Musk was once a political force on X. Now he’s back to business.
In February, most of Musk’s posts and reposts on X were about DOGE or the U.S. government and politics. So far in May, most are about his business ventures or technological issues.
Elon Musk often spoke of the hundreds of millions of dollars he spent on electing Republican candidates as a necessary expenditure to prevent the decline of Western culture and values.
But his declaration Tuesday that he had “done enough” political spending — at least for now — was yet another sign that the world’s richest man is shifting away from his strong political advocacy and deep government involvement to return to his role as a tech evangelist for his businesses.
That shift has been forecast in Musk’s social media activity on X over the past three months, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Since he purchased the platform, then called Twitter, in October 2022, Musk has used it as an idea generator and a bully pulpit for his views on MAGA politics, government policy and Donald Trump.
Now that he has pulled back from his full-time government role, Musk posts about space travel, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence. He rarely mentions Trump.
The shift mirrors Musk’s effort to revive the companies he controls, which suffered reputational damage and, in Tesla’s case, steep declines in stock price during his polarizing tenure in government.
In February, more than half of Musk’s posts and reposts on X were about the U.S. DOGE Service — the controversial cost-cutting initiative he spearheaded — or the federal government and politics more broadly, according to a Post analysis. The analysis used artificial intelligence to categorize the text of Musk’s posts on X since the start of the year, excluding replies because they lacked context. About 13 percent of his February posts mentioned Trump by name, nearly double the proportion that named one of his companies.
So far in May, the numbers have reversed.
Now, under 20 percent of Musk’s posts are about DOGE or American politics, and more than half are about his other business ventures or technological issues more broadly. Just 3 percent of his posts name Trump, while more than 20 percent name one of his companies.
It’s a remarkable shift for the billionaire businessman, who crash-landed in Washington with a mission to dramatically slash the size of the government by sending a band of mainly young tech workers into federal agencies to cut people and programs. DOGE — or the Department of Government Efficiency — has fallen far short of that goal.
The strong backlash against Musk from some quarters led him to declare that he would step back this month from government to focus on Tesla, his electric vehicle company, whose stock fell by 71 percent during the first quarter of this year compared with 2024. On Tuesday, he announced that he plans to do a “lot less” political spending in the future after investing at least $288 million to elect Trump and other GOP candidates in November.
Musk initially forecast that he could trim $2 trillion in government spending through his work at DOGE, which has been responsible for slashing thousands of jobs. While deeply engaged in government, Musk sometimes posted to X hundreds of times per day, and he often took memes, misinformation or offhand thoughts from X users into his work at DOGE.
He posted repeatedly and baselessly throughout the election campaign and during the first months of the administration that Democrats had deliberately brought undocumented people into the country to facilitate them illegally voting in elections. On Feb. 11, Musk posted a Fox News segment with the comment: “They imported voters to stack the election.”
But Musk was never planning to be a permanent fixture in Washington. When he announced that he was stepping back from government, he estimated that the savings generated by his team’s work would amount to $160 billion in fiscal 2026, far short of his goal. That tally lacks many specific details.
Musk has already made the transition digitally. He posts much less about politics and instead extols the safety of Tesla vehicles and the makeup of lithium-ion LFP batteries, posting in May that their components are “low cost and extremely common.”
That change in focus has given some investors hope that Musk’s return will help rally his companies. Tesla’s stock has risen for nearly a month.
But some of the business challenges facing his firms have more to do with Trump’s tariff regime than management inattention, and could be thornier to address. Tesla manufactures its cars primarily from parts assembled abroad.
Musk’s image has changed, too, from genius Silicon Valley businessman to MAGA provocateur, and it is unclear whether he can — or wants to — change it back, according to analysts and corporate-accountability experts.
“The brand damage is real. It’s been a dark cloud over Tesla’s stock, and Tesla became a political symbol,” said Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, which has been bullish on Tesla but criticized Musk for what Ives said was his neglect of the company while he was in government. “We think that 5 to 10 percent of that damage could be permanent,” he added.
Others were more critical.
“His 100 days have been a failure as his stated objective. And they came at a huge cost to his companies and reputation,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management. “The negative blowback he’s getting for embracing the Trump agenda is confounding to him, because he had cast himself as a heroic figure in Silicon Valley. Instead of being renowned, he’s become infamous and vilified in many sectors.”
Tesla essentially became a meme stock in the U.S., meaning that its valuation is based more on emotion and sentiment than underlying business performance, Sonnenfeld said. At the same time, Tesla’s overseas sales have suffered steep declines.
In turn, when he said he would spend less time in Washington and return to his business empire, Musk left a leadership vacuum at DOGE, with no other figure involved in the effort having the same online clout as Musk, nor as close a relationship to Trump.
On his way out of Washington, Musk acknowledged that the time he spent at DOGE came with some personal cost.
He has said that his experience in the government was fun about 60 or 70 percent of the time, but he added that he does not like to see people protesting his moves at DOGE by burning Tesla vehicles.
Musk’s return to his role as CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and his other holdings has assuaged some previously skittish investors. Shares of Tesla have risen since the company announced its earnings in late April. However, that rally follows months of faltering stock performance as demand for Musk’s electric car brand declined and analysts and investors steered away from the company.
“It gives investors some hope that he’s focusing on the companies again,” said Yale’s Sonnenfeld.
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