After more than two months of hyping Elon Musk and his work at the Department of Government Efficiency, President Donald Trump and his supporters have gone awfully quiet on the world’s richest man.
While Musk was once a fixture at the White House and featured heavily in the president’s social media posts and fundraising emails, the Tesla CEO has hardly been mentioned since early April, Politico reported.
He now barely gets mentioned in White House briefings, and members of Congress have also stopped talking about him, the outlet found.
It’s a stark contrast from February and March, when Musk seemed to be everywhere—speaking during Cabinet meetings, attending the president’s address to Congress, traveling aboard Air Force One, and leading press conferences at the White House.
Perhaps most tellingly, Trump hasn’t said a word about Musk on his social media platform, Truth Social, since March 31. Before that, he was posting about Musk about four times each week and mentioned him 11 times during the week of Feb. 17, according to an analysis by Politico.
By law, Musk could only serve as a special government employee for 130 days, until late May.
“The mission of DOGE—to cut waste, fraud, and abuse—will surely continue. DOGE employees who onboarded at their respective agencies will continue to work with President Trump’s cabinet to make our government more efficient,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico in a statement.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The Truth Social blackout started the same day Musk suffered a humiliating loss in the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race, with his preferred candidate Brad Schimel losing by 10 points despite Musk pouring a record $21 million into a normally low-profile and non-partisan judicial race.
Despite his high-profile antics—including handing out $1 million checks to voters and wearing a cheesehead hat at a rally—liberal appellate Judge Susan Crawford prevailed.
Two days later, Marquette University Law School released a poll that found 58 percent of respondents disapproved of how Musk was handling his secretive cost-cutting task force under DOGE. An even higher percentage—60 percent—disapproved of Musk personally.
“He’s finished, done, gone. He polls terrible. People hate him,” an anonymous GOP operative told Politico. “He’d go to Wisconsin thinking he can buy people’s votes, wear the cheese hat, act like a 9-year-old. … It doesn’t work. It’s offensive to people.”
Other factors—including other administration policies such as tariffs drawing some of the attention away from DOGE, and Musk himself taking a step back—could also help explain why Musk has faded into the background.
Tesla’s profits plummet by 71 percent during the first quarter of 2025, forcing Musk to promise the company’s investors he would limit his work at DOGE to one or two days per week starting in May.
In the meantime, it has become clear that DOGE isn’t likely to find anywhere near the $2 trillion in savings that Musk originally promised. The task force claims to have generated about $170 billion in savings, but even that is likely to be offset by lost revenue after DOGE cut key positions such as IRS auditors who fight high-income tax evaders, according to Lawfare.
Republicans have stopped touting the savings, though they’re still staying on Musk’s good side in the hopes that he will continue using his massive fortune and social media platform to support their campaigns, Politico reported.
And Trump hasn’t gotten rid of Musk entirely. He was invited to Trump’s April 30 Cabinet meeting marking the president’s first 100 days in office, and last week, he joined Trump in Qatar, where he attended a state dinner hosted by the ruling Al Thani family, and Saudi Arabia, where he met the country’s leaders and spoke at an investors event.
“We all want to thank you for your help,” Trump told Musk at the Cabinet meeting. “You really have sacrificed a lot.”
Everyone knows, though, how strongly Trump feels about losers.
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