Elon Musk said on Tesla’s disastrous earnings call that he’ll soon be spending less time working with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which President Donald Trump tapped him to lead and oversee massive cuts to government spending.
“The large slug of work necessary to get the DOGE team in place and working with the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done, and I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” he said.
Musk’s announcement came as Tesla’s profits fell dramatically, with the electric car company reporting 71% less net income compared to a year ago, when it earned $1.39 billion. Its revenue dropped too, missing Wall Street expectations by around $1.8 billion.
He said he still expects to dedicate at least some time to working with Trump’s administration, which, through DOGE, has fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers and gutted funding for medical research, school lunch initiatives, staffing at national parks and forests, and a litany of other programs.
“I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, the remainder of the president’s term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stopped does not come roaring back,” the Tesla CEO said.
“I’ll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do, so as long as it is useful,” he said.
Musk also addressed the surge in protests against him, baselessly claiming that they’re fake demonstrations “paid for” by his political rivals ― a common talking point from Republicans lately.
“The protests that you see out there, they’re very organised. They’re paid for,” he said. “They’re obviously not going to admit that the reason that they’re protesting is because they’re receiving fraudulent money.”
He also claimed that Americans upset with the cuts he’s been making were just people thriving off government waste.
Stephanie Keith via Getty Images
“The natural blowback … is those who were receiving the wasteful dollars … will try to attack me,” he said.
The timeline Musk offered on Tuesday about his plans to spend less time working with DOGE is faster than one Trump shared earlier this month.
“There’s a point at which time Elon’s gotta have to leave,” Trump told reporters on April 3, adding he thinks that time could arrive in “a few months.”
“I think Elon’s great,” Trump said. “But he also had a number of companies to run.”
A Quinnipiac University poll taken this month found that voters are losing confidence in Musk. The survey found that 57% of Americans, including 16% of Republicans ― believe he “has too much power in making decisions affecting the United States.” That figure was up 2 percentage points from February.
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