Elon Musk’s brief tour through the Trump Administration synthesizes both the reactionary character of Trump’s project, its contradictions and limits. The tech tycoon, who joined Trump’s campaign in 2024 and then his government, ended up ejected in the middle of a public meeting with the president.

By Vince Gaynor

After years of political ambiguity, Elon Musk made a decisive turn by aligning his companies and his public image with Trump’s campaign. On his X profile (former Twitter), he defended the Republican’s candidate with an “anti-woke”, nationalist and technocratic approach and as a more openly extreme right-wing expression than Trump himself.

In some of his first political actions, Musk tested the limits of the admissible, e.g. his notorious Nazi salute. His participation in an electoral event of the far-right Alternative for Germany also probed those limits. The aim of these provocations was to measure the extent of the shift to the right of the bourgeois political spectrum in order to calculate the magnitude of the austerity that would be possible to apply against the working masses.

It is beginning to become clear that Musk overestimated these possibilities when he said that he was going to cut a third of the federal budget. He also seems to have bet on achieving specific policies in his favor: environmental and labor deregulation for Tesla, multimillion-dollar contracts for SpaceX, regulatory advantages for X and his other technology companies, such as Neuralink and xAI. In return, he offered Trump his political and media capital, his technological resources and a platform from which to amplify the reactionary agenda, in addition to the millions of dollars he contributed to the campaign.

After the electoral victory, he joined as an informal adviser, no official position, but direct access and broad powers to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created to suit him. In fact, the acronym spells out the name of the digital currency that Musk supported in 2020, in another of his millionaire scams.

The presidential advisory commission had the goal of restructuring the federal government, eliminating regulations and reducing expenditures to increase government efficiency. From his position, Musk proposed the ambitious goal of cutting at least $2 trillion from federal spending, a third of it, consolidating agencies and eliminating programs considered unnecessary.

The state agency USAID that handled the bulk of the international aid granted by the country, including food and medicines to the poorest regions of the world, was closed. The estimated savings is $30 billion. He canceled contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion, cutting another $15 billion. He cut another $10 billion by laying off tens of thousands of state workers.

DOGE’s cruel measures intensified the suffering of the most vulnerable while not representing any significant budget cuts, which was later perceived as a failure of Musk.

Meanwhile, Musk expressed criticism of the president’s tariff policy, reflecting the contradictions and clashes of interests between the bourgeois sectors that support the government. Instead of measures that benefit Musk’s companies, Trump was implementing several that damaged him.

The inevitable shock came when Trump presented his Budget law, his “Big and Beautiful Law” that, contrary to the supposed austerity policy, significantly increases spending and the deficit.

Musk criticized the bill publicly, calling it a “disgusting abomination” due to its superfluous expenses. Trump reacted with fury, accused him of treason and displaced him from DOGE’s leadership. Musk stated that Trump would not have won the election without his support. Trump threatened to cancel state contracts with Tesla and Musk threatened to cancel SpaceX’s contracts with the state. In addition to being childish, the tycoon crossing exposes the real bargains behind which policies are defined that plunge millions into poverty.

In short, the Musk-Trump experiment ended in a resounding failure. Just as the beginnings of this “bromance” revealed the reactionary and oligarchic character of the Trump project, the outcome shows its contradictions and limits.

The main imperialist power in the world has been retreating for decades in the face of regional competitors and China at the global level. US bourgeoisie has accepted that the previous order no longer serves it, but it does not find a clear orientation yet. They have given Trump leeway to test his proposal but at every step interests clash . And deep down, the calculations of how much the exploitation of the working masses can increase do not seem to align at all with the confidence with which Trump started his second term.