What had started as a coronation in Washington for Elon Musk ended on Wednesday night with a brief post on X, the social media platform he owns, and a muted goodbye to his time a special government employee.
The honour conferred on him by Donald Trump, so he could serve as both symbol and wrecking-ball-in-chief to the waste and fraud the Trump administration has promised to rip from the federal bureaucracy, started with fireworks and finished with a tweet.
Trump held a farewell conference with Musk, for old times sakes, in the White House on Friday, in honour of “his last day, but not really because he will always be with us, helping all the way”. There was something funereal about the promise.
When he announced his signing off this week, Musk said: “The DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
There was no surprise in the timing of the announcement: Musk’s status as a special employee could only last 130 days.
But the mood of the departure stands in striking contrast to Musk’s jubilant arrival on Capitol Hill in early December, when he strode through the corridors with his little boy, X, on his shoulders on his way to meeting Republican senators and congressmen.
This week, Musk’s completion of his role coincided with a letter signed by Tesla’s top investors demanding that he dedicate a full 40 hours a week to steady the fluctuating fortunes of the car company.
His latest SpaceX rocket ship launch ended disappointingly on Tuesday as the craft broke up on re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.
Whereas the US president and Musk seemed inseparable during and after the January inauguration month, this week saw the latter for the first time openly criticise a tenet of Trump’s second term, when he gave his view in a CBS interview on the budget Bill under scrutiny in the Senate.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending Bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit. I think a Bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.”
And the disenchantment did not end there.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realised,” Musk said in another interview with the Washington Post this week where he bemoaned the quicksand quality of the swamp.
“I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.”
He also sounded hurt in several interviews as he reflected on the vandalism and protests waged on Tesla showrooms both in the United States and internationally as Doge began to infiltrate government departments, initiating a spree of mass lay-offs and agency closures.
The methodology was brutal and celebrated by the administration as an example of the tech motto “move fast and break things”. During those weeks when Musk was the most prominent figure of Trump’s frontline cabaret, there was optimistic speculation that Doge would save the US a trillion bucks. The department offered up several vivid nuggets of flabbergasting federal waste, including those from an actual mine – “Iron Mountain” – in Pennsylvania used to store the paperwork of up to 100,000 former employees. The statistics belonged to the pre-digital age: 22,000 cabinets, 400 million sheets of paper, accessible via an elevator.
“And the elevator breaks down sometimes,” Musk reported in the halcyon days when he stood next to Trump in the Oval Office. “And then nobody can retire – doesn’t that sound crazy?” The president shook his head reproachfully at the damnable waste of it all.
Musk’s autumn 2024 entry into the election campaign gave the race a left field dimension that delighted the Maga faithful and further discommoded Kamala Harris’s flatlining campaign. Not only did he invest $280 million in Trump’s campaign, he became a favoured rally novelty act, galumphing around the stage and offering gnomic utterances such as, “I’m not just Maga; I’m dark Maga.”
It was obvious that Musk loved the theatre and the adrenaline rush of the adoration of tens of thousands of supporters: being the richest person in the world cannot buy one that. The mistake he may have made, even then, was in failing to fully understand that the cheering was merely deflected towards him by Trump.
He’s a car assembler. He’s a car person. That’s what he does, and he wants cheap foreign parts
— US trade adviser Peter Navarro
He may also have failed to grasp just how easily transferable are Trump’s affections.
From the beginning, there were signs of tension, such as Musk’s huffy critique of the January announcement, in the Oval Office, of a planned $500 billion investment by Softbank, Oracle and Open AI, in US artificial intelligence infrastructure. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X the same night. “Softbank has well under $10 billion secured. I have that on good authority.”
Trump does not appreciate party-pooping counterviews to his starry announcements. Equally, that Musk is involved in an upcoming legal battle with Sam Altman from OpenAI didn’t dampen Trump’s enthusiasm for the project. The moment presaged future disagreements, such as the open row between Musk and the administration’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, whom the entrepreneur described as “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a brewing disagreement over the tariff policy.
Navarro offered a seasoned and cutting political savant’s response: “When it comes to tariffs and trade, we all understand in the White House – and the American people understand – that Elon is a car manufacturer. But he’s not a car manufacturer – he’s a car assembler. He’s a car person. That’s what he does, and he wants cheap foreign parts.”
It was a frosty reminder that while Musk was in the Trump club, and in Trump’s Washington, he was not quite of it. Further unease between administration department secretaries over the Doge methodology led to the president calling a cabinet meeting where frank views were exchanged.
But the crossing point for Musk was his failure, after investing $21 million and making a personal campaign appearance, to turn a crucial Wisconsin supreme court seat race in the Republican candidate’s favour. If anything, his intrusion in that race may have helped the cause of the winning candidate, Susan Crawford. The moment provided glaring evidence of the limitations of Musk’s popular appeal.
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent this week praised Doge as “one of the most important efforts of my lifetime and what I am committed to doing is not letting the bureaucracy slow it down too much. Elon Musk is one of the premier businessmen of this generation. He launched this cost-cutting programme. We need to get the cost under control but we need to get government efficiency under control”.
But the legacy he leaves behind depends on who you ask. As of May, Doge has succeeded in carving $160 billion off the federal bill. However, the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service estimated in an April report that those putative savings may have cost the US taxpayer $130 billion, when the costs of rushing tens of thousands of federal workers into paid leave, firing and then rehiring staff, and lost productivity are totted up.
Musk has strenuously rejected these reports and also combated the accusation that the dismantling of USAid has not only cost the US inestimable years acquiring “soft power” in vulnerable regions of the globe through aid and relief programmes, but has also cost lives.
“It is false,” Musk said last week of Bill Gates’s accusation that “the picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one”.
He went on to contend that when Doge sought clarity from aid groups and asked them “to connect us with this group of children so we can talk with them about their issue, we get nothing. Can we at least see a few kids? Can we at least see a few kids? Where are they? Can we at least talk to them and their caregivers? Because what we see is a huge amount of fraud and graft.”
The full human cost of the USAID closures will become apparent over time. But Musk’s lasting gift to the administration may be the culture of moving fast and breaking things. The chaos and changes continue at speed. The news cycle is fast and relentless. Musk’s departure, just six months into this administration, will soon recede in the memory.
It will be recalled in a variety of striking tableaux: those campaign rallies when Musk seemed close to being a surrogate son to Trump; of Musk brandishing a chainsaw; of young X, winter coated and chasing an elusive booger under Trump’s baleful eye as his father holds court in the Oval Office; and that Time magazine satirical cover of Musk sitting behind the Resolute Desk with Trump nowhere in sight.
Musk leaves all of that behind in Washington as he returns to cars and rockets – and the sense that he won’t miss it very much.
