Musk and Washington

For most of his career, Musk's politics were hard to pin to a party. He backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and briefly championed long-shot candidates like Andrew Yang and Kanye West along the way. The relationship with Biden's Washington curdled in 2021, when Musk complained publicly that Tesla had been left out of a White House electric-vehicle event that featured General Motors and Ford; General Motors' CEO later said he never forgave the snub.

By 2022, Musk's donations had swung almost entirely toward Republicans, and by 2023 he was funding Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign to the tune of $10 million. Within minutes of Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, Musk publicly endorsed him, and spent heavily to help elect him that November.

The payoff came fast. After Trump's January 2025 inauguration, Musk took a role as senior advisor to the president and became the de facto head of a new initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency -- DOGE -- tasked with cutting federal spending and headcount. DOGE staff got administrative access to procurement and personnel systems across multiple agencies, cancelled contracts, and pushed large-scale layoffs; the cuts to USAID in particular drew sustained public criticism. DOGE later reported roughly $215 billion in savings, though outside estimates of the real figure varied widely. Musk stepped back from the role by mid-2025, and the department was wound down entirely within the following year, its remaining functions folded into the Office of Personnel Management. His departure was followed by a public falling-out with Trump, playing out, fittingly, on the platform Musk owned.

The politics carried a cost at Tesla. In early 2025, the company's European sales and stock price both slid, and analysts and reporters tied the drop directly to Musk's political activity and his associations with the far right. None of it slowed his personal fortune: he became the world's richest person in 2025 and, in June 2026, the first person to reach a trillion dollars in net worth, with Forbes pricing him at roughly $917 billion that July. A Tesla shareholder vote in November 2025 approved a new pay package worth up to $1 trillion over ten years if he hits a string of milestones -- including pushing Tesla's market capitalization to $8.5 trillion -- after Delaware courts had thrown out an earlier $56 billion package the year before.

It is, in miniature, the whole story this series has been telling: extraordinary reach, real consequences for the people around him, and a wake of controversy that never quite catches up to the wealth and momentum generating it. Whatever comes next for Musk, it will not be boring -- and it will not, on the evidence of the last three decades, be simple to sum up as either triumph or cautionary tale. It is both, running at the same time, the way it always has been.