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Musk announced the news on X, where he declared his controversial government cost-cutting measures a victory.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced that he is leaving the administration of United States President Donald Trump, where he led a months-long project to cut costs in the federal government.
“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” he wrote on the social media platform X on Wednesday evening.
“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” Musk said, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency, which he was a top figure in.
An unnamed White House official confirmed the news with the Associated Press.
Musk joined the Trump Administration in January with the promise of slashing at least $1 trillion from the US federal budget, although the DOGE website shows it has only achieved about $175bn in savings, or $1,088.96 per US taxpayer.
Musk’s departure coincides with the 130-day limit for “special government employees,” although the White House said DOGE efforts to cut federal spending and restructure the government would continue.
The relationship between the billionaire and the US president, however, appears to have cooled since last year, when Musk poured nearly $300 million into Trump’s presidential run.
Over the weekend, Musk publicly expressed concerns about Trump’s flagship “big, beautiful bill”– a 1,000-page piece of legislation that extends the president’s 2017 tax cuts while adding work requirements for food assistance and Medicaid.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told the news programme CBS Sunday Morning.
The bill also allocates spending for some of Trump’s signature projects, like building a wall between the US and Mexico and raising funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The “big, beautiful bill” passed in the House of Representatives last week and will next be discussed by the Senate.
If passed in its current format, the bill would cancel out DOGE’s work because it is expected to raise the US deficit by $3.9tril by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“I think a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion,” Musk told CBS.
When asked about Musk’s concerns, Trump told reporters that work on the bill was still underway.
“We will be negotiating that bill, and I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it,” Trump said. “That’s the way they go.”
Trump has avoided criticizing Musk directly, but US media has reported clashes between the billionaire and members of the Trump Cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
US news outlet Politico reported that Musk’s s exit was already under discussion as early as April, citing unnamed US officials, after he clashed with top White House officials and staff.
Some of Musk’s DOGE cuts have also turned off US voters, including in crucial swing states. Earlier this year, the billionaire failed to secure a win for a conservative candidate in a race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court despite spending $20 million.
An April opinion poll from the Washington Post and ABC News also showed Musk’s approval rating was just 35 per cent for his work with the Trump Administration.
Following an uptick in public scrutiny, Musk said earlier this month that he would scale back his political spending and re-focus his attention on companies like Tesla, which just suffered its worst quarter since 2022.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms. I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out,” he tweeted over the weekend. “As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made. The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
