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1The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk
The Tesla innovator becomes the latest government employee to lose his job.
May 21, 2025, The Atlantic
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“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was shouting at Elon Musk in the halls of the West Wing last month, loud enough for Donald Trump to hear and in a language that he could certainly understand. Bessent and Musk were fighting over which of them should choose the next IRS leader—and, implicitly, over Musk’s bureaucracy-be-damned crusade. Without securing the Treasury chief’s sign-off, Musk had pushed through his own pick for the job. Bessent was, quite obviously, not having it.
The fight had started outside the Oval Office; it continued past the Roosevelt Room and toward the chief of staff’s office, and then barreled around the corner to the national security adviser’s warren. Musk accused Bessent of having run two failed hedge funds. “I can’t hear you,” he told Bessent as they argued, their faces just inches apart. “Say it louder.”
Musk came to Washington all Cybertrucks and chain saws, ready to destroy the bureaucracy, fire do-nothing federal workers, and, he bragged, save taxpayers $2 trillion in the process. He was a Tech Support–T-shirt-wearing disruptor who promised to rewire how the government operates and to defeat the “woke mind virus,” all under the auspices of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. For weeks, he and his merry band of DOGE bros gleefully jumped from agency to agency, terrorizing bureaucrats, demanding access to sensitive data, and leaving snack wrappers on employees’ desks. But as Musk winds down his official time in Washington, he has found himself isolated within the upper reaches of the Trump administration, having failed to build necessary alliances and irritating many of the department and agency heads he was ostensibly there to help. His team failed to find anything close to the 13-figure savings he’d promised. Court challenges clipped other projects. Cabinet secretaries blocked DOGE cuts they said reduced crucial services. All the while, Musk’s net worth fell, his companies tanked in value, and he became an object of frequent gossip and ridicule.
Four months after Musk’s swashbuckling arrival, he is effectively moving on, shifting his attention back to his jobs as the leader of Tesla, SpaceX, and X, among his other companies. In a call last month with Wall Street analysts, Musk said he was planning to spend “a day or two per week” focusing on DOGE issues—similar to how he manages each of his various companies. The next week, he seemed to suggest that he’d be slimming down his government portfolio even more, telling reporters that he expected to be in Washington “every other week.” Yesterday, he told the Qatar Economic Forum in a video interview that he no longer sees a reason to spend money on politics, though that could change in the future. “I think I’ve done enough,” he said.
He remains close with Trump, who still shows genuine affection for his billionaire benefactor, according to advisers and allies. But Musk’s decision to focus elsewhere has been greeted as a relief by many federal leaders, who have been busily undoing many of his cuts in their departments or making DOGE-style changes on their own terms. Cabinet leaders—who did not appreciate being treated like staff by the man boasting about feeding their fiefdom into a “wood chipper”—have widely ignored some of his efforts, such as his February demand that all federal employees send weekly emails to their supervisors laying out their accomplishments in bullet points.
