The real reason Musk retreated

This article The real reason Musk retreated was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article is adapted from a Choose Democracy newsletter email.

I’ve been searching for a metaphor to grasp the meaning of Elon Musk’s departure from DOGE. The closest I can come is an abusive relationship, where the person being harmed makes a significant break from their partner, like moving out, but hasn’t completely ended the relationship.

As a friend, you know all is not well. The threat of violence remains. The relationship is still toxic and dangerous. Still, you applaud the move. You don’t feed your friend’s aching feeling of disempowerment and loss — you feed the courage, the agency and the strength to keep going.

So it’s in that spirit that I want us to take a moment to acknowledge, even celebrate, our collective achievement of a massive, unplanned retreat by the richest person on the planet. Yes, it’s not everything — but if we can only cheer when it’s everything, we’re going to live sad lives.

It must be said: Musk’s departure is not because of the 130-day limit on special government employees. Plans had already been made to blow past that. Sure, Trump will spin this as part of his plan — but we have to stop ourselves from thinking that everything they do is masterminded. The anti-authoritarian side can also be relentless, brilliant, courageous and strategic.

Workers ignoring Musk orders. Institutional resistance to DOGE. Tesla Takedown. Pension letters. All these efforts beat back the salesmanship of Donald Trump hawking Teslas on the White House lawn and the richest man attempting to insulate himself from the people’s will.

This is a collective achievement. And I know, it’s hard to hold any kind of victory in dire times of great loss, but trench warfare tells us that before you can fully stop a thing, you have to slow it down. This is a moment for marking a significant slowing.

A critical retreat, not a total withdrawal

Musk’s 130-day tenure at DOGE was characterized by aggressive cruelty. He eliminated somewhere between 200,000-260,000 federal positions through mass firings, buyouts and early retirements. He didn’t achieve his stated goal of $2 trillion in savings. Even his website, filled with misleading and inaccurate claims, only touts around 8 percent of that goal — and actual verifiable numbers are closer to 0.8 percent. The most casual look at his 31 percent cut of tax auditors at the IRS reveals that the goal isn’t savings — it’s enriching himself and displacing democracy. Predictably the Republican budget is set to explode deficit spending and extract more money from all but the richest people in this country.

Nevertheless, Musk did manage to traumatize people in government, as well as much of the country. He’s walking away having stolen vast amounts of our data, killed investigations into his companies and gotten billions in government contracts — including a staggering $831 billion deal to build a fanciful Golden Dome. 

President Trump is not a reliable source of information — so it’s unwise to take it too literally when he says, “Elon’s really not leaving.” To be sure, the abusive relationship likely isn’t over. But the relationship has transformed starkly. 

After months of sycophant behavior, Musk spent his final weeks repeatedly attacking Trump policy — a violation of the social norms of Trump’s mob loyalty. Musk expressed “disappointment” about Trump’s spending bill. He has apparently withheld $100 million of pledged donations to Republican campaigns. He blasted Trump’s Middle East sweetheart deals that gave preference to Musk’s AI competitor Sam Altman. These open attacks are new and part of a significant growing political distance between Trump and Musk.

While it’s reasonable to doubt how far he is stepping back, it’s notable that a lot of key players in Elon Musk’s team are leaving the White House too. Steve Davis, Musk’s long-time confidant and internal coordinator, packed his bags. Recently fired DOGE staffer Sahil Lavingia told Wired Magazine, “Steven was the only person who was across everything” — leaving a massive hole in DOGE’s coordination. Katie Miller, the wife of the anti-immigrant crusader Stephen Miller, is also following Musk out of the White House. She was another critical node, the person who others trusted with the unenviable task of giving Musk bad news.

Musk is leaving with new personal scandals and having made new enemies inside the White House. The New York Times reported on Musk’s increased drug use and Steve Bannon contends that Musk’s black-eye came from a fight with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. There are even more seedy allegations that the two Millers and Musk were in a polyamorous relationship that has gone awry, which would be a possible explanation for Katie Miller joining Musk in his departure. 

Still, the DOGE coup is not over. It remains very active and its abuses continue. Wired noted that DOGE now retains tons of private information and desires to keep expanding its influence among government institutions. The same article quoted an IT specialist at USDA saying, “This doesn’t sound like a group that is going away, it sounds like one that’s digging in like a parasite.”

DOGE still has vigor and loyalty. But, at the same time, they report uncertainty within their ranks about who will hold the team together and drive their collective efforts.

Uncertainty reigns. Because this was not the plan.

The power of collective resistance

Musk’s departure did not occur in a vacuum. Internal politics and differing factions were always a cleaving line — but collective action was the axe that split them this far apart.

You were that axe if you organized or attended a Tesla Takedown event, chained yourself to a Tesla showroom, persuaded others to not buy a Tesla, or sold your Tesla — contributing to the crashing of the used Tesla pricetags. You played a role if you put up stickers that read “Anti-Elon Tesla Club” or “I bought this before Elon went crazy” on your Tesla. Or if you defied his orders as a federal worker or organized others to prepare quiet or loud resistance to his plans.

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No matter how big the action, the point is: Together, a lot of people playing a small role are still more powerful than the most powerful person on the planet.

Many people didn’t need to be told what to do. They knew to stop buying Teslas. Europe — where they have more experience recognizing Nazis — is now on track to buy half the number of Teslas as before. The Tesla board has made numerous moves to pull its CEO back from government, because they have been pushed by major investors, and recognize this as an existential issue for the company.

Musk has lost a staggering $150 billion off his net worth since mid-December.

This is the most important teaching of these times: Collective power resides not in a protest sign or petition asking Musk to do better, but in disabling the abuser by undermining their power.

Noncooperation means not giving them money, social capital, social approval or obedience when they tell us what to do. Musk’s power weakens when we don’t buy his stuff, when we turn his cars into pariahs and when we refuse his orders and turn to mass noncompliance. Eventually, it becomes too costly for him to keep doing what he’s doing.

To repeat the point: This is not a time to let up. This is just a retreat in a long battle. Instead, we expand our efforts in new ways. Tesla Takedown is already asking people to target public dollars that go toward subsidizing Tesla.

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This approach can be expanded to target Musk’s contracts with SpaceX — in conjunction with more protests at its facilities, like the ones that have already happened in Texas, California and Washington. Pressure could also be ramped up on T-Mobile and anyone else using Starlink to find services that aren’t run by pro-DOGE billionaires. Other countries are already leading such efforts, with Ontario canceling its $69 million contract with Starlink and Italy reconsidering its proposed $1.63 billion contract.

These are the kinds of actions that will keep Musk from returning to the White House — and help build pressure against other members of DOGE too.

If you’re not sure where to begin, remember Tesla Takedown didn’t start as a national plan. It started with a bunch of people doing things that made sense to them — and eventually a small crew “coordinated” what was already happening locally across the country.

The plan going forward can unfold much the same way. But for now, let this moment serve as both an achievement and a reminder of the power of collective noncooperation.

This article The real reason Musk retreated was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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