Americans are still in the dark about the scope and scale of what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is working to drastically shrink the size of government by aiming to cut $1 trillion or more in government spending.

But there’s some insight into what’s driving Musk — namely, an effort to combat what he referred to as “civilizational suicidal empathy.”

During a three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan released February 28, Musk talked about his deeply held belief in the conspiracy theory that Democrats are working to import as many undocumented immigrants as possible so that they can take over the US government forever.

“If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states,” Musk told Rogan. “They would just, they would be blue states. Then they would … win the presidential; they’d win the House, the Senate and the presidency.”

It’s a wild idea along the same lines as the debunked “replacement theory.” And there are many factual holes in the theory, starting with the fact that it’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and there’s no direct pathway to citizenship for people who enter the country illegally.

But what came next in the conversation may shine more of a light on what motivates Musk to cut down the size of government, and it melds with his takeover, purchase and founding of companies in the private sector. It’s the belief that empathy for individuals is costly to the collective.

Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said, borrowing the term from Gad Saad, a Canadian scholar who is also a frequent Rogan host.

While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Empathy, he said, has been “weaponized.”

It’s an important thing to remember as Musk turns his crusade toward the US government. While President Donald Trump has said cuts will not touch safety net programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, except to root out fraud, Musk made clear during the interview that he believes that the concept of Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.”

Musk’s lack of empathy is a theme in the recent biography for which the writer Walter Isaacson was given access to the billionaire throughout his takeover of Twitter.

And Musk’s disregard for individuals employed at his companies is also a throughline in the book, including on production lines at Tesla and at SpaceX, where he is described as quick to fire people.

At each of those companies, Musk expressed a desire to save humanity: with electric cars in the case of Tesla; by making humanity interplanetary in the case of SpaceX; and by sticking up for the First Amendment in the case of Twitter.

“He likes this notion of helping humanity,” Isaacson told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2023. “In fact, he has more empathy for humanity in general than he often has for the 20 people around him.

Musk still has that view of himself as a superhero taking risks; he repeatedly told Rogan about his fear of being killed. Now, instead of saving humanity, he believes he is saving the US government by cutting billions of dollars in spending, even if it impacts many Americans’ daily lives — by costing them their jobs or by curtailing government services — in the process.