‘The View’ Cohosts Predict Trump Will Turn on Elon Musk After Oval Office Meeting

Amanda Bell February 12, 2025, 12:02 pm

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Whoopi Goldberg and Alyssa Farah Griffin on The View — ABC

After Elon Musk‘s controversial press conference at the Oval Office, The View cohosts continued their condemnation of his nebulous access to the entire federal apparatus, as approved by Donald Trump.

Wednesday’s (February 12) episode started with a clip of Musk taking questions from reporters at the White House, with Trump sitting quietly alongside him at the Resolute Desk. Then, it focused on a portion where he admitted to getting it wrong when his DOGE claimed the U.S. spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza.

After a brief aside about the presence of Musk’s child, X Æ A-Xii, being present (after which Whoopi Goldberg insisted, “I don’t want to hear anyone mess about our names”), the hosts dug into the meat of the moment.

“Over the last decade, last 10 years, Musk’s companies, SpaceX, and Tesla were awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts… and since the president’s election, his net worth has increased $64 billion, or nearly 25 percent,” Goldberg said. “So yeah, I’m going to say, ‘You want to cut something? Cut some of the stuff you’re taking out.'”

Goldberg continued to rail against the unfettered access Musk and DOGE are being given to sensitive information about agencies and the American people, saying, “I get that there’s fat everywhere, and yes, we’d all like to see less of it, but what you’re doing is a lot more than just cutting fat. You’re giving people information they should not have because they’re not the people whose information it is… and nobody elected you.”

Sunny Hostin then took up the mantle of pointing out some apparent conflicts between what Musk is doing with these personnel cuts and his own personal financial interests, saying, “What is also very interesting is the cutting that he has done with the federal agencies, those very same agencies have 32 continuing investigations, complaints, or enforcement actions against his companies. Those are the agencies and the people that he is cutting. So all of it is enduring to his benefit.”

Hostin also pointed out that Musk’s statements on democracy are counter to his own personal upbringing, saying, “What is really rich to me again is that he is not elected, and he is talking about our American democracy, a man who grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era, who benefited from apartheid, is the very antithesis to our American democracy.”

Sara Haines called out the lack of transparency with Musk and DOGE, saying, “He said in that press conference, ‘You can go to DOGE on X,’ which he owns. So that’s part of the problem here. But then he says, ‘Go to the DOGE website.’ On there, the first things you can do is buy a meme coin, T-shirts, and hats. I couldn’t find it, and I literally looked for any piece of data that could be portrayed as some transparency. He has one debt chart. That’s a graph. And I’m like, ‘Okay, we already knew we had problems with our debt. Where’s the new information?’ No clickable links, nothing. So when he says it’s public, I’m not sure what he means.”

Joy Behar echoed the complaint about Musk’s mistake about spending, saying, “For two weeks, we heard this idea that they spent $50 million on condoms right in Gaza, right? It’s not even Gaza in the Middle East. It’s Gaza in Mozambique. They didn’t even know that… Elon Musk goes, ‘Well, I made a mistake.’ Meanwhile, you perpetuated the lie for the past two weeks, just like they did about these Haitians eating cats and dogs. Lies, lies, and more lies.”

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Alyssa Farah Griffin once again took issue with the lack of transparency about what DOGE is doing and why, saying, “My critique is that when they do release where they’re cutting from, they don’t tell us why they’re getting rid of it, what they’re replacing if a service is lost… Think of [Health and Human Services] and if we had, God forbid, another pandemic, you don’t want to find out later, ‘Oops, I didn’t bat 1000 and we got rid of that.'”

Griffin went on to say that she thinks that there’s a reason Trump is letting Musk do all the talking about DOGE and these drastic job cuts, saying, “I actually think that Trump’s doing something strategic by having Elon own this because it’s going to get less and less popular when people see that things they like are being taken away, and he’s going to blame Elon.”

Goldberg agreed, saying, “When people start keeling over because we’re not getting the information about what illnesses are out there … He’ll do what he always does is, he has this ability to slide out of there and everybody else eats the poop.”

The View, Weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC