can kind of go up or spin below you and come down. So transportation generally changes. …”

“So it's like in building Starlink, same thing, capital going in, but we know that the margins and the profitability of that business on the back end will be very, very high, and so the ROIC will be very good.”

“Look, we think, I think we're in a recession. I mean, I'll, I don't know if someone's already said this, but we're in a recession. We're in a recession.”

“And in the same fund we did Tesla, we actually had fracking assets.”

“The productivity difference between the kind of U.S. And China right now is about eight to one. So a U.S. Worker is eight times more productive than a Chinese worker.”

“So if Twitter was like the JV league, this is like the NBA. It's the most complex thing I've ever seen. I have in, ah, our office in DC, I have a, I've mapped now, as an example, the entire system of, like, basically from the border to the benefits programs. I…”

“I think there should be a third type, which is what you're talking about. People that are doing public service for a short duration, shorter duration, whether it's me, one-thirty as a SGE, or, you know, it's a couple of years as an engineer or something. I thi…”

“Yeah, no, what happened was I had actually volunteered to go to the VA because that's kind of, as you guys know, close to my heart. And Elon said to me, look, great, you can do that next, but will you go to SSA first and see what's going on there? Cause it's t…”

“And while you're waiting for your court date, which could be six, six years out is the average, by the way.”

“The person, the first person that posted the chart actually deleted it and sent me a post saying, Hey, I, you know, I'm deleting it because I get it. You're right.”

“It's literally the biggest turnaround, I think, ever in history.”

“We literally have a rule here government pay or in those areas, if it's more than like a third of the business, we don't do it.”

“Doge is not a new agency. It's the renaming of existing agency. I can't remember the name of it. We'll have to find it. Elon tweeted about this some weeks ago. That was set up under Obama actually to do this, to create an audit function to the government.”

“It'll take at least two or three months to really get the pad rebuilt and get another vehicle back on for testing maybe longer.”

“We invested in Andrewl with Palmer. We have a small investment in Flexport, which should have been one of the biggest mistakes the last 10 years of my career is not putting more money in Flexport.”

“TSMC basically took the many, this idea of outsourcing manufacturing assets that Intel did with TSMC in the beginning, Created that business and moved most of our high technology and chips off and offshore into Taiwan. This is like a terrible idea.”

“I think actually it's going to require industrial policy to force people like Intel, AMD to want to bring stuff back into the U.S., and to really get great talent to want to do it.”

“We have a woman who's got a PhD in the neuroscience of emotion, Caltech now, on staff, that helps us learn, as you said, always learning, about how to assess people and how to assess their emotional states.”

“When you have moments of large technological change, you always have political disruption because the means of communication have changed. This, the Gutenberg press, the tall ship, and you just go back and look, it always leads to a lot of disruption and often…”

“I think the productivity numbers in American, that we're seeing today are wrong, because they're not capturing what's happening underneath the technology, because these remote environments.”

“Like being able to allocate ten billion dollars in a venture fund in two years over zoom and think that's on just the metrics and not see people. I think that's a bad idea.”

“We haven't closed one field office, not one since we've been there.”

“You know, we were, as an example, at Social Security, we were criticized for the web setup time. Well, turns out web setup time has been better since we got there than after, imagine we have engineers. And we've now published the metrics on the website publicl…”

“He is in, he's in my son's class at Harvard. He dropped out of Harvard with two classes left.”

“80% of the people gone. That doesn't include all the contractors that were there.”