Uncle Elon's final report card

Business Insider

18 hours ago

All good buddy comedies come to an end. For President Donald Trump and first friend "Uncle Elon" Musk, theirs wrapped up with the same explosive fanfare upon which it started. But now their shared enthusiasm for cutting government waste has morphed into animosity for each other so deep and personal that it's become a textbook case study in management gone wrong.
In November, just after Trump's reelection, I asked management experts if Musk could mimic his track record of juicing everything he could out of his lean companies to make the government run more efficiently. They were reluctant to doubt Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, but just as reluctant to think his efficiency tactics at Tesla and X meant he could single-handedly transform the government. I checked back in with some of them in March, six weeks into DOGE's chaotic tenure, after it dismantled USAID and axed tens of thousands of federal workers. They described his management as "clumsy," "wrongheaded," and full of "political recklessness."
Now, the breakup of the bromance between two of the world's biggest, boldest personalities is surprising only in that it took so long to unfold and, once it did, moved with the speed that only two social media savvy, chronically online posters could propel. (Musk posted on X more than a dozen times lambasting Trump and his " Big Beautiful Bill" late last week, since deleting some of the most disparaging claims, and Trump suggested Musk might be suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome.")
If DOGE is a cautionary tale in how not to manage, it's one from the furthest extreme, marked by a clash between the egos of two of the world's most powerful men that made politics extremely personal. Still there are business lessons to be gleaned even for those of us who run fewer than six companies and have fewer than 220 million social media followers. DOGE has proved "unsuccessful" up to this point, and is so far a "failed venture" for Musk and for the government, says Subodha Kumar, a professor at Temple University's Fox School of Business. It brought "disruption, a lot of delays, a lot of mistrust, and a lot of good people have left the organization," he says. "This kind of damage takes a long time to repair."
To date, DOGE has claimed it found $180 billion in savings (Musk in May called DOGE "effective," but "not as effective as I'd like," as the original goal was to save $2 trillion). An analysis in April from nonpartisan research group Partnership for Public Service found that the department's actions could cost as much as $135 billion, an estimate of the costs of the firings, re-hirings, and lost productivity. Meanwhile, the four months Musk spent working taking a chainsaw to the federal government are wrapping up doused in drama that has spilled over to his other companies. After his 130-day post as a special government employee ends, Musk is pointing the blame for government waste back on Trump, skewering the spending bill for being too big and ugly, and endorsing a call to impeach Trump and replace him with Vice President JD Vance (that post has since been deleted).
The lesson here is akin to that of two mob bosses of the gangster world who both crave the superior distinction of being the number one boss. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management leadership professor
The escalating tension is just the beginning of a fight that could get worse for Musk, and likely has little benefit for Trump, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management leadership professor who has studied Trump for decades and advised presidents, tells me in an email. DOGE, he notes, overpromised savings and may actually cost US taxpayers more when it comes to rehiring costs, repairing systems, and weakened cybersecurity. As WIRED reported last week, DOGE is hiring, and even has reached out to technologists who formerly worked for the government.
Musk's involvement with the DOGE proved tumultuous for his businesses from the start. His personal wealth ballooned by some $200 billion in 2024, surpassing $400 billion after Election Day. Once he got to work in the White House, his absenteeism from his companies — paired with a growing distaste for DOGE's actions among the electorate and protests targeting Tesla — led his net worth to drop alongside Tesla's market cap. Last Thursday, Musk's open beef with Trump further hampered his wealth, leading the Tesla CEO to lose $34 billion personally in a single day. Tesla stock, which has taken a beating as people turn on the company to protest Musk's government work, took its biggest tumble since March, closing 14% lower and wiping out $152 billion from the company's market cap. Musk is still the richest person in the world.
For Musk, there's damage to the Tesla brand in need of repair. His next step could be "to portray himself as a purist who came in to offer his technical help and didn't realize how deep the corruption runs," says Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School. "Musk could potentially portray himself as a wayward son of the tech industry." This might only work if the Trump administration continues to stumble, and if Musk also sees more success, like winning big with his robotaxi push. As Taylor Lorenz reported in User Mag Friday, some high-profile Democrats are already signaling that they would welcome Musk back into the fold. Trump over the weekend told NBC News Musk would face "serious consequences" if he donated to Democratic candidates (he did not specify what they would be). It's yet to be seen where Musk will find his next political alliances: On Friday, he ran a poll on X asking if a third political party should emerge to include the 80% of Americans in the middle of Republicans and Democrats, as he sees it.
The president has threatened to go after Musk's government contracts — which total in tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX and Tesla. "The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Elon was 'wearing thin,' I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!" Trump himself bought a Tesla just three months ago, and is now considering selling it. (Best of luck to him, the cars' resale values have tanked).
As Trump and Musk part ways, it's clear that Musk's brazen, fully autonomous leadership style didn't work in the government world, as it eschewed transparency and collaboration in favor of a top-down approach. "The one-size-fits-all policy does not work everywhere," says Kumar. "You have to understand the culture of the organization and you have to work from inside rather than from outside."
Back in November, experts told me it wasn't clear what authority Musk would actually wield in the newly-created position to implement massive spending cuts. Trying to employ tech-world leadership tactics from the White House created a rivalry between Musk and Trump for power and control, undercutting the alliance between the two and leaving DOGE far short of its savings goals. "The lesson here is akin to that of two mob bosses of the gangster world who both crave the superior distinction of being the number one boss — with surging parallel drives for grandiosity," Sonnenfeld says. "Musk's tragic mistake was that he forgot his role — as a staffer and advisor to Trump, not the primary character he foolishly believed himself to be, and even now, continues to overestimate his own importance and indispensability."