May 28, 2025: A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington

 

A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington

 

The billionaire has made clear he is frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he tried to upend the federal bureaucracy.

 

Tyler Pager Maggie Haberman Theodore Schleifer Jonathan Swan Ryan Mac

By Tyler Pager Maggie Haberman Theodore Schleifer Jonathan Swan and Ryan Mac

May 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/us/politics/elon-musk-trump-doge.html?searchResultPosition=7

 

Elon Musk took a swipe at President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, saying it would add to the national deficit. He complained to administration officials about a lucrative deal that went to a rival company to build an artificial-intelligence data center in the Middle East. And he has yet to make good on a $100 million pledge to Trump’s political operation.

 

Mr. Musk, who once called himself the president’s “first buddy,” is now operating with some distance from Mr. Trump as he says he is ending his government work to spend more time on his companies. Mr. Musk remains on good terms with Mr. Trump, according to White House officials. But he has also made it clear that he is disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, raising questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.

 

Mr. Musk was the biggest known political spender in the 2024 election, and he told Mr. Trump’s advisers this year that he would give $100 million to groups controlled by the president’s team before the 2026 midterms. As of this week, the money hasn’t come in yet, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the behind-the-scenes dynamic.

 

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. In a post on X, his social media site, on Wednesday night, he officially confirmed for the first time that his stint as a government employee was coming to an end and thanked Mr. Trump “for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.”

 

“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” he added, referring to his Department of Government Efficiency team.

 

The billionaire’s imprint is still firmly felt in official Washington through that effort, an initiative to drastically cut spending that has deployed staff across the government. But Mr. Musk has said in recent days that he spent too much time focused on politics and has lamented the reputational damage he and his companies have suffered because of his work in the Trump administration.

 

“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Mr. Musk said in an interview this week with Ars Technica, a tech news outlet.

 

He added: “It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”

 

He also took a swipe at Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress, telling CBS News that he was “disappointed” by the domestic policy bill that the president championed and the House passed last week.

 

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” he said.

 

When asked by reporters about Mr. Musk’s criticisms on Wednesday, Mr. Trump declined to respond directly. He defended the bill while acknowledging that he did not love every aspect of it, and he lauded Republicans’ efforts to move it forward. He did not once utter Mr. Musk’s name.

 

However, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, shot back at Mr. Musk on social media without naming him. Mr. Miller asserted that the bill would reduce the deficit — despite multiple independent analyses saying otherwise — and noted that the cuts made by Mr. Musk’s team were unrelated to the spending bill.

 

Ahead of Mr. Trump’s trip to the Middle East this month, Mr. Musk objected to a deal in the works between a rival A.I. company and the United Arab Emirates to build a massive data center in Abu Dhabi, according to a White House official.

 

 

Mr. Musk complained to David Sacks, the president’s A.I. adviser, and other White House officials about the Abu Dhabi project involving OpenAI, an organization he founded with Sam Altman, with whom he has since had a falling out, according to the official. He also expressed concerns about fairness more broadly for other A.I. companies, and sought to have his own company, xAI, be included in the deal, though it ultimately was not. The Wall Street Journal first reported Mr. Musk’s pushback.

 

The OpenAI deal followed a plan secured between the Trump administration and the United Arab Emirates to build an A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi.

 

Mr. Musk joined the president on his trip through the Middle East, but Mr. Trump hardly mentioned his name publicly. And foreign officials in the Gulf seemed more interested in seeking out Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff, than they were in Mr. Musk.

 

On May 14, as a crowd of Mr. Trump’s wealthy supporters milled inside Qatar’s Lusail Palace before a dinner with the emir, Mr. Musk waited along with everyone else in the receiving line to shake Mr. Trump’s hand.

 

The billionaire’s role on the sidelines is a drastic shift from his dominance early in the new administration.

 

In February, Mr. Musk leaped onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference with a chain saw and remarked “how easy” it was to “save billions of dollars sometimes in, in an hour.”

 

“Yeah, like, it’s wild,” he said.

 

Mr. Musk’s DOGE team has repeatedly inflated its cost-saving efforts, at times posting erroneous claims about ending federal contracts that they later deleted.

 

This week, Mr. Musk told The Washington Post that it was an “uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C.”

 

The cuts he wanted to enact were far more difficult than he expected and his lack of interest in learning more about the bureaucracy he considered toxic impeded his efforts, particularly on Capitol Hill, according to people familiar with his efforts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

 

For the first 90 days of the administration, some White House aides felt the administration was essentially held captive by Mr. Musk and his willingness to use X to target people he didn’t like. Mr. Musk had a direct pipeline to Mr. Trump and encouraged measures that some cabinet officials opposed, like forcing federal workers to send a weekly email listing their top five accomplishments or risk termination. (That requirement was lifted for civilian employees at the Defense Department this week.)

 

Mr. Musk kept Mr. Trump enthralled, until some of the headlines about DOGE’s work — and complaints from lawmakers and cabinet officials — became hard to tune out. A rupture for the president, according to people with knowledge of his thinking, came when he learned from a New York Times report that Mr. Musk was about to receive a sensitive briefing on China at the Pentagon. Mr. Trump, who had repeatedly fended off questions about Mr. Musk’s potential conflicts of interest, was displeased, the people said.

 

Mr. Musk’s own disillusionment with national politics can be traced back to two recent events, according to people close to him: his frustrations with the president’s tariff regime and the roughly $25 million he spent backing a candidate who ended up losing a judicial bid in Wisconsin.

 

When it comes to his efforts to upend the bureaucracy, Mr. Musk insisted last month that it is possible to meet his goal of slashing $1 trillion of federal spending, “but it’s a long road to go, and, you know, it’s really difficult.”

 

“It’s sort of, how much pain is, you know, are the cabinet and is Congress willing to take?” he told reporters at the White House. “Because it can be done, but it requires dealing with a lot of complaints.”

 

He said it remained to be seen whether there was “sufficient political will in Congress and elsewhere to actually do that.”

 

It is unclear how many of Mr. Musk’s most prominent deputies will stay ensconced in their new government roles. Antonio Gracias, the billionaire investor, has transitioned from leading the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration to a role combing through federal databases to try to identify instances of foreign nationals voting illegally, according to people familiar with the effort.

 

Steve Davis, a loyal executive who has worked for Mr. Musk across many of his businesses, including at X, had remained a regular presence at the General Services Administration, according to two people who have interacted with him recently. But on Thursday, a White House official said that Mr. Davis was following Mr. Musk in leaving DOGE.

 

Last month, Mr. Musk told Tesla investors and analysts that he would cut his time on government matters to “a day or two per week,” and since then, he has made a concerted effort to show that he is re-engaged at his companies.

 

“Back to spending 24/7 at work,” Mr. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive, posted on X on Saturday. “I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla.”

 

On Tuesday, SpaceX held a test flight of Starship, the rocket that Mr. Musk hopes will someday take humans to Mars. The vehicle had a successful launch, but sprang a leak halfway through its journey and eventually exploded. On X Mr. Musk called the launch a “big improvement,” but postponed a planned talk he was set to give on “SpaceX’s plan to make life multiplanetary.”

 

He made it clear, however, that he was in attendance at the launch and focused on SpaceX. He reposted interviews with influencers and news organizations as well as a video of himself sitting in a control center while wearing a shirt that said “Occupy Mars.”

 

Kate Conger, Nicholas Nehamas and John Ismay contributed reporting.

 

Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

 

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.

 

Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.

 

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941

 

Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.