Elon Musk, who was the biggest presidential campaign donor in 2024, said on Tuesday that he plans to scale back his political spending.
"I'm going to do a lot less in the future," he said in a video interview with Bloomberg News at the Qatar Economic Forum. "I think I've done enough."
When asked if paring back his political financing was driven by any blowback he's weathered in the Trump administration, Musk said: "If I see a reason to do political spending in the future. I will do it. But I don't currently see a reason."
Musk, the world's richest person, funneled nearly $300 million into the campaign of President Trump, becoming a top political donor and a symbolically potent ally of the president.
Trump elevated Musk as a key figure in the White House, an arrangement that experts said posed conflicts of interest, since Musk's companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, receive billions of dollars in public subsidies, not to mention the numerous investigations launched against his business empire by government regulators.
Musk's unusually high-profile adviser role was crystallized during an early Cabinet meeting where Musk dominated the discussion and Trump heaped praise on the billionaire, as department secretaries looked on cautiously.
Musk has also appeared alongside the president in the Oval Office to tout his work with the U.S. DOGE Service, an initiative focused on trimming federal government spending. The Musk-led push has aided the lay off of thousands of government employees and helped dismantle entire agencies. Shunning norms and standard operating procedures, DOGE's work has triggered at least a dozen lawsuits.
Then there is the output of DOGE's work. The effort has drawn intense scrutiny from researchers and good-government groups, who have questioned whether DOGE has indeed slashed "waste, fraud, abuse." The unit's public accounting of savings is routinely riddled with exaggerations, double-counting and other inconsistencies.
Public polling has found that Musk's slash-and-burn DOGE work has not played well with voters, who also now disapprove of Musk more than Trump.
Last month, Musk's celebrity and fortune did not help Republicans win a Wisconsin Supreme Court election, where Musk poured in millions and tried to harness his image as a tech executive disrupter to bolster a Republican for the top judicial seat in the state. Yet it backfired. Analysts say Musk's involvement became a political liability, as Democrats used the billionaire as a personified villain to mobilize voters to the polls against Musk's preferred candidate, who lost by a decisive 10 percentage points.
On a recent earnings call for Tesla, whose sales and profits have cratered in the first three months of the year, Musk said he was turning his full-tilt White House role into something of a part-time gig to refocus his energy on the electric vehicle company amid investor pressure.
Musk's commitment to Tesla – the largest source of his personal fortune – came as the Wall Street Journal reported that the company's board of directors had begun the process of potentially replacing Musk as chief executive.
It may be yet another sign of Musk's slow fade out from Washington. But he hasn't completely disappeared. For instance, Musk was among a group of business executives who accompanied the president to Saudi Arabia recently during a Middle East trip.
And on Tuesday, Musk said he will be attending a dinner this week with Trump, proof that the tech tycoon is still in the president's inner circle, even if his time in the political spotlight appears to be waning.
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