00:00Charlie, this has kind of had a drumbeat up to it.
00:03What do we know about Musk's departure from Washington?
00:06Lizzie, so this feels a lot like a fizzling out.
00:08So there had been so much excitement within the Trump world about Elon Musk,
00:13about his fundraising, about his ability to kind of slash through a lot of the government spending.
00:18And as a temporary government official, he faced a May 30 deadline.
00:22That was subject to some kind of accounting for how much time he actually spent working.
00:25But, you know, government officials, White House officials have told Bloomberg that this is an amicable parting of ways.
00:33It's something that Musk wanted to do.
00:34It's something that Trump supports.
00:36But there have been signs over the past few weeks of a fraying of that relationship.
00:40So you have seen Donald Trump talk about Elon Musk a lot less on his own truth social network.
00:46You have seen Musk criticize just in recent days the Trump tax bill that's currently working its way through Congress,
00:53talking about how he's disappointed in the fact that it would raise the deficit,
00:58which is something that is, you know, anathema to what Musk wanted to do.
01:02And you could even look at a turning point, maybe to kind of early April,
01:05where we saw that Musk candidate in a key Wisconsin judicial race not winning, a candidate that he backed.
01:12And so that could have been something of a turning point where the Trump world sort of saw maybe Musk's electoral prowess
01:17not quite as sharp as they had hoped.
01:20And then there's just the work of Doge itself, right?
01:21We've seen this trending down of their goals for government spending cuts from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $0.15 trillion.
01:29Yeah, so you wonder where those goals are left if Musk is departing.
01:33But you talked about what government officials make of all this.
01:35What do investors make of Musk's time in government?
01:38They haven't liked what they've seen.
01:39And I think big picture, a lot of investors are saying, look, deficits are potentially going up.
01:45Tariffs are potentially going up.
01:47Meanwhile, the Tesla share price is going down.
01:50Tesla sales hit a three-year low in the first quarter of this year.
01:54You have issues about brand value related to Musk's time working with the Trump administration.
01:59And you've seen a number of troubles across the Musk business empire where, you know, as big as that failure of the space launch just yesterday to an X outage over the weekend.
02:13So the sense that maybe he needs to spend a lot more time focusing on his businesses.
02:18And if you think about Musk's wealth itself, it is very closely tied to Tesla, that share price down.
02:25So as an investor himself, he might be thinking he needs to make some changes.
02:28So in thinking about what's next for Musk, I have to ask how much is this a push because of Trump and how much is a pull because of his businesses?
02:36That's a really interesting way to think about it.
02:38And I think it's a mix of both.
02:39And we got a message from Musk himself talking about how he's going to be, you know, sleeping on server room floors,
02:46trying to really push this idea that he's going to be focusing on his businesses.
02:51He wants to make X money a success.
02:53He really wants to make X something of an everything app.
02:56He's really talked about how he needs to focus a lot more on SpaceX.
02:59So I think we're going to see a real shift in messaging away from talking about the government,
03:03maybe criticizing the government more certainly than he has recently and a huge focus on those businesses.
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