What Did Elon Musk Actually Accomplish, Except His Own Downfall?

Though he is distancing himself from Trump now, his original progressive fans will forever tie him to Trump anyway.

A s most are no doubt already aware, yesterday Elon Musk broke his silence about the “big, beautiful” spending bill that is currently wending its way through a Republican Congress. Calling it a “disgusting abomination,” he added, “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.” This bill, of course, is likely to end up being the primary legislative accomplishment of Donald Trump’s first year back in office. He pushed the House Republican caucus furiously to get it across the finish line there, to the point where its passage by a few votes felt — despite the seeming last-minute drama of it all — a bit like scripted kabuki theater.

One can only imagine how unhappy the Trump administration is with this, especially since several Senate lawmakers have used the opportunity afforded by Elon’s apostasy to poke their heads out from behind his protective skirt and chip in with their own reservations. (Profiles in cowardice, nearly all of them, with Rand Paul as a notable exception.) The Trump administration has, as of this writing at least, held its fire — uncharacteristic when a former ally directly criticizes it. It’s easy enough to grasp why in this case: Nobody wants to anger the world’s richest man, especially when he also happens to own and control the world’s most relevant social media site. Perhaps Trump may just let Elon stew online, rather than provoke a MAGA civil war. Perhaps not. Regardless of whether fireworks follow, this was always the way the story was going to end.

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When the idea for the Department of Government Efficiency was announced, during a campaign press conference in September of 2024, Trump described it as something akin to a Big Beautiful Blue-Ribbon Panel to audit waste and fraud in the government. Given the typical value of such panels, my initial reaction was to dismiss it as yet another ad hoc campaign ploy in a world where campaigns throw anything at the wall to see if it will stick. My ears perked up considerably, however, when Elon Musk officially endorsed Trump a month later and was given leadership over the initiative — for now, a serious man was involved, an acknowledged pathbreaking innovator and tech entrepreneur.

It’s true — I was initially excited by the prospect of Musk leading DOGE. Why not? The man does things. Though Musk’s many odd hypocrisies and peccadilloes were already well known to the world by that point, this was still the same guy who assembled a team of engineers capable of grabbing a rocket in mid-flight. I hoped that even if he didn’t know quite what he was doing at first (nobody fresh to the byzantine world of government bureaucracy does), he and his team of crack coders and quants could quickly figure it out and sandblast its stupidities away. I hoped that a smart and dedicated team, unconstrained by the pieties all lifetime federal employees share, might actually be able bang some of the notorious inefficiencies and political nest-feathering out of the government.

And yet the warning signs were there even before DOGE formally came into existence on January 20, with Trump’s first flurry of executive orders. Before the November election, Musk was promising onstage at rallies that DOGE would find $2 trillion in savings out of a (then) $6.4 trillion federal budget. He insisted that these savings would come exclusively from rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse” — a formulation familiar to all veterans of flabby centrist political rhetoric. The nation’s massively overleveraged entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, would remain untouched. (After the election, he halved DOGE’s anticipated savings to $1 trillion — a 50 percent reduction on paper but still every bit as implausible a target given his refusal to touch entitlement spending.)

Having promised a rainbow-riding winged unicorn to the world, Elon Musk and DOGE then predictably set about chasing rainbows: Musk used DOGE’s and his own X account to repeatedly promote false stories about “savings” or “scandals” his team had “discovered,” seeking furiously to keep the public hype machine going as DOGE haphazardly attacked the federal government with stunts like Musk’s infamously backfiring “Respond to this to resign immediately” letter, e-mailed out to every single federal employee regardless of status. (What works in Silicon Valley is impossible in the federal government — was Musk truly ignorant enough to think it would?) Meanwhile most of his boasts of massive savings or discovered fraud evaporated under closer inspection: Are you genuinely surprised to find out that, no, millions of 150-year-olds were not in fact receiving Social Security checks, despite Musk’s wild Twitter claims — or are you disappointed?

Musk quickly began to seem more intoxicated with his newfound ultra-celebrity than preoccupied with the responsibilities of his job. He accepted a commemorative chain saw onstage at CPAC in February from Argentinian president Javier Milei, grunting and swinging it inarticulately around like a ketamine-infused Jason Voorhees. As the promised savings failed to materialize and he ran into political — and internal administration — headwinds, he reverted to openly basking in the glow of praise from the likes of Catturd2 and his handpicked audience of aggressively promoted Twitter groundlings, like a lazily drifting sun shark. Between these bouts of transparent self-pity, he also occasionally indulged in his older megalomania: At one point he decided he was Karl Rove reborn and tweeted a proposal to mail out $5,000 “DOGE savings checks” to every American voter and secure their loyalty to Trump.

Such are typically the sodden, fog-brained consolations of a man deep into his cups late at night, not those of a dynamic world-class entrepreneur. Thus it was no surprise whatsoever when the New York Times recently reported — based on convincing sources — that ever since involving himself with the chaos of the MAGAsphere, Musk has drastically upped his already worrisome levels of drug intake (ketamine, psychedelics, pharmaceutical stimulants, etc.). If you’ve watched any of Musk’s recent public appearances (or read his tweets) and thought “Man, that guy often seems like he’s high as a kite,” then realize: You might have been onto something.

In late February, only a month after the DOGE experiment had begun, it was already obvious to me where this was all headed:

This is where I get extremely nervous. Because whether or not you approve or disapprove of his actions with DOGE (it’s impossible to judge results yet in any event), one cannot watch the way Elon Musk has carried himself over the last month without thinking of the hubris that inevitably precedes a spectacular downfall. I could gesture to the elements of Greek drama alone to explain why Elon — as he occupies the Twitter proscenium, performing for his online throngs — is setting himself up with his own words for an ironic denouement. (If anyone believes himself to be a figure of classically heroic proportions, surely it is Musk.) But there are more than the mere laws of dramatic gravity at play here.

Musk is laying the predicate for his own fall from grace right now, while he flies high in the esteem of the president he serves, by his careless and oftentimes casually cruel comportment. His arrogance, curdling over into clumsily manipulative cynicism, is impossible to ignore. For example, has anyone else noticed that Elon Musk tends to say a lot of things that simply aren’t true? As in, almost constantly, if X’s own AI audit of Musk’s account is anything to go by, and particularly about anything related to his role in “fixing” the federal government through his role at DOGE?

The title of that piece is “How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End,” and I stipulate this because my editors insisted on the “Probably,” not I. While I haven’t been proven right about the part where Donald Trump publicly rebukes Musk and Team MAGA begins treating him like a Judas goat of the movement (yet), the rest of the story has played out almost exactly as I anticipated — for it could have gone no other way. After having promised $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, in cuts, Musk ends his DOGE tenure having marked out cuts in the range of $60 billion to $160 billion. Whether any of them will be enshrined in law remains an open question.

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This, of course, brings us to Elon’s resignation from DOGE — first announced quietly on April 2, amid the tariff chaos of “liberation day” — and retreat to the private sector. Why then? Why the sudden public turn now, two months later? It’s easy enough to explain these developments as a simple narrative of disillusionment: the Henry Adams–like education of Elon Musk, as he learns he cannot simply prune away entire federal government departments at will. But there are more wrinkles to the story that suggest that his personal interests were also implicated in yesterday’s public repudiation of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

Over at Axios, Marc Caputo reveals that when Musk left the administration, he did so with some rather hard feelings: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act would cut the electric-vehicle tax credit that keeps his entire industry aloft, something that Musk lost an internal lobbying war to prevent. While in the administration, Musk also sought to make his Starlink communications system the standard for U.S. air traffic control and was rebuffed by an administration that finally found an obvious self-dealing conflict of interest even it could not stomach.

Caputo also indicates that Musk was irked by the termination of his “special government employee” status and had sought to remain at the White House past that date. This is intriguing, because it reverses what I had previously assumed to be the dynamic at work — that Musk was making a strategic decision to distance himself from the Trump administration as the “liberation day” tariff regime went into place. Instead, it seems he wanted to be in the mix for longer but may have been frozen out by his rivals.

And Musk made more than a few enemies within the Trump administration, as evidenced by his final humiliation: On Friday, Trump suddenly pulled the nomination of Musk ally Jared Isaacman, who had been tapped to be NASA administrator. Given Musk’s SpaceX interests — the company already works closely with NASA, for obvious reasons — it was a personal blow to him, and Caputo reports it as the likely work of Sergio Gor, one of Musk’s fiercest internal rivals, who might be intentionally twisting the knife into Musk on the latter’s way out the door.

Musk has an even bigger problem than the loss of administration turf wars and preferential access for SpaceX: His most profitable product’s brand value has been toxified, at least in the short run, by its inextricable association with him. Once upon a time, Teslas (and EVs in general) were well on their way to becoming fetish objects for the progressive upper middle class, status symbols of “eco-consciousness.” Back then, conservatives and Republicans (correctly) understood the EV boom — and the “green” subsidies that made these vehicles artificially affordable — to be part of a conspiracy to turn red-blooded free Americans into effete bug-munching progressives, gathered in urbanist misery. In 2025 little has changed for conservatives — most MAGA voters still regard EVs with intense cultural disdain. But now progressives, once Tesla’s No. 1 market demographic, have been given a very specific reason to actively loathe and avoid the product. (The plummet in Tesla’s stock value relative to its December 2024 peak tells the story well.)

Two months ago, I wrote what I intended to be my final requiem for the failure of the Elon Musk experiment. I recall being angrily lectured (in the comments section of that piece, among many other places) about the prematurity of my presumption: Elon’s not gone yet, and there’s no split between him and Trump! Stop writing such poisonous thoughts! All I can do at this point is shake my head cynically and wonder why so many others were either incapable of seeing it as it developed or invested in pretending that it wasn’t emerging. The split between Musk and Trump is no more “real” now than it was then — it is only more visible to those who were refusing to believe it earlier.

There is something extremely depressing about this dénouement. Musk entered the MAGA orbit with high hopes — vaingloriously high, perhaps, but born of a genuine commitment to fixing inefficiencies — and departs it leaving little but wreckage behind him. Not only has DOGE’s fizzle-out muted the idea of government-spending reform for the foreseeable future, Musk has mortgaged his own public reputation and future prospects for little perceptible gain. Though he is distancing himself from Trump now, his original progressive fans will forever hold him — as the man who got Trump elected — partly responsible for what Trump does regardless. Perhaps he deserved better, but those who fancy themselves as mythopoeic Great Men of History, as Musk often does, tend to suffer from the same flaw that brings them all down: hubris breeds nemesis.