Opinion | Elon Musk Leaves Washington Less Than Legendary

The partnership between the president and the richest man in the world is coming to an end. There is one clear loser in the breakup of this affair, and it is Elon Musk.

He fell from grace as effortlessly as he had risen. Like a dime-store Icarus, he took too many chances, never understood the risks and flew too close to the sun. Wrapped in the halo of his social-media superstardom, he was blinded to the reality of his circumstances until it was too late.

Mr. Musk has already inked several lucrative federal contracts and could get far more, but he leaves Washington with his reputation as a genius jack-of-all-trades — a reputation he relied on to boost his company’s stock prices and win investors for his ambitious adventures — severely damaged. Once likened to the Marvel superhero Tony Stark, he is becoming increasingly unpopular. Many formerly proud owners of his Tesla electric cars are trading them in or pasting apologies on their bumpers. Sales have plummeted.

Mr. Musk is hardly the first wealthy businessman to decamp to Washington: The Gilded Age millionaires, top hats in hand, focused on currying favor with the Senate, where laws were made and tariffs determined. With the collapse of the economy, the New Deal and the coming of a world war, the White House began to play a significantly larger role in directing the economy, and the businessmen paid it more attention. Dozens of them descended on the capital; others joined the cabinet. No matter when or in what position they served, however, they played by Washington’s rules, taking on well-defined, limited responsibilities and, for the most part, staying out of public view.

Mr. Musk broke with that tradition. Nobody was going to shut him up or rein him in. He was in the White House with his 4-year old son on his shoulders, on the stage of a Conservative Political Action Conference rally, promoting his cost-cutting crusade by waving a chain saw. He and his Department of Government Efficiency deputies spread chaos through Washington, locking staffers out of computer systems, gaining access to personal data on private citizens and identifying government employees they deemed expendable.

At first, President Trump appeared to endorse every cost-cutting move by his unorthodox adviser, declaring on social media that he and his cabinet were “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.” But Mr. Musk then violated the cardinal rule of Trumpland by daring to criticize the president’s policies and appointees — not just once or twice, but with remarkable consistency.

He jumped on his X platform to deride a White House proclamation that Sam Altman, the top artificial intelligence executive and his archrival, and others were going to invest $100 billion in data centers to generate the electricity required to power A.I. programs. Mr. Musk proclaimed in an interview that Social Security was “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” ignoring the fact that the president had vowed not to cut such spending. He even took issue with Mr. Trump’s triumphant “Liberation Day” announcement of sweeping new tariffs.

His bullying and lack of remorse as he slashed federal spending and dismissed tens of thousands of government employees eroded his popularity. He infuriated cabinet members by criticizing them in public, trespassing on their authority and refusing to recognize the White House chain of command.

Fittingly, his reign was effectively brought to an end on April Fools’ Day, when the $20 million he donated to elect a Trump-backed Republican to an open State Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin backfired, propelling more Democrats than Republicans to the polls. It was no longer possible to overlook the reality that the richest man in the world had become a political liability. The day after the Wisconsin debacle, Politico reported that the president had “told his inner circle” that Mr. Musk would be “stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role.” In mid-April, Mr. Trump signaled his dwindling regard for Mr. Musk by replacing his choice for I.R.S. acting commissioner with the candidate favored by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

On April 22, Mr. Musk announced that he was cutting back on his government work so he could spend more time at Tesla, which by then was in so much trouble, reports emerged that the board was considering replacing him as chief executive. (The company denied the assertion.) The reality that hit Wisconsin’s polls hit his car company even harder: Sales dropped 20 percent in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the year before; profits dropped by 70 percent. The flashy, impractical Cybertruck he had championed proved a flop. In the meantime, Tesla is rapidly losing market share to the Chinese automaker BYD and other established carmakers.

That’s not to say Mr. Musk’s other business interests, particularly his rocket launch company SpaceX and his satellite unit Starlink, are suffering. SpaceX is poised to gain billions from government contracts. The Trump administration has already cleared the way for Starlink to be eligible for the government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, and even encouraged other nations eager to reduce U.S. tariffs to do business with Starlink. But such promotions would most likely have been the case had Mr. Musk not joined Mr. Trump’s administration.

The lesson to be learned here is that there is no room in the American system of government for an unelected co-president. While elections often yield results we do not expect or desire, we have long proved to be better off with a government composed of elected officials and senior appointments that have gone through the constitutionally mandated confirmation process. Mr. Musk thought he could be an exception. And that was his undoing.

David Nasaw is an emeritus professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of the forthcoming book “The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II.”

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