The real reason Musk left the White House

Elon Musk looks on during a news conference with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 30, 2025. (Photo by Allison ROBBERT / AFP)

When Elon Musk announced his departure from the Trump administration last week, he attributed the change to unavoidable bureaucratic rules. "My time as a special government employee necessarily had to end, it was a limited-time thing," Musk said during a farewell presser at the White House on Friday. Special government employees, or SGEs, are limited to working 130 days per year, and Friday marked 130 days since President Trump's inauguration. But that doesn't tell the full story.

If an SGE only works a half-day, then the White House could tally it as a partial day, potentially stretching 130 working days into 260 calendar days or more. Musk had a lot of partial and off days during his time leading the White House's Department of Government Efficiency. In the last five months, he has left Washington dozens of times to fly to California and Texas for his job as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

More to the point, the Trump administration has consistently disregarded federal laws meant to limit executive power, so why would it suddenly respect a rule about how long one of its most powerful employees can stick around?

This anomalous rule-following also does not align with past White House assurances that Musk would remain for as long as it took to complete DOGE's mission of "eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse." (Musk, who promised to cut $2 trillion in federal spending, described that mission as "easy" in February, but has since acknowledged that DOGE has been unable to meet its goals.)

A more credible explanation for why Musk chose last week to leave was suggested by Musk himself during a CBS interview recorded a few days before he announced the end of his White House employment. "I'm a little stuck in a bind," he said. "I don't wanna speak up against the administration, but I also don't wanna take responsibility for everything this administration's doing."

Ultimately, the Trump-Musk union had drawbacks for both parties. For Musk, his association with Trump and DOGE's sweeping austerity prescriptions resulted in Tesla suffering its worst quarter in three years.

As it happens, left-leaning Americans are far more likely to own electric vehicles than conservatives. But they are less likely to purchase those cars from a company synonymous with a right-wing oligarch who has used his bought influence to cut social services, environmental protections, and medical research. Some one-time Tesla owners have joined the scores of anti-Musk protests held at the automaker's dealerships since January. State-level Democratic lawmakers also sought to fight the Trump-Musk program by imposing new taxes on Tesla and clawing back privileges the company received for being a top producer of zero-emission vehicles.

Tesla's brand crisis became so acute that its board of directors reportedly weighed replacing Musk as chief executive. But they settled on a vow renewal over divorce. In April, Musk heeded a plea from the board to publicly announce that he would spend more time working on Tesla and less time on DOGE.

Regardless of how much damage Tesla has suffered in the near term, Musk did not leave the White House empty-handed. For all of his complaining about federal spending run amok, Musk's time in Washington was more potlatch than belt-tightening. Thanks to Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary and one of Musk's closest allies in the administration, Starlink, the satellite internet subsidiary of SpaceX, stands to receive billions of dollars through the manipulation of a federal program to expand broadband access. Trump's State Department has also sought to benefit Starlink abroad by bullying small countries into sanctioning the service. The biggest prize, however, is the Golden Dome, Trump's fanciful missile "shield" initiative. With an estimated cost to taxpayers of $831 billion over two decades, it could prove to be the greatest defense boondoggle since the F-35, and SpaceX is the frontrunner to build some of its most complex and costliest features.

As for Trump, he began his term with a historically low approval rating. Attaching himself to Musk, who has a higher unfavorable rating, exacerbated that. Some conservatives fear that Musk's unpopularity could carry over to the midterms, stunting the GOP's House and Senate dominance. On the other hand, Musk has repeatedly blamed Republicans in Congress for DOGE's failure to deliver substantive spending cuts.

That Musk is as erratic as Trump likely did not help their partnership. Trump has had to contend with Musk publicly criticizing his policy decisions and scrapping with his top officials, both in social media sprees and White House shouting matches. All the while, Musk failed to deliver the goods he promised Trump. "Was it all bullshit?" Trump privately asked while referring to Musk's ambitions for DOGE, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The same report revealed that Trump was perplexed by Musk's sense of humor, referring to the centibillionaire as "50 percent genius, 50 percent boy."

Still, in a Friday sendoff, Musk and Trump appeared in the Oval Office and together insisted that everything was copacetic. “Elon’s really not leaving, he’s going to be back and forth… [DOGE] is his baby," Trump said.

But Musk clearly is not happy about the way everything went down. After complaining about how DOGE was treated as a "whipping boy" for all that has gone wrong in the Trump administration, Musk spent the weekend litigating his Nazi salute controversey from months ago and insisting that he is "NOT taking drugs!" He then returned to one of his favorite sources of comfort: exaggerating his gaming abilities.