Jordan Belfort, entrepreneur and subject of the 2013 movie “The Wolf of Wall Street,” said losing track of trillions of federal dollars doesn’t happen "by accident” and he credited Elon Musk for saving the country from “going broke.”
He added that waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government had reached “biblical proportions.”
Belfort made the comments in an interview earlier this week in response to the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Musk, finding roughly $4.7 trillion in payments that were disbursed by the U.S. Treasury without an identification code, making traceability “almost impossible.”
"Listen, it's like the oldest trick in the book. Back in the day when I wanted to hide my spending from my father, who worked for me — he was the gatekeeper,” Belfort told Fox News. “So what do you do? You just leave everything blank where the money goes. Who knows? You can't trace it.”
Musk’s DOGE found that trillions were sent without a Treasury Access Symbol, a standard financial process that identifies what payments were for and where they were sent. Belfort said leaving that blank doesn’t happen “by accident.” Belfort praised Musk and DOGE for sussing out the fraud.
"So thank God for Elon Musk, because without him, we'd be going broke. We would go broke," Belfort said.
Musk earlier this month asserted that roughly $1 billion per week in entitlement payments are "unequivocal and obvious fraud." "Everything at Treasury was geared towards complain minimization. People ... receive money don't complain, but people who don't receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue,” Musk said.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told Newsmax on Wednesday that “people need to go to jail” for the fraud, noting that many of the programs that received federal dollars had “made up names.”
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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