The latest cover shows the tech billionaire sitting at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office
US President Donald Trump has ridiculed the latest cover of TIME magazine depicting Elon Musk. The print edition features the Tesla and Space X CEO sitting at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.
The cover, dated February 24, 2025, shows the tech mogul at the center of the desk, positioned between an American flag and a presidential flag behind him. Musk, the head of Trump’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is shown holding a coffee cup in his left hand.
The magazine published a feature titled ‘Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington’, detailing the efforts of the Trump ally to reform the federal government since the president’s inauguration on January 20.
“No… Is TIME Magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that,” Trump said on Friday while speaking with journalists.
This comes two months after the publication named Trump ‘person of the year’, an honor that he first received after his election victory in 2016.
Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, was appointed as a ‘special government employee’ to head DOGE under the Trump administration. He is currently among the president’s chief advisers.
In November, Musk co-wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, announcing large-scale plans for budgets cuts. The billionaire said the newly launched agency – which is not listed among the permanent federal executive departments despite its name – would help the president “hire a lean team of small-government crusaders” who would work to bring “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.”
DOGE has set the goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget by 2026.
Earlier this month, the Musk-led department claimed that it had managed to save over $1 billion as a result of eliminating contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump signed a series of executive orders rolling back protections for transgender individuals and terminating DEI initiatives adopted by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Prior to this, the agency said it slashed daily federal spending by around $1 billion as of January 29, due to an effective halt to “the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, the deletion of DEI, and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations.”
In addition, the Trump administration has pushed against the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Washington’s primary vehicle for funding political projects abroad, with plans to place thousands of its employees on leave. Musk has called USAID a “criminal organization” and claimed it has funded bioweapons research.
