Elon Musk made himself the face of a humiliating political defeat in Wisconsin on Tuesday night. He’s rubbed cabinet members the wrong way and alienated several advisers close to President Trump. Republican lawmakers face angry questions about Mr. Musk’s influence from their constituents when they return to their districts.
It will come as a relief to many in Mr. Trump’s orbit when Mr. Musk completes his 130-day service as a special government employee, which according to federal law is due to end in late May or early June.
But the president has no intention of cutting ties with the world’s richest man, even after he leaves government, according to two people with knowledge of the president’s thinking.
Mr. Musk has become, for better or worse, an essential component of both Mr. Trump’s political operation and the broader Republican Party apparatus. He’s the party’s moneyman, having committed $100 million to Mr. Trump’s outside groups, on top of the nearly $300 million he spent on the 2024 election. And he controls the most important media channel in G.O.P. politics — the website X, formerly known as Twitter — which makes Republicans terrified of getting on his bad side.
At a closed-door J.P. Morgan conference last week in Montana, Mr. Musk was asked by the investor Michael Kives how long he believed his “bromance” with Mr. Trump would last, according to a person in the room. Mr. Musk, speaking via Zoom before a group that included his foes such as Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman and allies such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, said he would be finished with most of his work in “three to four months.”
Mr. Trump genuinely likes Mr. Musk, according to people who have observed their private interactions and have discussed their relationship with the president. Mr. Trump has also foreshadowed Mr. Musk’s departure in the past two weeks, saying publicly he expects Mr. Musk to leave government “at some point” to go back to his companies, and privately telling cabinet officials on March 24 that they had limited time to get things done given Mr. Musk’s status.
But Mr. Trump continues to see far more upside than downside to Mr. Musk. The billionaire has become a heat shield for a president who avoids blame at any cost.
The Wisconsin judicial race provided a case study of the risks and rewards of Mr. Musk’s engagement in politics. He came through with more money than Republicans could have imagined. He spent, along with an outside group he backed, at least $25 million, a record for a State Supreme Court race. But his millions have strings attached: To accept Mr. Musk’s help is to also accept his polarizing personality, quixotic ideas about political strategy and thirst for attention.
Mr. Musk threw himself into the Wisconsin race in the most over-the-top way imaginable, flying to Green Bay for a rally on Sunday, precisely when candidates typically make a carefully choreographed closing argument. His chosen candidate, the conservative judge Brad Schimel, did not even attend Mr. Musk’s event, at which the billionaire wore a cheesehead hat and handed out million-dollar checks to two Wisconsinites who signed a petition opposing “partisan judges.”
Mr. Musk’s personal involvement in the race backfired spectacularly; in fact, he appeared to become a powerful turnout machine for Democratic Party base. At the same time, he is not as popular with Republicans as Mr. Trump is. That meant Democrats could demonize Mr. Musk to fire up their base, with less of a risk of energizing Republican voters.
The morning after the drubbing — with the liberal judge Susan Crawford beating Judge Schimel by 10 percentage points in a state Mr. Trump won by a point — headlines predictably portrayed Mr. Musk as the architect of the Republican defeat. Advisers to Mr. Trump were happy to let Mr. Musk be the scapegoat.
Judge Schimel even lost Brown County, where Mr. Musk’s rally was held and where the billionaire wanted to juice conservative turnout. Still, Mr. Schimel got more votes than the conservative candidate did in 2023 — but Democratic turnout increased even more so, outperforming margins for other Democrats in recent races.
The defeat, while concerning to many Republicans, is unlikely to cause a split between Mr. Musk and the party. Yet the entire effort underscored that when Mr. Musk makes donations, he expects to have a strong presence. While G.O.P. lawmakers and prospective presidential candidates will continue to solicit his checks, they may be less eager for Mr. Musk to campaign publicly on their behalf.
Mr. Musk, who normally posts incessantly on social media, has said next to nothing about the results. When he did briefly speak up, in a reply to another account on X, he spoke cryptically of a game of chess, saying he “expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain.”
For Mr. Musk, and the Republican Party, the race is the latest reminder that off-year elections bring out a different kind of voter.
“The people waiting in line to vote last night looked a lot different than those in November,” said Bill Stepien, a Republican strategist who was Mr. Trump’s second campaign manager in 2020 and his White House political director before that. He said that the notion that Mr. Musk was going to persuade people to back Republicans with his presence or his political group did not reflect reality.
“Because special elections draw an audience that is almost exclusively partisan, and highly partisan at that, it’s a matter of turnout, not persuasion,” he said.
People close to Mr. Musk’s political operation acknowledged to allies that the race was an uphill climb — Mr. Musk said as much in Green Bay — but they predicted a much smaller margin than the eventual 10 points, one person with knowledge of the discussions said. A memo from a Musk-aligned group 10 days before the election said that the group’s polling found Judge Schimel down by just five points.
But Mr. Musk’s team found that polling to be Judge Schimel’s high-water mark. In the days after that memo, they soon saw Mr. Schimel’s numbers deteriorate.
The Wisconsin judicial race was Mr. Musk’s first major political defeat after successfully backing Mr. Trump in 2024. But while Mr. Trump was favored to win before Mr. Musk got involved, this time, Mr. Musk bet on a candidate whom the president’s closest advisers saw as an extreme long shot.
Heeding that advice, Mr. Trump was careful not to campaign as visibly as he might otherwise. He endorsed Judge Schimel, sent his eldest son to campaign in the state and offered the candidate a virtual town hall. But Mr. Trump, who has grown more cautious about which races he wades into deeply since 2022, resisted entreaties from Wisconsin Republicans to visit the state and do one of his trademark rallies for Judge Schimel.
Mr. Musk privately asked why Mr. Trump’s outside groups were not getting more involved in the contest. The reason was obvious: Their private polling was never close. A person briefed on the data said that the final poll taken by Mr. Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had Judge Schimel losing by eight percentage points and that his daily tracking model was bouncing between a nine- and 11-point loss.
The operative running Mr. Musk’s America PAC in Wisconsin, Keith Gilkes, was on vacation for 10 days during the race’s final stretch, which raised eyebrows among some involved in the race, according to two people with direct knowledge. Mr. Gilkes did not attend Mr. Musk’s rally in Green Bay. He did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
Mr. Musk had talked openly about his desire to spend “heavily” in 2025 on local races, like those for district attorney and judges. His engagement in the Wisconsin race came just eight days after Tesla sued the state over a law restricting vehicle sales. A few weeks later, Mr. Musk’s groups began a pro-Schimel advertising campaign, and he began building a canvassing operation that included up to 500 people across the state who knocked on doors for around $25 an hour.
Mr. Musk made himself central to his group’s messaging. “I am with America PAC, an organization run by Elon Musk,” reads part of one question that Wisconsin canvassers said at doors. Later, they ask: “Can President Trump and Elon Musk count on you to vote for Brad Schimel?”
Judge Schimel’s team felt they were often given very late notice about Mr. Musk’s activities in the state, including Mr. Musk’s desire for an X Spaces event with Judge Schimel himself, according to a person close to the campaign. Judge Schimel had less than a day’s notice before that event was finalized, and he was previously scheduled to be on a bus tour throughout the state. So he had to rent a hotel in rural Wisconsin to ensure he would have good internet access for the event, according to two people with knowledge of his schedule.
Mr. Musk, who has achieved wild success running his companies, has appeared to some Trump aides to be frustrated that he has not been able to sufficiently exert his will over the federal bureaucracy while running the Department of Government Efficiency, his government overhaul initiative. He has raged about judicial rulings and exhorted his team to bulldoze through internal rules and regulations, but his progress has been slower than he imagined, people who have spoken to him said.
Mr. Musk had pushed to be a special government employee, a role that is unique in that it is limited to a 130-day duration. These employees are not subject to various ethics rules, and they sometimes are able to fudge the time limits that supposedly bracket their work. He could theoretically return as a special government employee in 2026, but Mr. Musk said in an interview last week that he would “have accomplished most of the work” he set out to within the 130-day time frame.
Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. More about Jonathan Swan
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent, reporting on the second, nonconsecutive term of Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world. More about Theodore Schleifer
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