Had Donald Trump lost the 2024 election, several Republicans close to him, GOP lawmakers, and conservative megadonors would have been quick to blame his top billionaire surrogate: Elon Musk.
In fact, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, a number of these sources — including one senior Trump campaign official — said they were each willing to go on the record with Rolling Stone about how furious they were at Musk and his America PAC operation for comically botching the Trump ground game in the battleground states, thus blowing the presidential race for Trump. The catch was: These sources were only willing to vent, with their names attached, if Trump actually lost. And some of these Republicans were indeed anxious that he would.
“What a loser,” said a source close to Trump, who agreed to allow their quote to be used anonymously for this story, to show what they would have publicly said of Musk, had Vice President Kamala Harris won the election. “Donald Trump was right to call Elon a ‘bullshit artist’ … A tenth-grader could have run a better [operation] in the swing states.”
The Trump campaign official went as far as to concede to Rolling Stone that “we never should have outsourced” so much of the ground-game operations to that “very strange man.”
Yet the embattled former president nevertheless came out on top — and now Musk is more firmly embedded within the MAGA and GOP elite than ever, to the frustration of some of the president-elect’s longtime advisers. They are, at least for the time being, stuck with him, due to a victory that many in the MAGA upper crust see not as the result of Musk’s efforts, but in spite of them.
Musk spent at least $119 million on his pro-Trump Super PAC — and now he’s set to help lead Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with dismantling government bureaucracy, waste, and regulations, as well as restructuring federal agencies. Musk — who runs Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly known as Twitter — is a major government contractor, and federal agencies are investigating some of his companies.
At this moment, he is a protected man in Trumpworld, in the good graces of key members of the Trump family, Tucker Carlson, and other MAGAville luminaries, and the president-elect — even though a few short months ago, Trump was privately trashing Musk as “boring” and awkward.
It is also true, as multiple news outlets have reported lately, that a number of top aides and confidants in Trump’s orbit have grown visibly annoyed at what they view as Musk’s overstepping and ham-fisted meddling as the second Trump administration takes shape.
“Please leave us alone,” a Trump adviser tells Rolling Stone, characterizing the mood toward Musk among some of those who are frustrated. “There is one president at a time.”
There are numerous sources close to Trump — big donors, incoming administration officials, lawyers, even some who like Musk — predicting that the Trump-Musk bond is not built to last. This is largely based on Trump’s tendency to loathe sharing the national spotlight, as well as the inevitable friction you get when two titanically large egos — both of whom came into this 2024 alliance with wealth, fame, and political muscle — become so intertwined.
There are some Republican figures who predict Musk might just get bored and bail.
According to notes taken by a source who was on a Monday video conference call, Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — now at consulting firm Actum LLC — told clients of the firm that when it comes to restructuring and overhauling the federal government, “Elon’s going to find out going to Mars is easier.”
Per the notes, Mulvaney added: “I highly doubt Elon will stick around to actually get it done.”
Since Trump defeated Harris, Musk has been a near-constant presence in Mar-a-Lago as the president-elect plans his return to the White House. Musk is not only advising Trump on Cabinet appointments, but also sitting in on calls with world leaders. Given his lack of an official role on the transition team, tensions have flared with others looking to guide the Trump’s decisions, including Boris Epshteyn, an adviser who supported the provocative nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general despite a House Ethics Committee probe and previous Justice Department investigation into his alleged sex crimes. (Gaetz resigned from Congress before the Ethics Committee could release its findings.)
Epshteyn and Musk reportedly clashed during a Mar-a-Lago dinner in front of other guests last week, with Epshteyn unhappy with the billionaire for questioning his recommended Cabinet picks and Musk accusing him of leaking details of the ongoing transition to reporters.
During the election, Musk’s Super PAC raised tens of millions in an effort to return the twice-impeached former president to the White House. In return, the president-elect and his senior staff entrusted Musk’s America PAC with much of the Trump operation’s GOTV and door-knocking efforts in must-win states, particularly Pennsylvania.
America PAC also offered cash incentives in exchange for referring swing-state voters who signed a petition in support of the First and Second Amendments, including a $1 million daily grand prize for eligible signatories. That lottery triggered multiple lawsuits because Musk had said that winners would be chosen “randomly,” but, as one of his lawyers admitted in a Philadelphia court, they were actually selected according to specific criteria. (Almost all were registered Republicans or right-leaning voters.)
In the last weeks of the campaign, several Republicans close to Trump warned him directly that Musk and America PAC, run in part by veterans of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failed 2024 GOP primary run, were blowing it. The last stretch of the campaign saw their worst fears realized as reports trickled in of canvassing efforts marred by tech problems, vendor-swapping, and the group’s inability to manage its consultants’ canvassing operation.
“By the end of this election, it felt like there was a new news story every day coming out showing how much the Elon and DeSantis-world crew were fucking things up on the ground,” says one GOP megadonor who’s known Trump for years.
Trump went on to run the table anyway, picking up every swing state on his way to winning the Electoral College. He also won the popular vote, which Republicans hadn’t done since 2004.
At Mar-a-Lago, Musk has repeatedly bragged about America PAC’s role in securing those results and taken “lots of credit for the president’s victory,” according to a member of Trump’s inner circle who spoke to NBC News, adding that Musk was “behaving as if he’s a co-president.”
The world’s richest man has vowed to keep America PAC “grinding” to increase Republican voter registration through 2026, hinting that he plans to retain a key role in the GOP machine, and said the Super PAC would also back favored candidates in primaries.
Musk’s support for Trump in 2024 has always appeared opportunistic. Two years ago, he was arguing that the one-term president was “too old” to hold the office again and should “sail into the sunset,” prompting Trump to insult him and “his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless.”
Yet Musk’s rightward drift — propelled in part by an estrangement from his transgender daughter and a disgust with leftist ideology he describes as “the woke mind virus” — eventually brought him into close alignment with Trump. Musk endorsed him in July when he seemed fated to win, just after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. The two would appear together at the same venue in October.
By then, Musk was deeply immersed in MAGA talking points and paranoia, arguing that electing Trump was an existential necessity and saying that he would be “fucked” in the event of a Harris presidency. He took lots of time away from his various companies in order to stump for Trump and host town-hall events around Pennsylvania.
Now, Trump finds himself practically joined at the hip to the world’s richest man, from the links at Trump International Golf Club to ringside seats at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He continues to praise Musk, even while joking that he “can’t get him out of here.”
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