The Beginning and End of Elon Musk’s Love Affair with Donald Trump: KBS Sidhu

KBS Sidhu

May 29, 2025:

1 | A Sudden Break—Musk Walks Away from DOGE

In the small hours of May 28, 2025, Elon Musk posted a 36-word post on X announcing he was “leaving Washington behind” and resigning as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the flagship cost-cutting agency he had built for President Trump. White House aides confirmed the exit within hours, framing it as “voluntary” and “effective immediately.”

“The bureaucracy is much worse than I realized—it fights efficiency the way antibodies fight infection.” —Musk, in a taped Washington Post interview that aired the same morning

His departure landed barely 24 hours after a preview of that interview showed him lambasting Trump’s new omnibus tax-and-spend bill for “ballooning the deficit we swore to shrink.”

2 | Big Money, Bigger Influence—The 2024 Cash Flood

Long before he quit, Musk had bought a seat at the table. Final FEC filings show he poured $259 million–$288 million into pro-Trump super PACs during the 2024 cycle—easily the largest individual outlay of the election.
The money bought more than goodwill: he co-drafted talking points on industrial policy, shaped an energy plan centered on domestic lithium, and—in January—was installed as DOGE’s public face alongside budget hawk Russ Vought.

3 | The Early Honeymoon—Silicon Swagger Meets MAGA Muscle

For a brief season the pairing looked unstoppable. At rallies Musk promised to “run government at Gigafactory speed,” while Trump relished having a tech titan break with Silicon Valley’s usual Democratic tilt. The optics were doubly striking because, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Musk is naturalized, not natural-born, and therefore barred from the presidency—freeing him to play kingmaker rather than king.

4 | Clashing Over the “Big Beautiful Bill”

Musk’s break with Trump sharpened when the White House rolled out its Big Beautiful Bill—a 2,200-page mash-up of tax cuts, infrastructure credits, and eye-watering discretionary spending. During a televised CNBC spot on May 26, 2025, Musk called the package “a sugar high with a trillion-dollar hangover,” arguing it would erase any savings DOGE hoped to book. He blasted the proposed luxury-goods levy (a surprise pay-for aimed at “coastal elites”) and the new “Tech R&D Surcharge” that, in his view, “punishes companies for reinvesting in American factories.” While Trump hailed the bill as “fiscally gorgeous,” Musk warned senators that its deficit impact would “make 2020 look thrifty”—and two days later, he drafted the resignation post that ended his Washington experiment.

5 | DOGE—From Moonshot to Mismatch

DOGE launched with a moonshot pledge: $2 trillion in savings across ten years. Reality intruded fast. Three months of GAO audits shaved the headline savings to roughly $200 billion, while class-action suits from laid-off federal workers clogged the courts.
Musk’s own verdict, offered in multiple TV hits: “Congress kneecapped us with that monster bill—DOGE became the scapegoat for everything.”

6 | Courts Slam the Brakes—Orders Put on Ice

Even DOGE’s most aggressive directives stalled once they hit the bench. In late May, Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay blocking two lower-court orders that would have forced DOGE to hand over internal records and put its acting administrator under oath.
Lower-court judges had also frozen a planned mass-layoff directive and a contested contract-termination spree, warning that the agency’s statutory footing was “at best ambiguous.” The Supreme Court’s temporary reprieve gives the administration time to argue that DOGE, as a White House advisory body, is exempt from both FOIA and standard procurement rules—but it underscores how swiftly the judiciary can hobble even Musk-style blitz reforms.

7 | Bureaucracy Bites Back

By spring, Musk was openly fuming about civil-service protections, FOIA delays, and “Kafka-level paperwork.” Staff leaks describe impromptu corridor rants and threats to “fire 10,000 more by Labor Day.” Yet the deeper he dug, the more institutional booby traps he triggered—inspectors general, union injunctions, bipartisan subpoenas. D.C. proved that you cannot simply ship, iterate, apologize when due process is written into statute.

8 | Rockets, Ruptures & Pep Talks at Starbase

Even as he packed up in D.C., SpaceX was reeling from three straight Starship mishaps: Flight 7 (Jan 16) tumbled post-MECO, Flight 8 (Mar 6) exploded nine minutes in, and Flight 9 (May 27) reached space but lost both stages on the way home.
Hours after Flight 9’s fiery end, Musk flew to Boca Chica and promised engineers he would “sleep on the factory floor again until we stick the landing,” urging them to treat failure as “data with the volume turned to eleven.”

9 | Wall Street’s Verdict

Policy whiplash and rocket woes spooked investors; Tesla has seesawed all winter amid whispers of a board-imposed succession plan and a bruising EU antitrust probe. The stock now trades well below its January peak, with market analysts flagging “Musk concentration risk” as a structural vulnerability for every firm he controls.

10 | Doors That Did Open—Starlink’s India Coup

Politics did grease one commercial track: March 11–12, 2025, SpaceX clinched twin distribution pacts with Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio to blanket rural India with Starlink—deals fast-tracked, sources say, by White House nudging during Musk’s final DOGE weeks.
For once, bureaucratic diplomacy met private-sector velocity—and the payoff could be millions of new subscribers in the world’s biggest untapped broadband market.

11 | Musk vs OpenAI—Founders’ Feud & the Hardware Pivot

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and has since turned litigant, reviving a 2024 lawsuit that accuses Sam Altman and Microsoft of betraying the nonprofit charter.
Altman, meanwhile, has doubled down: last week OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s hardware startup io for $6.5 billion, signaling a bold “hardware-software wedding” that could give ChatGPT its own bespoke device family.
The move lays bare the philosophical rift: Musk’s xAI is building models to embed in his existing gadget empire, while Altman is forging an Apple-style union of silicon, services, and design talent—perhaps the very paradigm Musk once dreamed of but never realized.

12 | Lessons & Laments

1. Velocity ≠ Viability: Blitz-scaling works on factory floors, not Senate floors.

2. Capital Is Not Consent: $280 million bought access, not amnesty—once DOGE soured, political cover evaporated.

3. Bureaucracy Endures: Like a cockroach, the federal machine survives every would-be exterminator; reformers leave, rule books remain.

Musk retreats to his launchpads, chastened yet unbowed. Trump loses a marquee adviser but keeps the DOGE brand. Washington, ever protean, slides back to incrementalism—and maybe that is its genius.