Last week, Elon Musk said He had “done enough” After spending five months working hand in hand with the president Donald Trump As head of the Ministry of Effectiveness of the Government.
While the attention of the CEO of technology is moving away from the White House and returns to the companies that made him richest man in the world,, Nowsweek Asked the experts if his time on the front line of politics was a success or a failure.
Nowsweek contacted Musk to comment via the X press office, formerly Twitter.
The context
While Musk has regularly increased his political comment in recent years, his first -hand involvement in the campaign began in the 2024 presidential election. Approved Trump After the assassination of Pennsylvania, an attempted assassination in Pennsylvania gave millions to the RepublicanCampaign via America PAC, the Musk Super Political Action Committee. After Trump’s victory in November, Musk joined his team as a Dogee leader, a project that the billionaire had presented on the campaign campaign to reduce federal spending and reduce government size.
What to know
The technology magnate entered politics last year in the explicit goal of ensuring that Trump is elected for a second term as president, spend more than $ 75 million in the process.
While Musk achieved this goal, the experts said Nowsweek That his stay at the White House would become considered as a mixed bag, in particular with the great expectations that the billionaire had attached to his signature project, Doge.
“Musk has succeeded in attracting attention and renamed government reform as a Silicon Valley style disruption”, Casey Burgat, Director of Legislative Affairs at the George Washington University, said. “But beyond the optics, Doge is far from its promises.”
“The administration has promised 2 dollars of savings; independent exams suggest that a fraction of it has materialized, and even these figures are riddled with accounting errors and double accounting victories,” he added.
The Doge account of its savings Put the total at $ 170 billionAnd even if it’s much less than Original musk pledgeHe was one of the figures in the Trump circle most strongly associated with federal spending cuts, which protested his businesses, especially Tesla.
Burgat continued: “The reputation of Musk suffered a net recalibration. For years, he cultivated a character as an eccentric but brilliant innovator. But his passage with Doge placed him squarely in the political arena – where admiration is quickly hidden.
“For criticism, it has become a symbol of inexplicable power: a billionaire with a government badge, which flows from standards and institutions.
“Even many conservatives who have applauded its dismantles of federal” bloating “will now distant themselves quietly while legal challenges accumulate and as the more erratic behavior of Musk – including the targeting of civil servants and abrupt policy inversions – becomes a political responsibility.”
Eric Schiffer, a better technological investor and president of the Patriarch Organization capital company, said Nowsweek This recessive bias always affected the perception of the public of Musk’s political frenzy, and that over time, he would be seen differently, a bit like Trump himself.
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Schiffer said: “Public offices is a question of” how real that is? “No one really knows how deep he is with the Trump administration to this point, and they run this anger against a vulnerability of Trump, who is Elon, and his wealth.”
He also said that while TeslaThe reputation has dropped, its sales figures remained strong and the peak of anti-musc demonstrations had probably passed.
Schiffer continued: “Until now, he resists fairly well. In China, the figures are always strong. We will have to see how he shakes. The challenge is the same in Europe and abroad, where he is associated with draconian policies. But that could also turn.
“While prices are starting to be integrated and Elon is distanced from the administration, people will not keep negative biases in the long term. They dissipate over time.”
Conversely, Burgat said that Musk’s time in politics was used to accelerate polarization, with those who support him even more, while his detractors opposed him even more.
“Among the public, polarization has intensified,” he said. “For fans, he is always a free-track hero; for skeptics, he is transformed into something much more dangerous: a privatized version of the government without railing.”
What happens next
Musk said in a recent meeting with Tesla investors that he would spend More time with the company. He said in April: “I think that probably starting next month, May, my time allowance in Doge will drop considerably.”
vice-president Jd vance echoes the feeling that Doge would continue In a certain form without musk, saying to journalists: “DOGE has a lot of work to do, and this work will continue after the departure of Elon. But fundamentally, Elon will remain a friend and an adviser to me and the president.”