In less than five months, Elon Musk is leaving US President Donald Trump as one of his top advisers after spearheading the efforts to cut the American government’s federal staff strength.
Musk’s exit, announced late Wednesday, marks the end of a tumultuous chapter that saw thousands of layoffs, a hollowing out of key government agencies and multiple lawsuits. Musk accomplished far less than he’d started out to do, when he took charge at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. And this follows a pattern. Just 69 days after Trump announced the DOGE team, , who was to share the burden at the helm with Musk, abruptly quit.
“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,” Musk wrote on X Wednesday. “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.” Incidentally, Musk’s announcement came a day after the news channel CBS released part of an interview in which he criticised Trump’s tax cut bill – the centrepiece of the President’s legislative agenda – by saying he was “disappointed” by what Trump calls his “big beautiful bill.”
The legislation includes both tax cuts and stricter immigration enforcement. Musk had earlier voiced his dissenting views on immigration action, especially on H1B visas.“I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful,” Musk said. “But I don’t know if it could be both.”
Musk’s role at DOGE was seen as somewhat temporary, but the unceremonious exit has got tongues wagging. The main reason for this is being attributed to Musk’s signalling in recent weeks that would be shifting his attention back to running his businesses, especially electric automaker Tesla.
His role at DOGE had, however, led to multiple run-ins with key personalities in Trump’s cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. Also, Musk’s role at the helm of DOGE fell well short of his original targets for reducing headcount.
When Musk started out, Trump had likened the initiative, an idea mooted by Musk himself, to the “Manhattan Project” (the World War II project led by the US to produce the first nuclear weapon) saying “this will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” The prediction indeed turned out to be true, and Musk became a bugbear for many inside Trump’s cabinet and those laid-off, including many in Trump’s voter base in the heartland states.
There were also multiple contradictions in the symbiotic relationship between Trump and Musk, which both sides had to work with – or around, right from the start.
· China: Trump started by increasingly filling his incoming administration with China trade and security hawks while Musk had a cordial working relationship with high-ranking officials in China, where he established Tesla as the country’s first fully foreign-owned automaker in 2018. Chinese state media has often cited Tesla as an example of successful trade cooperation between Beijing and Washington.
China is Tesla’s second-largest market only after the US and the Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai, which started production in 2020, is the carmaker’s largest production centre in the world. Tesla sold some 600,000 EVs in China last year.
As the developing trade war between the world’s two biggest economies intensified, Musk found himself in an increasingly difficult position to firewall his interests in China and justify his position as one of Trump’s top advisors.
· Trumponomics: Before taking charge, Musk has expressed doubts over the basic tenets of Trump’s economic plans including his call for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and higher tariffs on practically all imports. On tax cuts, Musk had acknowledged at a “telephone town hall” just before Trump’s swearing in that cutting government spending, given the tax cut promises, could be painful. On the other issue of illegal immigration, the Washington Post had reported how Musk himself “worked illegally” in the US while building Zip2, his company which sold for about $300 million in 1999 and bankrolled most of his other ventures.
· Climate change: Trump’s climate change denial and consistent ridicule of EV manufacturing flew in the face of Tesla’s main business. Trump has vociferously supported internal combustion engine car makers, batted for the Detroit Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) and started to walk the talk by cutting federal support for EVs. For Musk, all of this presented an existential challenge. His personal wealth was tied largely in Tesla stock and his EV hard sell was fundamentally rooted in the environmentally-friendly pitch of battery electric cars that Tesla makes. The Detroit three were among Tesla’s competitors. Paring down the federal subsidy was a serious headwind for Tesla especially when EV sales are seeing a temporary slowdown.
· Starlink, SpaceX: Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service has provided a clear frontline advantage to Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion, permitting Kyiv to share real-time drone feeds between battlefield units and keep communication lines open where war has disrupted cell phone services. Given Trump’s perceived rethink on Russian president , Starlink’s support to Ukraine has already seen some recalibration.
SpaceX, which operates Starlink, has a lot of business riding on US government contracts. It won a $1.8-billion contract with US military and intelligence agencies in 2021 and is now the major rocket launcher for NASA and Pentagon. Clearly, Musk needed to straddle a diplomatic tightrope and face conflict-of-interest scrutiny. His lay-offs at the Department of Space also raised serious issues of conflict.
· Cutting jobs: For all the talk of streamlining government, Musk’s impulsive firings in his companies did not square with Trump’s employee-friendly pitch. Indeed, during his campaign, Trump championed the cause of American workers, eliciting support from prominent union leaders ostensibly campaigning against mass lay-offs at American companies. He has also drummed up support among steel worker groups and projected himself as a protector of American jobs.
The impulsive firings by Musk across all his companies ran counter to all this, even though Trump had publicly backed him multiple times.
