President Donald Trump said on Monday that Elon Musk’s time in the White House is running out and that the government-cutting project known as D.O.G.E is almost done.

Speaking from the White House during a signing event for an executive order focused on ticket scalping, Trump told reporters that:

“I think he’s amazing but I also think he’s got a big company to run and so at some point he’s going to be going back. He wants to. I’d keep him as long as I could keep him, but he’s got to go.”

The remarks came as complaints about the chaos caused by D.O.G.E continued to grow, while Tesla, the company Elon still supposedly leads, is going through one of its worst downturns in years.

The legalities behind Elon’s White House job

Right now, Elon is working in Washington under a temporary federal appointment with a legal limit of 130 days, which puts his last day sometime near the end of May. But in February, someone at the White House allegedly told Politico that Elon wasn’t going anywhere and was “here to stay.” That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore though, but Trump does change his mind about ten times a day on average, so who even knows anything for sure?

As of April 1st, Elon has fired at least 40,000 federal workers and has even killed off entire agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Elon famously described the White House job as taking a chainsaw to the federal workforce. It hasn’t gone unnoticed.

A Monday poll from Quinnipiac showed that more than half of voters believe Elon and D.O.G.E are damaging the country. But Trump defended the effort to reporters on Monday, saying, “There will be a point at which the secretaries will be able to do this work,” adding that his Cabinet had learned a lot from the chaos. “They’ve gotten a big education,” he said.

Tesla continues crashing while Elon burns through money and time

While the government experiment burns on, Tesla is sliding fast. The company’s stock dropped 36% in the first quarter of 2025, which ended yesterday with Tesla having erased over $460 billion in market value. Sales are down across literally every single region, and the public is pulling away from the brand.

Many former customers now want nothing to do with Tesla, as they see it as a reflection of Elon’s political drama. The last time the company saw losses this steep was late 2022, when Tesla stock tanked 54% after Elon sold $22 billion worth of shares to buy Twitter, which he later renamed X.

Last Friday, Elon shared that his AI company, xAI, bought X outright, putting a $33 billion price tag on the social media platform, which is $11 billion below its initial purchase price of $44 billion, as Cryptopolitan reported.

Elon also told Fox News last week that D.O.G.E’s mission was almost complete. “I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame,” he said, referring to his 130-day window.

On Sunday night, at a Green Bay rally to promote a right-wing judge in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race, Elon said the work had cost him and other Tesla investors a fortune. “My Tesla stock and the stock of everyone who holds Tesla has gone, went roughly in half,” he told the crowd. “This is a very expensive job is what I’m saying.”

D.O.G.E has also had trouble defending its numbers, as its official website had to revise many claims about how much money it saved after mistakes were found in the original data. Many of Elon’s public claims about federal fraud and waste have also been flagged as false or misleading, sometimes by his very own platform’s so-called Community Notes.

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