Elon Musk has left the building. On Wednesday night the tech billionaire announced the end of his time in government, thanking Donald Trump for the chance to serve and pledging that the DOGE “mission will only strengthen over time”. On one level, Musk’s departure is no surprise. As a “special government employee”, he was limited to 130 days of service this calendar year, so he was due to exit soon. However, his increasing criticisms of elements of the Republican agenda — such as the disappointment he expressed this week with the One Big Beautiful Bill — may indicate a deeper tension between Musk’s tech-disruptor sympathies and the MAGA populist coalition.

It’s been a wild political year for the Tesla boss. Right after the assassination attempt on Trump last July, Musk endorsed the former president then became one of his biggest donors and most prominent surrogates. In the opening months of the second Trump administration he achieved unparalleled influence as the captain of DOGE, storming one federal agency after the next while absorbing attacks directed at the President.

Yet, as it has done for so many dreamers, the Beltway soon disillusioned the world’s richest man. Musk’s “move fast and break things” ethos ran into the realities of Washington, where death by a thousand cuts is the fate that awaits most ambitious efforts. A true leviathan, the federal apparatus is infinitely more complicated than Twitter, and Washington is characterised by a culture of deal-making, bureaucratic fiefdoms, and sheer administrative intransigence.

Musk hoped to use DOGE to cut trillions of federal spending, but the project looks likely to fall far short of this goal. The current DOGE tracker lists only $175 billion in savings, and even that number is contested. As a budget-cutting exercise, it was perhaps always doomed to some level of disappointment. Far and away the biggest drivers of federal spending are auto-piloted entitlement programmes such as Social Security, not personnel costs. The billions in potential savings enabled by DOGE can easily be swamped by legislative initiatives which cut taxes and continue those spending trajectories. The Congressional Budget Office estimates, for instance, that the version of the One Big Beautiful Bill which passed the House last week would add trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Musk’s alliance with Trump is to some extent one of convenience. In many respects, Musk remains an economic libertarian, which is at odds with the more interventionist tilt of much American populism. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements served as an inflection point in Musk’s relationship with the administration. Unilaterally raising tariff rates as part of high-stakes power politics is at the core of Trump’s populist presidentialism — and anathema to libertarian economics.

The escalation of the President’s war with American higher education could be another point of tension between Musk and the White House. The Tesla CEO has long championed making it easier for American businesses to recruit credentialed talent from around the globe. The administration’s pause on student visas and threats to restrict them more broadly would make that global recruitment much harder.

So far, Musk’s departure has been relatively amicable. Stephen Miller and other top aides heaped praise on the billionaire, and Musk remains publicly cordial with the President. Given his continued dislike of Left-wing identity politics, he seems unlikely to defect to the progressive coalition. As a major federal contractor, Musk almost certainly wants to stay on Trump’s good side. He maintains influence in a GOP which has been reconstructed in the Commander-in-Chief’s image, while his control of X gives him critical leverage over the American Right’s information ecosystem.

For all their ideological differences, Musk and Trump have many of the same foes. DOGE was a major front in the President’s war on the administrative state. And the realisation of certain populist goals depends upon harnessing the dynamic potential of technology. AI could, for instance, help boost manufacturing output. The American Right cannot thus afford a complete schism between tech and populism. Trump might instinctively know this. Championing space exploration has been one of the President’s marquee efforts, and Musk’s real passion isn’t cutting government — it’s going to the stars.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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