By Qamar Bashir
Elon Musk is widely hailed as one of the most intelligent, inventive, and enterprising individuals of our era. From humble beginnings, he created Tesla—now a global symbol of prestige, environmental innovation, and American industrial might. His Cybertrucks, sedans, and Model Xs populate highways from California to China, and his vision goes far beyond Earth. With SpaceX, he dreams of colonizing Mars; with Starlink, he aims to bring satellite-based internet to every corner of the world, especially those untouched by traditional connectivity.
Musk is no ordinary entrepreneur. He is the embodiment of the private sector’s limitless ambition—sharp, calculative, and daring. It was with this same foresight that Musk evaluated the 2024 U.S. presidential race. Using the full weight of his data-driven infrastructure, artificial intelligence labs, and possibly even his experimental quantum computing capabilities, Musk and his team likely ran models on how much a Trump victory would benefit his sprawling empire.
Musk became the single largest individual contributor to Donald Trump’s campaign, funneling nearly $288 million into the 2024 re-election effort. This was not charity. This was calculated investment. He expected returns—massive ones.
Had his projections materialized, Musk stood to gain significantly. He was banking on Trump to offer substantial tax breaks for electric vehicle producers like Tesla, open government coffers to fund the Mars colonization effort via SpaceX, expand satellite contracts under Starlink, and ease federal regulations that often choked innovation. This was to be the ultimate private-public handshake—a deal between power and capital, innovation and governance.
Trump, a seasoned political tactician and unpredictable force, had other plans. While initially wooing Musk and appointing him to head the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (ironically abbreviated as DOGE), Trump positioned Musk at the forefront of sweeping bureaucratic reforms.
Musk, known for disrupting industries, found himself trying to “disrupt” the federal government—a machine more massive, convoluted, and interlocked than any private sector conglomerate. Alongside him were Anonymous as the department’s lead strategist and Vivek Ramaswamy as deputy, neither of whom had any substantial experience managing such a massive administrative ecosystem. What ensued was chaos.
Under Musk’s brief stewardship of DOGE, thousands of federal employees were laid off in an aggressive downsizing campaign. Entire departments, like USIS (U.S. International Services), were defunded and rendered obsolete. The social security net—lifelines for the elderly, veterans, disabled citizens, and the working poor—faced brutal austerity. Education institutions were mocked and dismissed for “wasting money on trivial research,” as per internal memos. Predictably, the blowback was immense.
But here’s the twist—while the political consequences of these decisions damaged the Trump administration’s public image, Musk bore the brunt of the reputational carnage. Protesters boycotted Tesla vehicles. Starlink subscriptions declined. SpaceX lost pending government partnerships. In total, Tesla lost nearly $150 billion in market capitalization, and Musk’s personal wealth reportedly dropped by over $8 billion in a matter of weeks.
The public began seeing Musk not as a visionary, but as an enabler of political cruelty—one who traded compassion and ethics for contracts and concessions. His marriage of convenience with Trump was rapidly deteriorating into a nightmare.
And then came the final blow. Trump, in an unexpected move that blindsided Musk’s strategy teams, eliminated all federal tax credits for electric vehicles, a key policy instituted during the Biden administration that had helped Tesla maintain its competitive edge. The “Big Beautiful Bill,” as Trump called it, redirected funds toward fossil-fuel-based industries, internal combustion engine subsidies, and defense manufacturing.
All of Musk’s calculations unraveled. No tax relief. No contract expansions. No Mars funding. No regulatory easing. In fact, the very act of placing Musk at the head of DOGE seemed, in hindsight, to be a clever political decoy. Trump utilized Musk’s corporate stature to execute controversial decisions, allowing the tech mogul to soak up the public’s anger, while Trump distanced himself as the politician who didn’t cave to corporate interests.
Musk, in turn, was left alienated—abandoned both by political leadership and the public. His products suffered, his reputation suffered, and most painfully, he received none of the political rewards he had bet nearly $300 million on. The entire affair became a textbook case of conflict of interest gone wrong.
In a recent interview, Musk admitted that meddling in politics was “a bitter lesson.” He vowed to withdraw from political maneuvering and focus instead on what he does best—innovation.
The lesson? Never underestimate a politician—especially not one like Trump, who has made unpredictability his strongest political asset. He is known to act with unilateral decisions, often impulsive and strategically obscure. Musk, for all his intelligence and resources, failed to predict the very human, very emotional, and highly unpredictable nature of political power.
As someone who served in government and diplomacy, I fully understand the scale and complexity of the federal machinery. It is interconnected, fiercely protected by legacy systems, and incredibly hard to reform. What Musk attempted was akin to striking a mountain with a chisel. But instead of breaking the mountain, he broke his own tool.
Moreover, Musk’s central role in auditing departments that were, ironically, his clients—such as those dealing with tech contracts, infrastructure, and innovation—amounted to a glaring ethical lapse. This wasn’t just bad optics; it was a profound conflict of interest, and the backlash was swift and brutal.
Ultimately, Trump gained. He emerged as the anti-corporate crusader who didn’t bend to billionaire pressures. Musk lost—not only money and market share but trust. Trust is the most expensive currency in politics and business, and once lost, it’s almost impossible to buy back.
This saga of two titans—one of politics, the other of technology—reminds us that when the public and private sectors collide without clear boundaries and ethical foresight, the resulting wreckage can be colossal. Musk may be a brilliant inventor, but politics proved to be a different beast altogether. Let this be a lasting lesson to all powerful entrepreneurs: play your part, not theirs.
By Qamar Bashir
Press Secretary to the President (Rtd)
Former Press Minister at the Embassy of Pakistan to France
Former MD, SRBC
Macomb, Michigan, USA
