When Donald Trump first hooked up with Elon Musk during the campaign last year I think most people thought it was just a rather flashy example of a rich guy with mega billions in government contracts putting his money behind a politician who promised to cut taxes and regulations, which happens every day in American politics. Musk had famously become red-pilled in the last few years and was a very important cultural figure since he bought twitter and made it into a right-leaning free-for-all. But he didn’t seem to have direct political ambitions for himself. He just looked to be having fun performing for the adoring MAGA crowds and Trump obviously enjoyed having the richest man in the world in his entourage.
Musk’s appearances at the rallies were cringe worthy and his speeches were anything but riveting but he put a lot of money into the campaign and launched some provocative tactics such as offering million dollar lotteries for people to sign petitions and register to vote. He apparently believed that he delivered Pennsylvania for Trump and Trump was certainly grateful for the support (although I doubt he believes anyone delivered anything but him.)
I think we all assumed that he’d go back to doing his usual thing, running his mouth on twitter and running his companies once the election was over but instead he became joined at the hip with Trump who didn’t seem to mind. Spending the transition period down in Mar-a-Lago along with businessman and now candidate for Governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, he came up with his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) project to cut government spending. It appeared to be just another commission to provide advice on where the cut programs, a Washington perennial that usually goes nowhere. The assumptions in those early days was that the Project 2025 people, led by soon to be Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, would be doing the dirty work such as implementing Schedule F, the order to make all federal workers into at will employees.
It soon became apparent that Musk was staying on to run this new agency while Ramaswamy was ignominiously dumped right after the inauguration, ostensibly because he wrote a very provocative post on X declaring that we needed foreign workers because America “venerated mediocrity over excellence,” which hit a nerve with the Trumpers. (Also, no one could stand him.) And I think most of us figured that he and Trump would be headed the same way in short shrift. Would Trump really want this guy around much longer, getting too much attention and waving his money around? As it turns out Trump has quite liked having the richest man in the world at his beck and call and he even puts up with his precocious little son X, who likes to tell the president to shut up during press conferences.
Musk had actually been thinking about doing something like DOGE since 2023 when he dreamed of gutting the bureaucracy by getting access to the government computers. (He may have some other motives for that as well.) Trump, who is completely ignorant about computers, gave him the keys and said to have at it and Musk and his people have been taking a chainsaw to the executive branch for three months now, causing tremendous chaos and trauma and essentially destroying much of what the American people count on their government to do.
Whatever his purpose with all this slashing and burning, he’s not getting the job he promised done. The New York Times reports:
[Musk] previously said his powerful budget-cutting team could reduce the next fiscal year’s federal budget by $1 trillion, and do it by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Instead, in a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk said that he anticipated the group would save about $150 billion, 85 percent less than its objective.Even that figure may be too high, according to a New York Times analysis of DOGE’s claims.
Musk is constantly going on about this tremendous amount of fraud taking place in government programs and while his team is wrecking them quite efficiently, they aren’t actually saving any money because there actually isn’t this massive level of fraud. In fact DOGE is largely fraudulent itself. The Times reports:
[I]t inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all. One of the group’s largest claims, in fact, involves canceling a contract that did not exist.
If DOGE’s mission is to cut spending he’s doing a terrible job of it. If its job is to cause misery it’s a rousing success.
Meanwhile, Musk has been watching his personal fortune shrink by the day and his reputation be blown to smithereens like one of his failed starship rockets. The stock in his car company Tesla has been sliding precipitously and not just because his baby, the cybertruck, the worst failure of his career, is dragging down the whole company. (He takes great pride in saying that he did “zero market research whatsoever” and it shows.) He apparently didn’t realize that by becoming a right wing MAGA troll he would alienate the people who buy his cars — there aren’t a whole lot of EV buyers in rural America, the MAGA base.
Two weeks ago Musk found out the hard way that his money can’t buy everything. He pulled out all the stops in Wisconsin, spending tens of millions of dollars in a pivotal state Supreme Court race and lost by ten points, a much bigger loss than expected. The voters were not impressed by his antics, or his reprise of the million dollar lottery gambit.
And now he’s found himself on the other side of Trump in the big tariff debacle that tanked world markets and looks like it could easily lead to recession or worse. He’s on record saying that he tried to talk Trump out of it and was sparring with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro on X , calling him a “moron” and “dumb as a sack of bricks” perhaps not realizing that Navarro is a made man who went to jail for Trump and is the only person in the world who Trump truly bonds with on this issue. Musk’s entreaties went nowhere.
So, Elon may be on his way out, finally. Polls show that only 45% of Republicans hold a favorable opinion of him. Rolling Stone reports that virtually everyone in the White House finds him irritating, some even questioning if he’s high. (His SpaceX reps deny it.) According to Puck’s Leigh Ann Caldwell, since his Wisconsin faceplant, Republicans on Capitol Hill are no longer in awe (or terrified) of him either.
Musk’s “special employee” status requires him to leave by the end of May although Trump has recently said that he would finish the DOGE mission (God help us) and we know Trump doesn’t care about rules or law so if he wants to stay, he can. But considering recent events it will not be surprising if he bows out next month on schedule. He’s not happy and Daddy Trump is always just a phone call away if he wants to chat. The long awaited Musk departure may be upon us.
Salon
