On Tuesday night, Elon Musk became the face of a humiliating political defeat in Wisconsin. He has bothered members of the cabinet and alienated several advisors close to President Donald Trump. Republican legislators face angry questions by their voters about the influence of Musk when they return to their districts.
It will be a relief for many in Trump’s orbit when Musk completes his 130 -day service as a special government employee, which according to the federal law must end at the end of May or early June.
But the president has no intention of cutting ties with the richest man in the world, not even after Musk leaves the government, according to two people with knowledge of the president’s way of thinking.
Musk has become, for better or worse, an essential component of both Trump’s political operation and the broader apparatus of the Republican party. He is the party’s money man: he has allocated US $ 100 million to Trump external groups, in addition to the almost US $ 300 million he spent in the 2024 elections. And he controls the most important media channel of the policy of the Republican Party – the X website, formerly known as Twitter -, which makes Republicans terrify them to fall badly.
In a conference behind JP Morgan’s closed door held last week in Montana, the investor Michael Kives asked Musk how long he believed would last his “joke” with Trump, according to a person present in the room. Musk, speaking through Zoom before a group that included his rivals, such as Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman, already allies, such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, said he would end most of his work in “three or four months.”
Trump is genuinely well Musk, according to people who have observed their private interactions and talked about their relationship with the president. Trump has also foreshadowed Musk’s march in the last two weeks, saying publicly that he hopes that Musk leaves the government “at some point” to return to his companies, and by saying privately to the officials of the Cabinet, on March 24, who had little time to do things given the situation of Musk.
But Trump continues to see many more advantages than inconveniences in Musk. The billionaire has become a shield for a president who avoids assuming to blame at any cost.
The Wisconsin judicial contest provided a case study of the risks and rewards of Musk’s involvement in politics. He contributed more money than Republicans could have imagined. He spent, together with an external group that he supported, at least US $ 25 million, a record for a contest to the Supreme Court of a State. But its millions have conditions: accepting Musk’s help is also accepting his polarizing personality, his quixotic ideas about political strategy and his thirst for attention.
Musk threw himself into the Wisconsin contest in the most exaggerated imaginable way, flying to Green Bay for a rally on Sunday, precisely when candidates usually make a carefully choreographer allegation. His chosen candidate, the conservative judge Brad Schimel, did not even attend the act of Musk, in which the billionaire wore a cheese head and delivered checks of one million dollars to two Wisconsin inhabitants who signed a request opposing the “partisan judges.”
Musk’s personal participation in the contest was a loud failure; In fact, he seemed to become a powerful machine to attract voters to the bases of the Democratic Party. At the same time, it is not as popular among Republicans as Trump. That meant that the Democrats could demonize Musk to excite their base, with less risk of energizing Republican voters.
On the morning of the overwhelming electoral defeat – the liberal judge Susan Crawford beat Schimel for 10 percentage points in a state in which Trump won by a point – the headlines foreseeably presented Musk as the architect of the republican defeat. Trump advisers were glad that Musk was the scapegoat.
Schimel even lost Brown County, where the Musk rally was held and where the billionaire wanted to squeeze the conservative participation. Even so, Schimel obtained more votes than the conservative candidate in 2023, but the Democratic participation increased even more, surpassing the margins of other Democrats in recent contests.
The defeat, although worrying for many Republicans, is unlikely to cause a split between Musk and the party. However, all the effort showed that, when Musk makes donations, he hopes to have a strong presence. Although the legislators of the Republican party and the possible presidential candidates will continue to request their checks, they may have less desire to campaign publicly in their name.
Musk, who normally publishes incessantly on social networks, has said practically anything about the results. When he spoke briefly, in one answer to another account in X, he talked crystically of a chess game, saying that “I hoped to lose, but lose a piece in exchange for a positional gain has its value.”
For Musk, and for the Republican party, the contest is the last reminder that the elections outside the election year attract a different type of voter.
“The people waiting in the row to vote last night seemed very different from those of November,” said Bill Stepien, a Republican strategist who was Trump’s second campaign director in 2020 and his political director at the White House before that. He said that the idea that Musk was going to persuade people to support Republicans with their presence or their political group did not reflect reality.
“As special elections attract an almost exclusively partisan public, and very partisan, it is a matter of participation, not persuasion,” he said.
People close to Musk’s political operation recognized their allies that the contest was a uphill. A memorandum of a group related to Musk, 10 days before the elections, said that the group surveys gave Schimel an advantage of only five points.
The Musk team, however, discovered that this survey would be Schimel’s best moment. In the days after that note, they soon saw that Schimel’s figures deteriorated.
Wisconsin’s judicial contest was Musk’s first great political defeat after successfully supporting Trump in 2024. But while Trump was a favorite to win before Musk got involved, this time, Musk opted for a candidate to which the closest advisors of the president saw as an extremely remote possibility.
Following that advice, Trump was careful not to campaign as visible as he could have done in other circumstances. He publicly supported Schimel, sent his eldest son to campaign in the state and offered the candidate a meeting with virtual voters. But Trump, who since 2022 has become more cautious when deciding on what contests he gets fully, resisted the pleas of Wisconsin’s Republicans to visit the state and make one of his characteristic rallies in favor of Judge Schimel.
Musk wondered privately why Trump’s external groups did not get more involved in the contest. The reason was obvious: his private surveys were never closed. An informed person of the data said that the last survey conducted by Trump’s main pollster, Tony Fabrizio, projected that Schimel would be defeated by eight percentage points, and that his daily monitoring model ranged from a defeat of nine and eleven points.
Keith Gilkes, who directs the America Pac of Musk in Wisconsin, was on vacation for 10 days in the final stretch of the campaign, which generated doubts in some people who participated in the contest, according to two people with direct knowledge. Gilkes did not attend the Musk rally in Green Bay. Wednesday did not respond to comments requests.
Musk had openly talked about his desire to spend “a lot” in 2025 in local elections, such as those of the District Prosecutor’s Office and Judges. His participation in the Wisconsin elections occurred only eight days after Tesla demanded the State for a law that restricted the sale of vehicles. A few weeks later, the Musk groups began an advertising campaign in favor of Schimel, and he began to create a survey operation that included up to 500 people throughout the state, who visited houses for about US $ 25 per hour.
Musk became the center of his group’s messages. “I am with America Pac, an organization directed by Elon Musk,” reads a question that Wisconsin pollsters said at the doors. Later, they ask: “Can President Trump and Elon Musk tell you to vote for Brad Schimel?”
Schimel’s team considered that they were often notified of Musk’s activities in the state, including Musk’s desire to celebrate an act in X Spaces with Schimel himself, according to a person close to the campaign. Schimel was notified less than a day in advance before that act was held, and before he had a bus tour throughout the state. So he had to rent a hotel in a rural Wisconsin area to make sure he would have good internet access for the event, according to two people who know their agenda.
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Some Trump assistants have seemed that Musk, who has had great success by directing his companies, has been frustrated for not being able to exercise his will over the federal bureaucracy by directing the government efficiency department, his government reform initiative. He has rant against judicial sentences and has urged his team to destroy the internal norms and regulations, but his advances have been slower than he imagined, they said people who have spoken with him.
Musk had pressed to be a special government employee, a role that is unique in the sense that it is limited to a duration of 130 days. These employees are not subject to various ethical standards, sometimes they can avoid the temporal limits that supposedly frame their work. In theory, I could return as a special government employee in 2026, but Musk said in an interview last week that “he would have done most of the work” that was proposed within 130 days.