Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Elon Musk in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month
Elon Musk is out of the Trump administration—or is he? The richest man in the world announced this week that he is transitioning out of politics and returning to business. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @RealDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” he posted on Twitter/X.
It’s true that the special government employee designation has a nominal 130-day time limit, and today is the 130th day since Inauguration Day. My colleague David Dayen noted 100 days ago that Musk only had 100 days left in government.
Rules are made to be broken by the Trump administration, of course. At the outset, officials said there was no planned exit date for Musk. And if what he was doing was in any way successful or popular, he’d probably stay in place. But with a shaky business empire and an inability to achieve anything close to his goals, the formal deadline offered Musk a convenient out.
We can say this at least: Musk is one of the most malignant people ever to hold a position of influence in American politics. His actions, without exaggeration, have devastated the health and security of American society and directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people all over the world, with millions more to follow given the course that he has set.
Musk’s DOGE, which is more or less a conspiracy to destroy constitutional government in this country, has wreaked untold havoc. Perhaps 10 percent of the already badly understaffed federal workforce has been laid off en masse, with no regard to institutional knowledge or experience, much less the constitutional separation of powers. Basic systems foundational to American life, like weather prediction, air traffic control, and disaster relief, are starting to crack.
America’s world-leading system of scientific funding has all but ground to a halt. DOGE, along with Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., has frozen the pipeline of grants that fund a huge portion of scientific research, including new treatments for cancer and other major diseases.
Basic enforcement of the nation’s laws has been abandoned, with Musk gleefully hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because it might have interfered with his plans to offer banking services on his X app. The Prospect is currently chronicling what new financial predators lurk to separate people from their money in a special series.
Musk’s political antics could be starting to catch up with him and threaten his wealth.
But the worst damage has been done to foreign aid. USAID has been essentially shuttered (fed “into the wood chipper,” as Musk gleefully boasted), and various programs providing medication and food aid around the world, particularly in Africa, have been halted indefinitely. Huge warehouses are full of rotting food that American taxpayers already paid for but that can’t be handed out. Millions of people are seeing their cases of HIV, tuberculosis, and other diseases rage out of control.
Simply halting PEPFAR, which provided about 20 million people with HIV antiretroviral drugs at a microscopic cost, has already killed an estimated 54,500 adults and 5,800 children. Many, many more will follow. Roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication.
All of this does at least provide an object lesson in the dangers of Silicon Valley ideology. Tech bros like Musk and his DOGE minions are unshakably convinced that everyone but themselves is an idiot, government is useless, and any system can be easily transformed or rebuilt from the ground up by a couple of engineers hacking together solutions on the fly. This extreme arrogance, combined with contempt for expertise, is amusing when it leads tech companies to repeatedly reinvent the bus. But applied to the federal government, the result is a Stalin-scale humanitarian catastrophe.
In that context, Musk’s apparent retreat doesn’t much matter—the damage has already been done, and there is little prospect of it being reversed. It will take years to rebuild the federal government from this assault. And as Will Royce pointed out recently at the Prospect, he should still be assumed to be running DOGE, given the fact that most of his personal flunkies are still in charge of it. (His chief lieutenant, Steve Davis, did just leave the agency, for the record.) Musk is also notoriously flighty and mercurial, and in general you’d be a fool to trust a single word that comes out of his mouth, as WIRED recently illustrated with a detailed CVS-receipt-length breakdown of his broken promises about Tesla features.
Still, Musk’s retreat from politics just might be more than a pretense. For one thing, he has publicly attacked Trump’s reconciliation bill, and has been feuding with White House adviser Stephen Miller online—which might have something to do with Miller’s wife leaving the White House to work for Musk directly (and there is some, uh, history there). Right-wing movements are typically filled with the most unpleasant people imaginable; bitter personality conflicts and permanent ruptures are common.
For another thing, Musk’s political antics could be starting to catch up with him and threaten his wealth. He clearly gained tremendous credibility among Republicans with his unprecedented donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign. His purchase of Twitter and subsequent transformation of it into a neo-Nazi cesspit where the algorithm boosts Republicans and suppresses Democrats (free speech!) gave him even more influence.
But since then, Tesla—still by far the most liquid portion of Musk’s wealth, as SpaceX remains private—has been in serious trouble. Musk’s far-right extremism has deeply alienated the core EV customer base of affluent liberals, while competing manufacturers now have better, newer, and cheaper models available. Tesla’s profits were down 71 percent in the first quarter of this year, and sales are continuing to fall around the globe—down 15 percent in California, down 49 percent in Europe, and down 9 percent in China—all while EV sales in general are rising. Musk has openly bet the company’s future on driverless cars and robots, but given his record mentioned above, these are almost certainly vaporware.
Tesla’s stock price has continued to remain at utterly preposterous levels, but this is largely because of the Musk personality cult among retail investors, who have been piling into the stock even as it circles the business drain. Several Tesla board members and executives, by comparison, are dumping their stock as soon as it vests. Indeed, some institutional investors are beginning to ditch Tesla stock precisely because its valuation is so irrational. “Something is just amiss,” one Pennsylvania public pension manager told Institutional Investor. “It reminds me of GameStop—you wonder if something like that is happening. Why is it going up?”
An investment cult is vulnerable to a crisis of confidence, like for instance if the cult figurehead starts dumping his shares. Musk may not actually be able to unlock much of his paper wealth.
A final factor in where this all lands is Musk’s towering ego and attendant sensitivity to criticism. Since January, he has continually whined about Tesla Takedown protests, often sounding on the verge of tears. “Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, was running around on stage with the Tesla stock cut in half. He was overjoyed,” he bitterly complained on Fox News back in March. “What an evil thing to do. What a creep. What a jerk. Who derives joy from that?” Mommm, they’re being so mean to me, all I did was throw one little Sieg Heil salute, ruin the American government, and condemn tens of millions of people to a painful, lingering death!
This might lead Musk to lash out even more in anger, but he might also give up. He has already signaled that he will massively scale back his political donations. As he told The Washington Post, “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything … something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.” Let’s hope Musk has lost his taste for public scrutiny.
