Musk: What did he achieve in Washington?

Elon Musk says it was X Æ A-Xii, his 5-year-old son, who gave him the black eye he sported during last week's farewell Oval Office meeting with President Trump. But that bruise was "an unmistakable metaphor for his tumultuous government service," said Jonathan Allen and Zoë Richards in NBCNews.com. From the start of his 130-day stint as a "special government employee," the Department of Government Efficiency boss waged open war on the federal bureaucracy, firing workers by the thousands and gutting entire agencies—most notably USAID—with the stated goal of slashing $2 trillion from the federal budget. Musk never came close. By DOGE's own dubious figures, it saved a mere $175 billion, and Musk's "haphazard, inhumane, and counterproductive" cuts could end up costing taxpayers $135 billion this year alone, by one analysis. "Trump's favorite weird billionaire" destroyed his own reputation in the process, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. Tesla sales are in free fall and his favorability rating now hovers in the 30s. This isn't just a result of the Nazi salute, or the chain saw, or the "14-ish children," or allegations—denied by Musk—that his rampage through Washington was fueled by a cocktail of ketamine, MDMA, Adderall, and psychedelic mushrooms. It was that the planet's richest person, with the freedom to do anything he wanted, "chose to bring American governance to its knees."

Musk is leaving with understandable bitterness, said Dace Potas in USA Today. He made a "genuine effort" to cut government waste, at great personal cost, only for Republicans to draft a "big, beautiful" spending bill that will add $3.6 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Musk slammed the bill this week as a "disgusting abomination" and hinted he might try to unseat Republicans who backed it in the 2026 midterms. DOGE was doomed from the start, said Mark Antonio Wright in National Review. The "government's financial crisis" stems from decades of overspending on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare—programs that only Congress can cut—not now-terminated funding for "transgender puppet shows in Guatemala." With his "sky-high promises" of balanced budgets, Musk set himself up for failure.

The billionaire didn't fail because "his ambitions were too grand," said Matt Bai in The Washington Post. He failed because "they were so pathetically small." Back in January, even some Trump-hating liberals were quietly hopeful that the "mad genius" of Silicon Valley might deliver the lean, responsive government "of our sci-fi dreams." After all, this is the visionary who revolutionized the electric-car industry and slashed the cost of rocket launches with SpaceX. Yet Musk's "only Big Idea" for revolutionizing government was "to fire as many people as he could, in as humiliating a way as possible."

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Musk did achieve one of his goals: shredding USAID, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. About 80% of its grants have been terminated, and as a result starving people in South Sudan are going without food aid and Kenyan HIV patients without antiretroviral meds. According to a Boston University study, Musk's cuts to USAID have "already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children," and that figure will only rise. Maybe Tesla's share price will also rise with Musk back at the helm. And maybe his rockets will one day carry humanity to Mars. But Musk's legacy in Washington is one of "disease, starvation, and death," and it "should shape how he's seen for the rest of his public life."