For the past several months, it seemed like President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were inseparable. The tech billionaire and “First Buddy” championed Trump on his reelection campaign trail, slept at the White House, attended deal-making dinners at Mar-a-Lago, and chainsawed a giant hole in the government with firings and spending cuts through DOGE.
Now, Musk is saying he’s had a change of heart. On May 28th, Musk announced that he’s officially stepping away from DOGE as his “scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end.” And in the days leading up to this update, Musk has held a flurry of interviews in which he’s tried to convince his audience that he’s done with politics.
“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Musk said during an interview with Ars Technica. “It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.” For reasons we’ve explained, the idea he’s leaving politics is suspect — but he’s got good reasons to say he is.
Musk’s time as a special government employee always had a legal 130-day deadline that was up at the end of May. He isn’t known for strictly obeying laws, and at the height of his power at DOGE, it wasn’t clear if he would follow this one. But as the deadline neared, there were numerous signs Musk was wearing out his welcome in Washington. News outlets reported clashes with other Trump administration members, including an argument that saw Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent repeatedly shouting “Fuck you!” in the West Wing. After Trump announced sweeping tariffs and a trade war with China — both of which threatened Musk’s electric vehicle business — the billionaire retaliated in a public spat with trade advisor Peter Navarro.
“I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla.”
A rift between Trump and Musk opened up with the Republican-backed “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Musk dubbed a “massive spending bill” that “increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing” in an interview with CBS. And in one more loss, Trump greenlit OpenAI’s plan to build data centers in Saudi Arabia, despite Musk’s attempts to “derail” the deal for not including xAI, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
Last month, the White House dismissed rumors that Musk’s departure from DOGE was imminent. “Elon Musk and President Trump have both publicly stated that Elon will depart from public service as a special government employee when his incredible work at DOGE is complete,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the time. Now, just weeks later, a source told Reuters that Musk didn’t have a conversation with Trump before he revealed that he’s leaving, and that “his departure was decided at a ‘senior staff level.’”
Arguably, the bigger issue is Musk’s shareholders getting nervous about his detachment from his companies, so as part of his alleged transition from government employee to just a regular billionaire, he’s started to reemphasize his commitment to his businesses.
Tesla is in trouble, with Musk’s involvement in the government leading to a sinking stock and making it a target for protests. It saw a massive dip in sales throughout Europe in particular. As part of efforts to regain favor among investors, Musk said last week that he’s committed to leading Tesla for the next five years. “It’s not a money thing,” Musk said during an interview with Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum. “It’s a reasonable control thing, over the future of the company, especially if we’re building millions, potentially billions of humanoid robots.” Tesla is also gearing up to introduce its robotaxi service next month, according to Bloomberg, despite sharing little detail about the milestone.
Then there’s X, which Musk’s xAI purchased for $33 billion on paper in March. The platform has seen a big dip in European users and has been plagued by outages in recent weeks. “Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” Musk wrote on X last week in response to a post about an outage on X. “I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”
This week, Musk returned to Texas for SpaceX’s Starship launch — sans MAGA hat. In interviews with Ars Technica, Musk talked up the company’s plans to bring humans to Mars and build a base on the Moon. “We should be going 1,000 times farther, and going to Mars,” Musk said. “And if we are gonna go to the Moon, I think we should do a Moon base, or something that’s the next level beyond Apollo.”
The Washington Post also caught up with Musk at SpaceX’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas, where he similarly reiterated the company’s big ambitions about getting to Mars. “SpaceX is sort of ultra hardcore,” Musk told the outlet. “But if we’re not ultra hardcore, how are we going to get to Mars? You’re not going to get to Mars in 40 hours a week.”
When talking about his time in DC, Musk pointed out the “uphill battle” he faced trying to get things done, and reflected on the negative sentiment surrounding DOGE’s nearly wholesale attempted destruction of several government agencies, including cuts to projects like Ebola prevention. “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he told the Post. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”
Even while downplaying his political ambitions, though, Musk didn’t disavow them. He told the Post that he’s not completely done with DOGE, and that the agency will focus “a bit more like tackling projects with the highest gain for the pain, which still means a lot of good things in terms of reducing waste and fraud,” without mentioning what those were.
Musk may not be present at the White House or brushing shoulders with Trump on world tours, but his specter still looms over DC.
