For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
In January, Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist, spoke on his podcast with Chris Hayes, the MSNBC anchor, about attention, a topic on which Hayes had just written a book. Klein called Donald Trump a “master” at wielding and using attention, including the negative kind, to his political benefit, and noted that he had a “disciple” in Elon Musk, who was then on the cusp of becoming Trump’s hatchet man in government. Together, the pair were the most “attentionally rich” people on earth, Klein said, and for Musk these riches might have become more important than his finances—a big claim, given that Musk is the world’s richest person. Musk had used some of that money, in 2022, to acquire Twitter (now called X) at what many analysts mocked as a ripoff price, only to leverage the platform’s ability to corral attention into immense political power. At the time of Hayes and Klein’s conversation, he was unavoidable. A few days later, Trump was inaugurated, and Musk quickly stole the President’s thunder, performing what appeared to be a Nazi salute at a rally. He said that it wasn’t; his many critics, not to mention gleeful white supremacists, said that it was. The trollish ambiguity may have been the point. Either way, people talked about it—a lot.
Things now seem very different. Last week, an analysis by Politico found that Trump had stopped mentioning Musk in his posts on Truth Social, and that Musk had all but disappeared from Presidential fund-raising blasts, White House media materials, and Republican lawmakers’ newsletters, too. The news cycle has mostly moved on from Musk’s chaotic DOGE work to other stories, such as tariffs and immigration. He has even been less ubiquitous in his online fief: the Times found that Musk has been posting on X much less often than in the early days of the Administration, when he never seemed to stop, and the Washington Post’s recent assessment of his feed found that he is posting much less about politics. Last week, he said that he plans to curb his spending on political campaigns. (“I don’t currently see a reason,” he said.) Politico wrote that he has “started to fade away”; the Times noted that he is moving into “the background of American politics.” The Atlantic dedicated a story to his “decline and fall.” On Wednesday night, Musk suggested in a post on X that he’s leaving government altogether.
The gulf between January and now might not be quite as wide as all that. For starters, Musk is hardly out of view. We know of his claim that he will dial back his political spending because he said as much in an interview with Bloomberg—one of several that he has given to mainstream outlets recently—and he remains a character in political stories about everything from a federal probe of a media-watchdog group to Republicans’ “big, beautiful” megabill, which he just criticized in a CBS interview. Although he may be posting less frequently on X, he is still very active there by normal standards; recently, he temporarily changed his display name to “Kekius Maximus” (again) and his photo to one that depicted him as an emperor. I noticed this when one of his posts popped up on my time line, which they still have an annoying habit of doing: a screenshot of the “Decline and Fall” headline, captioned with a teary emoji.
And yet Musk is now much less of a political attention magnet. What changed? And, if he seemed to be converting even negative attention into “energy,” as Klein put it in January, does his relative lack of visibility now really mean that he’s powering down?
Initially, I was among the many commentators who predicted that sharing center stage with Trump, a generationally talented attention hog, would not end well for Musk; that Trump would quickly come to resent being upstaged and would summarily exile him, perhaps after the inevitable Time magazine cover depicting Musk as the “real” President. That cover, however, came and went without a big blowup; Musk is now on the outs, but his exit missive on Wednesday was thankful, and Trump supposedly still has affection for him. Officials have said that Musk was always scheduled to leave after a hundred and thirty days—a milestone that falls today—under rules relating to his status as a special government employee.
Still, I’d argue that Musk does look like the latest victim of a common Trump-era dynamic: the impossibility of sharing the President’s spotlight for any sustained length of time, and Trump’s apparent singularity when it comes to getting people’s attention, holding it, and mostly coming out on top. On Klein’s podcast, Hayes name-checked Republican politicians, including Mark Robinson and Kari Lake, who ran on Trump’s brand of outrage politics and lost winnable races, without their failure splashing back on Trump, at least in any durable sense. For now, Musk looks more like those figures than like Trump. Unlike Robinson and Lake, he has not run for office himself, but he was commonly seen as the central figure in a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin earlier this year. He characterized the vote as critical for “the future of America and the future of the world,” after taking the stage at a rally in a cheesehead hat; the candidate he backed lost handily, in what the Guardian recently called Musk’s “political Waterloo.”
Indeed, whereas Trump has—on the whole, if not always—seemed to benefit from understanding that any attention is essentially worth having, all the negative attention Musk has attracted in recent months, not least that related to the DOGE cuts, looks really to have harmed the tech mogul. Polls have shown that Musk is unpopular. Democrats have turned him into a campaign punching bag and seem set to keep punching, whatever his future role; many Republicans, in turn, have distanced themselves from him. (“People hate him,” a party operative told Politico. “He’d go to Wisconsin thinking he can buy people’s votes, wear the cheese hat, act like a 9-year-old. . . . It doesn’t work. It’s offensive to people.”) Hayes told Klein that Musk’s purchase of X had turned out to be “an enormous, almost Archimedean, lever on the electorate.” If that was true, the lever may have cranked back against him.
Crucially, Musk’s unpopularity—or, at least, his status as a polarizing emblem—appears to have hit him in the pocket; protests, sometimes violent, targeting Tesla, his car company, likely contributed to drops in the stock price, and results for the first quarter showed a huge slump in profits. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla’s board had told Musk that he needed to devote more of his time to the company, and had even considered replacing him as C.E.O. Musk denied this, but his focus does now seem to be back on his businesses: the Post’s analysis of his activity on X found that he is increasingly writing about “space travel, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence”; he told the paper this week, in an interview ahead of a SpaceX rocket test, “I’m physically here. This is the focus.” Financial riches, perhaps, won out in the battle with other types of riches, as they have a habit of doing.
Musk could still be manipulating people’s attention, including by appearing to recede from the political scene—Katie Drummond, of Wiredsuggested recently that his apparent return to Tesla might mostly be about “optics” and “narrative”; the company is in trouble and “needed a way to change that story.” Last month, Musk had suggested he might continue to devote one or two days per week to government affairs, which would still be “a lot of Elon Musk,” Drummond observed. His post on Wednesday sounded like a firmer departure than that. But his influence will surely live on either way, through the network of allies he has embedded in the government, as I observed recently in this column, or, perhaps, by whispering in Trump’s ear. (Musk may have pledged to dial back his political spending, but, as the Times noted, he has previously funded campaigns in more opaque ways and could conceivably return to that method.) And, though Musk’s antics put DOGE at the center of the national conversation for a time, much of its actual work was conducted in secret, despite claims of transparency. Its work is continuing apace—with an altogether more boring cast of characters and technical-sounding set of priorities, but with no less significance. In this political era, applying scrutiny to attention hogs sometimes feels counterproductive, because they can turn it to their advantage; scrutiny, after all, is a form of attention. But outright secrecy, with no attention hog, is much worse.
All that notwithstanding, Musk has never been in full control of the attention lever. He hasn’t even seemed to control the attention of one very important individual: himself. He certainly gives the impression that he’s struggled to divide it efficiently between reshaping the federal government and running his companies. (This week, in an interview with Ars Technicahe accused the media of exaggerating the extent to which he neglected his businesses, but acknowledged, “I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics.”) Even near the height of Musk’s political influence, he would channel attention to unclear ends—amplifying, for example, far-right narratives about grooming gangs in the U.K. This appeared to be downstream of fringe X accounts grabbing his attention; a former Twitter executive suggested to the Financial Times that Musk was the first tech leader to have been radicalized by his own product. This dynamic has continued throughout Musk’s tenure at DOGE. Recently, the Times attempted to reconstruct Musk’s X feed by following the same accounts that he does: an imperfect exercise, but one that seemed to show that his followers have “the power to seize” his attention and potentially “redirect his policy goals.”
The same analysis found that Musk mostly follows accounts that agree with him, creating “a flattering alternate reality filled with boundless praise—for him, for Tesla, for X, for his politics.” That put me in mind of Klein and Hayes’s debate as to whether Musk cares about the negative attention he gets; Hayes questioned how much criticism actually reaches Musk, but suggested that, when it cuts through, it probably does bother him. Events since then seem to have borne that out. During his interview with BloombergMusk looked visibly subdued: After affirming that he took the vandalism against Tesla personally, he was asked whether it made him regret his political work. He took a long pause and called the vandalism “evil.” The same day, he spoke with CNBC and faced a similar question. “What I’ve learned is that legacy-media propaganda is very effective at making you believe things that aren’t true,” he said. Asked for an example, he said that he’d been smeared as a Nazi “because of some random hand gesture at a rally.” All he’d been doing, he insisted, was trying to tell people that his heart went out to them, and talking about space travel. ♦
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