WASHINGTON - Hours after President Donald Trump's inauguration, a triumphant Elon Musk took the stage at a Trump rally in Washington and boasted, "I'm going to work my ass off for you guys."
He then let out a deep sigh and broke into laughter as he soaked in the enormous role he was about to hold: leading the administration's Department of Government Efficiency with a mission to gut the federal bureaucracy.
"Man, I can't wait. This is going be fantastic," Musk said as he grinned ear to ear.
But now, 100 days into Trump's second White House term, the Musk who once held up a chainsaw to display his power as a government slasher ‒ and became the most prominent face of the White House behind Trump ‒ has started to disappear. The richest man in the world is set to spend significantly less time with the Trump administration as he takes a backseat to the DOGE endeavor he launched.
The fading of Musk from the White House comes after his companies, particularly Tesla, have suffered the consequences of his increasingly polarizing brand as the president of the United States' chief sidekick.
Yet he also became a political liability for Trump, with his role already noticeably diminishing.
Musk stormed Washington by taking a battery ram to the federal government and becoming the administration's agenda-setter. But in recent weeks, Musk dramatically lowered his taxpayer savings estimates from DOGE's government cuts, disagreed publicly with Trump's aggressive tariff policies and butted heads with multiple Trump officials, some publicly, revealing divisions within the White House over Musk's influence.
Far from the jubilance three months ago, Musk sounded dejected during an April 22 Tesla earnings call as he announced he would be allocating significantly less of his time to DOGE beginning in May. Tesla, the electric car company he owns, had just posted a disastrous net income that was down 71% the last quarter.
"As people know, there's been some blowback for the time I've been spending in government with the Department of Government Efficiency," Musk said, blaming the protests that have followed him and Tesla on paid individuals he claimed are dependent on government "waste and fraud" he eliminated.
In his downsized role, Musk ‒ a top White House adviser ‒ said he would spend only a day or two a week in the government "for as long as the president would like me to do so and as long as it is useful."
From the moment Musk began pumping his vast personal resources into Trump's 2024 campaign and started stumping for Trump last year, how long the Trump-Musk marriage could last was the subject of much speculation.
Although Trump has continued to offer only praise for a man he calls a "genius," even the president has started to talk about Musk in the past tense. "He was a tremendous help, both in the campaign and what he's done with DOGE," Trump told reporters April 23 from the Oval Office.
In the first two months of Trump's second term, Musk was everywhere: boarding Air Force One with the president on the way to Mar-a-Lago, next to Trump in the Oval Office, wearing a black MAGA hat with his four-year-old son X on his shoulders, and in a prominent seat at Trump's first joint address to Congress since his White House return.
But during a Cabinet meeting Trump opened up to reporters in April, Musk only spoke for a few minutes. It was a far cry from Trump's first Cabinet meeting in February, when Musk ‒ wearing a black T-shirt that read "tech support" ‒ dominated the show as he touted DOGE's efforts to purge the government alongside Cabinet secretaries.
Steered by Musk, the DOGE team of more than 100 IT engineers, tech executives and other Musk allies has fanned throughout the federal government, eliminating government programs without congressional approval and pushing the termination of tens of thousands of federal workers. DOGE employees took control of federal IT infrastructure and installed themselves in departments and agencies.
It has been an unprecedented arrangement, turning Musk into as much of a target for Democrats as Trump himself.
Musk, however, has started to discuss DOGE's work in smaller terms.
Musk went from setting a campaign goal of cutting $2 trillion in "waste and fraud" from the government through his work at DOGE to $1 trillion after Trump returned to the White House. Most recently, Musk lowered his savings expectations dramatically, saying he expects DOGE to cut $150 billion in spending during the next fiscal year.
Meanwhile, an April 14 deadline for federal agencies and departments to submit "reduction in force" plans to the Office of Personnel Management passed with little attention after a similar ultimatum in March led to thousands of federal workers accepting voluntary buyouts.
Signs that Musk, with his brash personality and style, wore out his welcome with many in Trump's orbit have become more apparent, particularly as the tech entrepreneur's habit of publicizing his opinions have run counter to some of Trump's policies and positions.
Ahead of Trump's inauguration, Musk in December clashed with Trump's traditional hardline conservative base through his vocal support of the H-1B program, arguing the temporary work visa program is needed to attract global talent in in technology sectors.
Musk in March rallied behind conservative podcaster's Ben Shapiro's push for Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted for his role in the death of George Floyd. But Trump said he wasn't even considering the move.
And in a much more consequential dispute, Musk publicly countered Trump's newly imposed steep tariffs, calling for a "zero tariff situation" between the U.S. and Europe and a "free trade zone between Europe and North America." Duties imposed on imports pose a threat to Tesla, which imports auto parts from other countries even though Tesla vehicles are assembled in the U.S.
"I'll continue to advocate for lower tariffs rather than higher tariffs, but that's all I can do," Musk said in the April 21 Tesla earnings call.
His skepticism of the Trump administration's tariff regime blew up into infighting with two top Trump aides.
Musk in April called Trump's top trade adviser Peter Navarro a "moron" and "dumber than a sack of brick" after Navarro responded to Musk's tariff concerns by labeling his administration colleague "not a car manufacturer - he's a car assembler."
More recently, Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got into a heated argument in the West Wing, according to a report from Axios, over the Internal Revenue Agency, which Musk has targeted with massive workforce cuts.
These incidents followed a confrontation between Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a closed-door Cabinet meeting in March as the the DOGE leader accused Rubio of not swiftly carrying out department cuts, the New York Times reported.
Musk's entry into Trump world exposed discord between Trump's original hardline loyalists and a group of tech billionaires led by Musk who gravitated to Trump during the 2024 election.
Former top Trump strategist Seve Bannon, who has long embraced Trump's working-class populism, turned into a frequent critic of Musk ‒ including on the H-1B debate ‒ saying Musk and "other oligarchs" don't "support MAGA."
Musk's status in the administration as a "special government employee" made the current window a convenient time for him to ease away from the White House. The designation is given to federal government employees who work 130 days or less during a calendar year, creating an end-of-May deadline for Musk's official role in the White House.
"He was always at this time going to ease out," Trump told reporters after Musk announced his plans to scale back on his federal government work. Trump touted Musk's businesses, saying: "We have to at some point go ahead and let him do that."
Trump, however, could extend Musk's government status if he wanted, or just disregard the 130-day limit entirely.
But the reality: it's becoming a greater risk politically for Trump to keep Musk around.
Musk suffered an embarrassing setback when Democrats won a Wisconsin state Supreme Court race in early April that became a referendum on the powerful business mogul after he pumped $20 million into the race and declared before the election that the outcome could decide "the future of America and Western Civilization."
In a Quinnipiac University poll taken in April