Elon Musk’s stint in government has been an abject failure — and wildly destructive

This is an adapted excerpt from the May 29 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

To put the news in the parlance of SpaceX, it seems Elon Musk’s career as co-president to Donald Trump has had a bit of a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

Technically, his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) campaign was always billed as temporary, but less than six months into this administration, the man who came in like some sort of MAGA rock star, who was jumping around at Trump rallies, appeared at Cabinet meetings and spoke to adoring crowds at CPAC is now slinking out the side door.

By every conceivable metric, Musk’s stint in government has been an abject failure. On the substance alone, it has been wildly destructive. A lot of lifelong experts in key positions have lost their jobs. Important medical research has been set back, possibly indefinitely. Government agencies are functioning worse than they were before.

There are also huge ramifications for the Global South, where cuts to foreign aid will lead to needless suffering. Musk’s fellow billionaire Bill Gates warned that cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the agency Musk bragged about putting through the “woodchipper,” could cost millions of lives throughout the world. Experts have also cautioned that tens of thousands of people could die as a result of cuts to the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.

So it’s clear Musk did real, substantive damage that will be hard to repair, but even by his own standards, his so-called cost-saving, efficiency program failed to achieve what it set out to do.

The world’s richest man promised to cut federal spending by $2 trillion. But, by his own website’s shoddy math, he managed to cut just $175 billion. He barely made a dent. Even the libertarian Cato Institute, which is ideologically very supportive of DOGE’s mission, wrote that Musk “has overpromised and underdelivered on verifiable spending cuts.”

Musk assumed that the government is full of lazy bureaucrats who could be fired without any meaningful consequences. But even one of his own DOGE insiders had to concede that’s not actually true. In an interview, tech entrepreneur Sahil Lavingia, who Musk placed at the Department of Veterans Affairs, told Fast Company earlier this month: “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions … But honestly, it’s kind of fine — because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”

Lavingia said he found “himself surrounded by people who ‘love their jobs,’ who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work,” according to Fast Company. After that interview was published, Lavingia said his “access was revoked without warning” and his “DOGE days were over.”

Now that it’s clear Americans do not like the behavior and the cruelty of DOGE, Musk, with what is left of his tattered reputation, is doing media interviews trying to distance himself from it all.

“You know, it’s not like I agree with everything the administration does,” Musk told CBS News. “I mean, I agree with much of what the administration does, but we have differences of opinion … But it’s difficult for me to bring that up in an interview because then it creates a point of contention. So then I’m a little stuck in a bind where I’m like, well, I don’t want to, you know, speak out against the administration but I don’t want to — I also don’t want to take credit for everything the administration’s doing.”

It is a tough spot to be associated with those toxic Trump policies, but it’s worth remembering Musk is the same guy who was on stage with a chainsaw, bragging about all the cuts he was making to the federal government.

Months later, Musk is leaving in disgrace because he was wholesale rejected by everyone. We have seen report after report that members of the administration simply could not stand the guy. Back in March, The New York Times reported on an “explosive” Cabinet meeting, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins all tore into Musk for his haphazard cuts in their respective agencies.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic reported on an expletive-ridden screaming match between Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that spilled out from the Oval Office into more public areas of the West Wing.

That same article also quotes the general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees as saying, “We kicked him out of town … If he had stayed in the shadows and done his stuff, who knows how bad it would have been? But no one likes the guy.”

“No one likes the guy” might be the best summation of Musk’s foray into American politics I’ve encountered.

But Musk’s “Waterloo moment” came in April in Wisconsin. He flew in from out of state, wore a cheesehead and flexed his newfound political muscles in the state’s Supreme Court race. Musk spent a small fortune of his own money in support of the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel, but it didn’t work. Schimel lost by 10 points. Wisconsin voters called Musk a “pushy billionaire” who was “cutting everything” and said “he just makes me very angry.”

That’s not just in Wisconsin; voters everywhere don’t like him. Nate Silver’s polling average shows Musk’s public approval more than 14 points underwater, with about 54% of Americans saying they disapprove of the billionaire.

Musk’s intrusion into national politics has also had real financial consequences for his companies. He has lost billions of dollars since he spent more than $270 million to get Trump elected last year. Tesla sales are down big, especially in Europe, where they crashed nearly 50% year over year last month.

In the U.S., according to one report, “A shopping center with a shuttered Bed Bath and Beyond store is in violation of a Detroit suburb’s city code for storing dozens of Tesla vehicles on its parking lot.” Generally, I don’t think it is good news for a car manufacturer when your flagship, luxury trucks are sitting unsold in a random parking lot somewhere outside of Detroit.

Tesla shareholders are now saying the company is in crisis, sending a letter to the company demanding that Musk return to work full time. Thankfully for them, it looks like he has a lot of time on his hands right now.

As Musk leaves the government worse off than he found it, it's clear his tenure in Washington was a complete failure, substantively and politically. Musk got high on his own supply and convinced himself the American public would fall in love with his antics. But it turns out, they would much rather he just go away.