Elon Musk Looks Desperate
How to lose $148 billion in less than two months
March 12, 2025, 4:53 PM ET
For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of
behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for
real on the White House South Lawn.
Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to
five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten
notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car
himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars. Musk
explained that the electric vehicle was “like a golf cart that goes really
fast.” Trump offered his own praise to the camera: “Wow.
That’s beautiful. This is a different panel than I’ve—everything’s computer!”
This was a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s
stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency. But you ought not to
overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the
event—during which Trump also declared that the White House would label any acts of violence against Tesla
dealerships as domestic terrorism—was the ongoing countrywide protests against
Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities,
protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s
charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply—almost 50 percent
since its mid-December, postelection peak—on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The
hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of
solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and
fix his mess for him.
And Tesla isn’t the only Musk venture that’s struggling.
SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket has exploded twice this year during test flights. And
Ontario, Canada, has canceled its contract with his Starlink internet company
to provide service to remote communities, citing Trump’s tariffs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire
Index, Musk is $148 billion poorer than he was on Inauguration Day (he is
currently worth $333.1 billion).
Just 17 days after wielding a chain saw and dancing
triumphantly onstage at CPAC, the billionaire looked like he was about to cry on the Fox
Business channel earlier this week. He confessed that he was having “great
difficulty” running his many businesses, and let out a long, dismal sigh and
shrugged when asked if he might go back to his businesses after he’s done in
the administration.
The world’s richest man can be cringe, stilted, and manic
in public appearances, but rarely have I seen him appear as defeated as he has
of late, not two months into his role as a presidential adviser. In the past
few weeks, he’s been chastised by some of Trump’s agency heads for overstepping
his bounds as an adviser (Trump sided with the agency heads). Reports
suggest that some Republican lawmakers are frustrated with Musk’s bluster and that the
DOGE approach to slashing the federal bureaucracy is angering constituents and
making lawmakers less popular in their districts. DOGE has produced few
concrete “wins” for the Trump administration and has
instead alienated many Americans who see Musk as presiding over a cruel
operation that is haphazardly firing and rehiring people and taking away
benefits. Numerous national polls in recent weeks indicate that a majority of respondents
disapprove of Musk’s role and actions in the government.
Musk’s deep sighs on cable TV and emergency Tesla junkets
on the White House lawn are hints that he may be beginning to understand the
precariousness of his situation. He is well known for his high risk tolerance,
overleveraging, and seemingly wild business bets. But his role at DOGE
represents the biggest reputational and, consequently, financial gamble of his
career. Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of
the narrative.
And the narrative is everything. Elon Musk is many
things—the richest man in the world, an internet-addled conspiracy theorist,
the controller of six companies, perhaps even the shadow president of the United States—but
most importantly, he is an idea. The value of Musk may be tied more to his
image than his actual performance. He’s a human meme stock.
A CNN clip from late October captures this
notion. In it, a reporter is standing outside one of Musk’s America PAC rallies
in Pennsylvania, interviewing the CEO’s superfans, most of whom are unequivocal
that Musk is “the smartest man in the world.” He has an engineer’s mindset, one
attendee claims, meaning he sees the world differently. Two other men in the
clip say that Musk got them to pay attention to politics (and to Trump,
specifically). These people had fallen hard for a cultivated image of
Musk as a Thomas Edison or Tony Stark type, a great man of history who is
single-handedly pushing the bounds of progress. Musk has had great success
popularizing electric vehicles and building new rockets (though many still
debate his direct involvement in the engineering). These supporters might have
been fans of his companies, but they seem to have also fallen for the myth of
his genius, a story born out of years of hagiographic books, news articles
reporting his hyperbolic claims, and Musk’s own ability to command attention.
Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius
The image of Musk as a true visionary has proved surprisingly durable. In the early to mid-2010s,
Musk took advantage of a different era of technology coverage—one that was more
gadget-focused and largely uncritical—to hype his ideas for the future of
transportation and interplanetary exploration. At that time, Tesla, his
signature project, was coded as progressive and marketed as being in line with
climate-change goals. The cultural dynamic of these ideas has changed, but the
fundamental product being sold by Musk has not: one man with a singular ability
to brute force his way to the future.
Musk’s trajectory changed after Trump was first elected
president. It was during this period that Musk—already an incessant
poster—realized how Twitter could be used to command an unbelievable amount of
attention. Even when that attention was negative, the process of repeatedly making
himself the main character on the platform elevated Musk’s profile. He became
more polarizing (for chastising journalists, behaving erratically, making a
supposed weed joke on Twitter that got him in
trouble with the SEC, and getting sued for defamation for calling somebody a
“pedo guy”), yet this somehow only added to Musk’s lore.
For years, valid criticisms of the Tesla executive came
with an asterisk: He’s erratic, crude, even a little unstable, but
that’s all part of the larger visionary package. Kara Swisher
showcased this dynamic well in a 2018 New York Times column titled “Elon Musk Is the Id of
Tech.” “I find the hagiography around him tiresome and even toxic,” she wrote.
But also, “Mr. Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.” As Swisher noted, Musk’s
attention-seeking at the time had a secondary effect of alienating him from
some of his peers and fans. But tweet by tweet, Musk found a different audience,
one eager to embrace his visionary image, provided he took up their crusade
against “wokeism.”
During the pandemic, Musk’s posting frequency intensified
considerably as he began to stake out more reactionary territory. He called the COVID-19 panic in March 2020
“dumb” and later that year tweeted that “pronouns suck.” Musk endeared
himself to the right wing by positioning himself as a free-speech warrior, a
posture that ultimately led him to purchase Twitter. Right-wing influencers and
the MAGA faithful saw Musk’s turn as proof of their movement’s ascendance, but
what has happened since Musk turned Twitter into X is nothing short of audience
capture: Musk has fully become the person his right-wing fanboys want him to
be, pushing far beyond a mere dalliance with conspiracy theories and
“Great Replacement” rhetoric. It is hardly controversial to suggest based on
Musk's posts and blatant political activism that the centibillionaire has been
further radicalized by his platform, which he then
turned into a political weapon to help elect Trump.
Musk’s X and MAGA bets mostly paid off, at least in the
near term. Before Musk bought Twitter, I highlighted a comment from Lily Francus,
then the director of quant research at Moody’s Analytics, who noted, “I do
think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla’s value is due to the
fact that Elon can command this attention continuously.” Francus doesn’t go as
far as to say that Tesla behaves like a meme stock—which can surge in price
after going viral as a result of coordinated efforts online—but that Musk
himself has this quality. Musk’s Twitter purchase was a bad deal financially
and has been detrimental to X’s bottom line, but his ownership of the platform
helped boost his cultural and political relevance by keeping him in the center
of the news cycle. Similarly, Musk going all in on Donald Trump, becoming a
megadonor to Republicans, and ultimately getting the DOGE gig all resulted in
Tesla stock soaring—up until a point.
You can argue that there’s a flywheel effect to all of
this. Musk’s polarizing, upsetting, attention-seeking behavior has made him
unavoidable and increased his political influence, which, in turn, has
increased his net worth overall. This has only improved Musk’s standing with
Trump, who both respects great wealth and appears flattered by the notion that
the richest man in the world wants to spend his time shadowing him around
Washington and Mar-a-Lago.
Musk is used to being leveraged, trading on his reputation
or his illiquid assets to keep the flywheel spinning. To his credit, he tends
to make it work. He’s flouted the law when that has been advantageous to his
business interests and taken advantage of a culture of elite impunity. He’s long been unafraid to get
sued or reprimanded by a government agency. But two important things are
different in his current situation. The first is the stakes of his reputational
bet—rather than alienating himself from progressives or the media, Musk is
threatening to meddle with essential government services, such as Social
Security, that millions of Americans rely on. Indeed, Musk floated the idea of
cutting Social Security benefits in his Fox Business interview on Monday.
Whether he’s in charge of cuts or not, as DOGE’s figurehead, Musk risks
infuriating countless people who object to the federal firings. Breaking the
government is orders of magnitude different than buying a niche but influential
microblogging platform.
Read: There are no more red lines
The second difference is the man he’s tied his reputation
to: Trump. Musk’s attention-seeking and fondness for organizational chaos are
usually unmatched, giving him an advantage in most of his dealings. This is not
the case with Trump, whose shamelessness and penchant for discarding close
confidants when they become liabilities are well documented. Musk is rich and
powerful, but he is not the durable, singular political figure that Trump is.
It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where this ends poorly for Musk. The
flywheel could reverse: Musk could become universally reviled, causing the
protests to increase and his net worth to shrink. The richest man in the world
is valuable to Trump, as is the myth of Musk as the modern Edison. But mere
billionaires? They are fungible tokens and easily interchangeable dais members in Trump’s eyes—just ask Mark Zuckerberg.
It would be foolish to suggest with any certainty that Musk is cooked. Historically, he’s managed to wriggle out of trouble. Perhaps the most hopeful outcome for Musk is that Trump has too much of his own presidency tied to Musk to throw him under the bus. It’s too early to say.
Yesterday’s White House stunt had all the hallmarks of Trump corruption, but there was something else, too—an air of desperation. It was a tacit admission that the protests are working and that Musk and Trump are rattled enough by current sentiment that they’re willing to turn the South Lawn into a showroom. Watching Musk clam up on Fox Business or quietly idle next to Trump in front of the White House, it’s even easier than normal to see past Musk’s trademark bullshitting and bluster. These moments make clear that this time, Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself.
