Tesla just shared a lower-than-expected earnings report and is moving towards losing money if the trend line continues. At the same time, Tesla CEO and U.S. government hotshot Elon Musk has announced that he’s moving away from DOGE.
In the Tesla earnings call, Musk claimed that he would limit his DOGE involvement to one or two days per week. Specifically, he said: “Starting next month, I’ll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla, now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is done,” as reported by The Verge.
However, as someone who’s reported on Musk for a lonnnng time, I would take anything he says with a grain of salt. Musk does what he wants, and he could just be saying this to hopefully lessen the impact his political allegiance has on the Tesla brand name.
Notably, further in the call, he said, “I’ll have to continue doing it for the remainder of the president’s term, just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back, which it will do if it has the chance. So I think 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, and as long as it is useful.”
A Washington Post report from earlier in April also claims that Musk’s influence in the White House is “waning,” so perhaps this is just a more graceful way to step out of the political realm before he’s ousted, as many Trump advisors are. Other reports indicate Musk is not well-liked among top Trump advisors.
For many, Musk’s stepdown is too little, too late, and after months of Tesla protests and weak sales, it might be hard to grow the brand now that so many people are upset with the CEO and his alignment with the current president.
There’s also DOGE itself, which critics at The New York Times have pointed out has likely done more harm than good, and lately it has been altering or erasing savings that it thought it earned by cutting government spending.
Finally, the main question is what will Elon do when he goes back to Tesla? I guess he can keep tweeting twice per year that full self-driving is almost here, but that grift is getting old. I think he’s going to turn his attention to the robotic taxi service or the humanoid robots, but I’m not sure if those niche projects will be enough to right Tesla’s failing brand identity. The company was an extremely fast-growing automaker for years, but now that it’s basically cut itself off from people with left-leaning ideologies (a core market for Tesla’s electric vehicles), it will be interesting to see how it continues to navigate that situation.
Source: Electrek, The Verge, Washington Post, New York Times
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