Source : THE AGE NEWS
By Dana Hull and Kurt Wagner
Elon Musk bounded into Washington as a special government employee earlier this year. Gaining unprecedented access to the corridors of power and data, the billionaire injected a sense of chaos across the US government. He joined US President Donald Trump’s meetings with foreign leaders and cabinet secretaries, weighed in on defence and tariff policies, and most notably, gutted dozens of agencies as the public face of DOGE.
During Musk’s tumultuous run, his private companies – SpaceX, brain implant venture Neuralink and AI start-up XAI – have benefited from new funding, while the value of debt taken on when he converted Twitter into privately owned X soared.
Elon Musk, a “special government employee” who heads DOGE.Credit: Getty Images, digitally tinted
But it was Tesla, Musk’s only publicly traded company and a big source of his wealth, that bore the brunt of the public anger against him and his policies. Tesla’s stock dropped 33 per cent since inauguration. The EV maker’s sales plummeted.
In terms of Musk’s personal wealth, the alliance with Trump has so far cost him $US113 billion ($175 billion), with his fortune tumbling by a quarter since January 17, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“This is 100 days of destruction,” said Elaine Kamarck, the director of the Centre for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “DOGE is cutting into muscle, not fat. Elon Musk is taking a lot of the heat for Trump’s decisions, and people have decided to hate Musk more than Trump.”
From day one, Musk began seeding US agencies with Silicon Valley allies. DOGE gained unprecedented access to government databases, giving him a view into the inner-workings of agencies that regulate and help finance many of his businesses.
Though many people think of Musk as the CEO of Tesla, the better way to understand him is as a long-time government contractor.
While Musk initially promised to cut $US2 trillion in wasteful government spending, by DOGE’s own accounting, the initiative has saved only $US160 billion so far. Public sentiment about the project is low: 57 per cent of Americans disapprove of Musk’s job in Washington, up from less than half in February, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released on Monday.
Meanwhile, Musk has ruffled enough feathers in the Trump administration and across Congress that he now meets several times a week with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to keep her informed of his moves, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
A White House official said there’s been no change in Musk’s status as a special government employee. Musk, Tesla and SpaceX did not respond to inquiries.
Elon Musk’s affiliation with Donald Trump has hurt Tesla.Credit: AP
Tesla punished
None of Musk’s businesses has taken a bigger hit than Tesla, prompting investors and analysts to publicly plead for Musk’s return. The company lost $US448.3 billion in market value since January 17, more than double what DOGE claimed to have saved so far.
Tesla’s cars, showrooms and Supercharger stations endured a wave of protests and sporadic acts of arson and vandalism. The Cybertruck, the stainless-steel vehicle most closely associated with Musk himself, has been a particular target.
After Tesla’s worst quarter in years, Musk finally acknowledged the pain at the top of Tesla’s earnings call last week.
“There’s been some blowback for the time that I’ve been spending in government,” he said. Starting in May, his “time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly”.
SpaceX successes
Unlike Tesla, SpaceX has mostly benefited from Musk’s time in Washington. Though many people think of Musk as the CEO of Tesla, the better way to understand him is as a long-time government contractor. The influence was immediately clear from the president’s inauguration speech, when Trump echoed Musk’s enthusiasm for going to Mars.
Trump then picked Jared Isaacman to lead NASA, nominating a billionaire who has twice paid to fly aboard SpaceX capsules. In February, the US Justice Department dropped a lawsuit against SpaceX alleging employment discrimination.
During the last few months, SpaceX has benefited from even more government support. The Department of Defense awarded $US5.9 billion to SpaceX to send intelligence satellites into orbit, a higher figure than competitors got. It won Republican backing for a bigger role in a $US42 billion federal effort to bring broadband to rural America, stirring complaints from Democrats.
At the Federal Aviation Administration, Musk has been installing SpaceX engineers to deploy Starlink terminals across the US airspace system. Employees there were warned that if they impeded progress, they would be reported to Musk and risked losing their jobs, Bloomberg News reported.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a commercial crew of four launches from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida on March 31.Credit: AP
Musk has also spent time at the Pentagon – a big SpaceX customer. Musk, who has long held a US security clearance, even descended upon space rival Boeing’s military aircraft facility in Texas to inspect next-generation Air Force One presidential jets – a Trump priority years behind schedule. His visit in December, before the inauguration, signified the unique pressure Boeing and others have endured with Trump back in power and Musk at his side.
X factor
Musk’s influence in the White House helped him quickly settle a lawsuit with Trump over X’s decision – then known as Twitter – to ban the president in 2021 following the January 6 Capitol insurrection. And it pushed advertisers back to X after years of struggles as companies sought to avoid drawing ire from two of the most powerful men on the planet.
“You’re buying insurance, you’re not buying advertising,” Lou Paskalis, an ad industry veteran and CEO of the consulting firm AJL Advisory said.
X is suddenly poised for its first year of revenue growth since 2021. Banks holding billions of dollars in debt from Musk’s X acquisition – recently considered the worst buyout since the 2008 financial crisis – are finally able to offload it without taking losses.
Other investors bought back into X at a valuation close to what Musk paid for the company in late 2022. They were rewarded a few weeks later when Musk acquired X via his artificial intelligence startup, XAI, at a similar valuation. X’s investors now have shares in an AI venture that’s said to be raising funds at a $US120 billion valuation.
Political liability
In recent weeks, though, Musk’s seemingly ubiquitous presence in Washington has become more complicated. The Wisconsin Supreme Court race became a referendum on DOGE and Musk, who spent $US20 million to support a Republican candidate who lost by a 10-point margin.
Wisconsin was a “a wake-up call”, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said. “Clearly he has become a rallying point for the opposition.”
Musk then butted heads over Trump’s tariff policy – a centrepiece of the administration – with presidential trade advisor Peter Navarro, who Musk called “dumber than a sack of bricks”. He also called out the negative impact of Trump’s tariffs on the Tesla earnings call, and said that despite trying to convince Trump otherwise, the president is “within his rights to do what he wants to do”.
As Musk announced his soft exit from government, the billionaire left open the door to advising Trump through the end of the administration. “I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, probably the remainder of the president’s term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stopped does not come roaring back,” he said on the Tesla earnings call.
For Trump, speaking to reporters last week, Musk’s role with the administration already sounded past-tense.
“He was a tremendous help, both in the campaign and in what he’s done with DOGE,” Trump said.
