Elon Musk says that if he was given the chance to do it all over again, he would pass on heading up the Department of Government Efficiency at the beginning of President Trump’s second term. 

The billionaire tech mogul defended his Washington tenure in a podcast with Katie Miller, a former Trump administration aide and DOGE spokesperson, calling his waste-cutting efforts “a little bit successful” but that he should have kept his focus on running Tesla and SpaceX.

“We were somewhat successful,” Mr. Musk said on the Katie Miller Podcast, adding that he believes the initiative “stopped a lot of funding that really just made no sense.” But when asked if he would repeat his time in politics, the world’s richest man demurred.

“I think instead of doing DOGE, I would’ve basically…worked in my companies, essentially,” he said before referring to a series of arson incidents at Tesla dealerships blamed on activists angry at the current administration. “They wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”

Named after an internet meme, DOGE launched within hours of Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January. Mr. Musk — who poured over $200 million into Trump’s campaign — became a fixture at the White House, appearing at meetings and events almost daily.

His team moved fast and within weeks, DOGE had shuttered programs deemed wasteful and slashed the federal workforce through layoffs and buyout offers. Some agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, were effectively dismantled.

In May, just five months after assuming the role, Mr. Musk suddenly left the department as a falling out between him and President Trump played out on social media.

“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Mr. Musk wrote. “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

The attack from Mr. Musk came just minutes after the president said he could “save money” by getting rid of Mr. Musk’s contracts and subsidies. 

Before that threat, Mr. Musk said that the president would not be in office were it not for him, and the Republicans would not have won the House majority. The Senate majority would also be thinner, he said, if it were not for his hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending.

The two have appeared to reconcile, at least partially. Mr. Musk returned to the White House last month for a dinner with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and when asked last week, Mr. Trump said, “I like Elon a lot,” and attributed their previous rift to cuts in EV subsidies.