Analysis
Musk is
pivoting from DC and Doge’s failures – and wants investors to know
Nick
Robins-Early
The
billionaire mogul is signaling far and wide that he’s back to business, and
even criticizing Trump’s tax bill
Wed 28 May
2025 22.09 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/elon-musk-trump-doge
Elon Musk
really wants the public – and investors – to know that he’s leaving Washington
DC behind.
Even before
Wednesday night, when he announced his departure from the Trump administration
in a post on X, Musk had been distancing himself from the government role that
made him, and his company Tesla, the target of furious global protests.
In a series
of interviews and social media posts this week, Musk has criticized Donald
Trump’s marquee tax bill and emphasized his recommitment to leading SpaceX,
Tesla and the artificial intelligence company xAI. The world’s richest person
claimed that he was back to working around the clock at his companies – to the
point of sleeping in conference rooms and factory offices once again.
Musk has
been telegraphing a pivot back to his businesses for months, but in recent
appearances, he has repeatedly distanced himself from his unpopular stint in
Washington while proclaiming that his new sole focus is his tech empire. It is
a drastic turnaround for Musk, who spent most of the last year constantly at
Trump’s side promoting far-right ideology online, appearing on stage at
political rallies and pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the
Republican party.
The shift,
which comes amid public and investor backlash against Musk’s political
ambitions, was apparent earlier this week as SpaceX launched and lost control
of its Starship prototype rocket. Musk gave a round of media appearances to the
Washington Post, Ars Technica, CBS News Sunday Morning and a YouTube aerospace
influencer, all of which featured him emphasizing his dedication to his
companies or attempting to explain away the shortcomings of his heavily
criticized “department of government efficiency”.
“The federal
bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Musk told the Washington
Post on Tuesday. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill
battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.”
Musk
additionally told the Post that Doge had been turned into a “whipping boy” that
was criticized for anything that went wrong under the Trump administration. In
Ars Technica, Musk admitted: “I think I probably did spend a bit too much time
on politics.”
A White
House official confirmed on Wednesday night that Musk was leaving the Trump
administration, and told Reuters that his “off-boarding will begin tonight.”
Musk did not
have a formal conversation with Trump before announcing his departure, Reuters
reported, citing a source with knowledge of the situation. The source added
that Musk’s exit was decided “at a senior staff level.”
The turn
from Trump’s self-appointed “first buddy” back to the familiar territory of
space travel and tech has taken place as Doge faces numerous legal challenges
and remains widely unpopular.
Although
Musk successfully seeded the government with his allies and helped gut
regulators that would oversee his companies, Doge’s central promise to slash
$2tn worth of fraud and waste has been an obvious failure. Doge’s cuts, while
devastating to government services, humanitarian aid and the federal workforce,
have amounted to little in terms of actual budget savings. Much of the savings
it has claimed on its “wall of receipts” have also turned out to be false,
including the cancellation of an $8bn contract that in reality was an $8m
contract.
Musk’s
answer for Doge’s shortcomings appears to be casting the blame on some of his
familiar foes: politicians and bureaucrats. In doing so, however, he has
increasingly split with the Republican party – though notably stopped short of
any criticism of Trump himself.
Musk’s split
with Congressional Republicans has been starkest on X, the social media
platform that he owns. Musk’s posts have fully leaned into the narrative that
Doge’s actions were successfully reducing waste, but that Congress hamstrung
its operations through actions like approving Trump’s tax bill, which is
expected to add $2.3tn to the deficit.
Musk told
CBS that he was “disappointed to see the massive spending bill, which increases
the budget deficit … and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing”.
Now, Musk
claims, he will focus on saving humanity through technologies like self-driving
cars, interplanetary rockets and humanoid robots – exactly the products his
companies need investors to believe in.
“I have come
to the perhaps obvious conclusion that accelerating GDP growth is essential,”
Musk posted on Friday in response to a thread calling the GOP bill “disastrous”
and demanding term limits on Congress. “Doge has and will do great work to
postpone the day of bankruptcy of America, but the profligacy of government
means that only radical improvements in productivity can save our country.”
In a
separate exchange, he replied to a conversation between two users with large
followings who routinely praise his leadership and business acumen.
“I think
Elon is realizing that, despite the promises made by the new administration and
a Republican-controlled Congress – and all the campaign platforms they ran on –
the current incentive structures and entrenched special interests in government
make it nearly impossible to enact any meaningful, long-term changes to address
the many big issues we face,” one pro-Musk account posted.
“DOGE has
done incredible work, but the GOP has failed to actually implement any of the
cuts,” another prominent Musk-booster replied.
“Yeah
(Sigh),” Musk responded to the thread.
Musk goes
back to selling the future
What became
clear throughout Musk’s time in Washington was that the public did not enjoy
seeing him and many in the Trump administration did not like working with him.
Numerous polls showed his overall popularity declining even as people supported
the premise of reducing government inefficiencies. Musk’s prominent involvement
in a Wisconsin supreme court election intensified opposition to his influence,
while international demonstrations made him the face of the administration.
Musk also found few friends within the Trump administration, with report after
report of heated clashes with senior officials and some Republican political
operatives warning his brand had become too toxic for the party.
The pushback
against Musk affected his businesses, causing Tesla sales to plummet to the
point that the company’s board reportedly began considering replacing him as
CEO. While Musk denied those claims, in recent weeks he has very loudly
reaffirmed his dedication to leading his businesses.
“Back to
spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” he
posted on Saturday. “I must be super focused on 𝕏/xAI
and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies
rolling out.”
While only a
few weeks ago Musk’s posts on X were a nonstop stream of invectives against
Democrats, fringe theories about immigration and demands to gut the judicial
system, his online output has also changed. His posts this week have been
heavily focused on SpaceX’s ambitions to go to Mars and Tesla’s self-driving
car program, stopping only occasionally to promote attacks against “the woke
mind virus” or feud with the government of his native South Africa.
As Musk
moves away from full-time politics and tries to win back investor confidence,
he has also doubled down on his habit of making grandiose predictions of how
his technologies will transform the world. Echoing a long list of previous
claims that have missed deadlines and so far failed to come to fruition, he has
promoted new endeavors like Tesla’s humanoid robots as crucial to the future of
civilization.
“Once you
have humanoid robots, the actual economic output potential is tremendous. It’s
really unlimited,” Musk said on stage at the Saudi-US Investment Forum on 13
May. “Potentially, we could have an economy 10 times the size of the global
economy, where no one wants for anything.”
Rather than
dwell on a year of missed targets and intense backlash, Musk is back to selling
a future where anything is possible.
Lois Beckett
contributed reporting
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