Oh wow, Elon is giving a concession speech in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/npzAiu3het
— Liam Nissan™ (@theliamnissan) April 2, 2025
BREAKING NEWS: Billionaire JB Pritzker BEATS Elon Musk.
Two billionaires poured money into Wisconsin:
Elon Musk spent $82 Million.
JB Pritzker spent $500,000.
Pritizker’s response? “Elon Musk is not good at this.” pic.twitter.com/jRJlPE0ID6
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) April 2, 2025
The GOP has no time for luzers, Elon!
Charlie Warzel, at the Atlantic – Elon Musk Lost His Big Bet:
…Given Musk’s heavy involvement—the centibillionaire not only campaigned in the state but also brazenly attempted to buy the election by offering to pay voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges”—the election was billed as a referendum of sorts on Musk’s own popularity. In that sense, it was a resounding defeat. Musk, normally a frenetic poster, had very little to say about politics last night, pecking out just a handful of terse messages to his 218.5 million followers. “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” he posted at 1:23 a.m. eastern time.
In the light of defeat, the SpaceX post feels like a glimpse into what could have been for Musk—a timeline where the world’s richest man wasn’t algorithmically radicalized by his own social-media platform. It’s possible that Musk’s temperament and personal politics would have always led him down this path. But it’s also easy to imagine a version where he mostly stayed out of politics, instead leaning into his companies and continuing to bolster his carefully cultivated brand of Elon Musk, King of Nerd Geniuses.
Unfortunately, he surrendered fully to grievance politics. Like so many other prolific posters, he became the person his most vocal followers wanted him to be and, in the process, appears to have committed reputational suicide. Since joining President Donald Trump’s administration as DOGE’s figurehead—presiding over the quasi-legal gutting of the federal government—Musk has become not just polarizing but also genuinely unpopular in America. Now his political influence is waning, Tesla is the object of mass protest, and sales of his vehicles are cratering. This morning, only hours after his candidate lost, Trump reportedly told his inner circle and Cabinet members that Musk will be “stepping back” from his perch in the administration for a more “supporting role.” In Trumpworld, nothing’s over until it’s over, but Elon Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred me to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post calling the report that Musk is stepping back “garbage”; Musk posted on X that the reporting is “fake news.”)
Musk’s appeal to Trump has always been about two things: money and optics. As the richest man in the world, Musk is both a cash cow and a kind of enforcer: His checkbook and closeness to Trump remind Republicans in Congress that they can and will be primaried if they break from the administration. But Musk’s reputation is just as important to Trump, who respects great wealth and clearly enjoys being shadowed and adored by a man of Musk’s perceived stature and technological acumen (although Trump is easily impressed—take, for example, “Everything’s Computer!”) Musk’s image in Silicon Valley was useful to the Trump campaign, bringing in new fanboy voters and sending a message that the administration would transform the government and run it like a lean start-up.
But although his money is still good, the Wisconsin election suggests that Musk himself is an electoral liability. A poll released today, conducted in Wisconsin by Marquette University Law School, showed that 60 percent of respondents view Musk unfavorably, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that his national favorability dropped 10 points from February to March. (He now has a net favorability rating of –10 percent.) An aggregation of national polls shows that the approval rating of his DOGE efforts has also dipped dramatically: Just 39 percent of Americans approve of his work, nearly 10 points lower than in mid-February…
John Heilemann, at Puck –Elon Crash Lands in Wisconsin:
As far as most casual observers are concerned, Elon Musk jumped into the national political arena—and when I say jumped, I mean jumped, baring a blinding expanse of alabaster-white belly—almost exactly six months ago, in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he made his first appearance at a Donald Trump rally. Six months later, this past Sunday night, Musk was at it again: hopping, skipping, and flapping his arms at a campaign event in Green Bay. Only this time, Trump was nowhere to be seen; nor was Brad Schimel, the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Musk was ostensibly there to stump for. In fact, in the two hours Musk spent onstage, which began with him donning a foam Packers cheesehead hat, he barely mentioned Schimel, instead holding forth about Social Security fraud, global birth rates, and A.I.
Among political professionals in both parties, the Musk event cemented a consensus about the state of play in the Badger State on election eve: that, on top of Musk’s odd habit of jumping up and down, this might be the moment, as one Republican strategist put it, “when Elon jumps the shark.” By the time voting started on Tuesday morning, the conventional wisdom had firmly set in that Schimel was all but certain to lose to his opponent, Susan Crawford, by somewhere between 2 and 5 points. In fact, the White House political shop had reached this conclusion a week earlier, which helps explain why Trump ignored the pleas of senior Wisconsin Republicans, including former Governor Scott Walker, that he fly in and campaign for Schimel.
Yet no one in Trumpworld or the G.O.P. writ large expected that the race would be called so early, that the margin would ultimately stretch to double digits (55-45), or that the repudiation of Musk would be so total and unequivocal. “It’s no secret that Elon has liabilities, but I don’t think we appreciated how serious they are,” a Republican consultant who works closely with the White House told me. “We knew we were going to get beat; we didn’t know we were going to get stomped.”…
Ironically, the silver lining around these dark clouds is the shellacking Musk took in Wisconsin. One of the dirty little secrets of the G.O.P. House and Senate conferences—and of its governor’s mansions, too—is that more than a few Republicans in these bodies had been quietly hoping Musk would have his head handed to him last night. From his chainsaw-wielding acting-out to his even more lunatic labeling of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” Musk is a walking, talking political I.E.D. that many if not most Republican electeds wish could be summarily dispatched to pursue his dream of colonizing Mars. “Not that he needs our money,” a senior G.O.P. senator told me, chuckling. “But we’d all pitch in and pay for his ticket if that’s what it took.”
Comments like this, even on background, were all but impossible to come by in the first two months of Trump 2.0—such was the acute and pervasive fear that crossing Musk would lead to facing a well-funded primary opponent (and irking Trump in the bargain). But the passage of time and mounting sense of the political risk Musk embodies has begun to loosen at least a few tongues. In his Politico column yesterday, my pal Jonathan Martin induced two House Republicans to cough up spicy quotes (sans attribution) on this topic that rhyme with conversations I’ve had recently: one saying that an “April 1 massacre” would be “a beautiful thing,” the other that “Elon’s work needs to wrap up, and he needs to exit stage left.”…
@annelaurie.bsky.social
— espierce (@espierce.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 9:18 AM