ASTANA, Kazakhstan, February 6. Elon Musk has offered Kazakhstan his help in optimizing the state budget, said Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Economy Serik Zhumangarin to Kazakh media in Kazakhstan’s Senate’s corridors, Trend reports.
"Frankly speaking, Elon Musk reached out to me with a proposal to carry out the same work that he is currently doing with the Trump administration. He has a department for optimization and offered his services, saying he has an idea. I invited him: let's work together and create a working group. If you find areas for budget cuts, let us know. However, it’s difficult to cut the social budget – it concerns large families, children, pensioners, and the elderly. We are a social state. I asked him to look at other parts of the budget. We are not against cuts as long as they are reasonable and do not affect ordinary people," Zhumangarin said.
According to the minister, Kazakhstan is already working on
reducing state expenditures. Initially, the budget for 2025 was set
at 32 trillion tenge (approximately $60.8 billion), but it has been
revised and reduced to 25.7 trillion tenge (approximately $48.83
billion).
Musk’s proposal has raised some concerns. In the U.S., he has
previously suggested radical reductions in the federal budget,
including cuts to social programs and a review of defense spending.
These initiatives have faced sharp criticism from experts, who warn
that such measures could degrade the quality of public services and
harm vulnerable groups.
To note, Musk previously called for a $1 trillion reduction in the U.S. budget by 2026, aiming for savings of $4 billion per day. However, experts caution that achieving such savings is unrealistic without drastic cuts to key budget items.
Elon Reeve Musk is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and billionaire. He is the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX; investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and owner of Twitter (X). On January 7, 2021, with a fortune estimated at $185 billion, he became the richest person on the planet for the first time, displacing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in second place.