By Cliff Montgomery – May 30th, 2025
On May 28th, Elon Musk announced he is leaving his post as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Unfortunately, the damage of his tenure has already been done.
Upon entering the White House for the second time, Donald Trump hired Elon Musk – CEO of Tesla and majority owner of X (formerly Twitter) – to work as the effective face and mind of DOGE, an entity Trump claims he has created to make government work more efficiently.
But in practice, that claim doesn’t mean much. Trump knows nothing about saving businesses, or about saving money. He has filed for business bankruptcy on six separate occasions, and has made claims about his own wealth that later were proven to be false in a NY state court of law. So his business acumen is not quite what he pretends.
“Donald Trump committed fraud with ‘fantasy’ valuations of his property empire as he rose to prominence as a business tycoon,” declared the London Standard in its coverage of a New York judge’s ruling in Sept. 2023, “and ultimately [to] president of the United States.”
The judge who made the ruling, Arthur Engoron, stated in a summary of his judgment that monetary “lenders [routinely] required personal guarantees from Donald Trump, which were based on statements of financial condition compiled by accountants that Donald Trump engaged. [… But] in order to borrow more and at lower rates, defendants submitted blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in fraudulent financial statements.
Then “when confronted at trial with the statements, defendants’ fact and expert witnesses simply denied reality, and defendants failed to accept responsibility or to impose internal controls to prevent future recurrences,” according to Judge Engoron’s summary.
Thus at best, Trump is a business fraud who lies about his worth, and is more showman than businessman. At worst, he is wildly incompetent and uses puffed-up claims about his businesses to hide his incompetence.
But the more one looks at Musk’s business wranglings, the more one begins to see a similar lack of certainty about his business acumen. Like Trump, Musk rarely – if ever – allows anyone else a serious look at his business records, and often gives public statements about his financial activities that later appear to be over-valuations.
Even before he joined DOGE, Musk’s business wranglings did not appear to be as stellar as he claims, according to those who apparently have followed him for awhile.
“At any Tesla event, you have to go in expecting a good amount of smoke and mirrors,” declared a 2024 CNN article published in October.
“This is the company run by Elon Musk, after all — its self-anointed Techno-king who’s made over-promising and under-delivering a theme of his career,” added CNN.
“But Thursday’s ‘Cybercab’ robo-taxi unveiling was, even by Musk-ian standards for bluster, one giant optical illusion,” continued the October article.
Musk had a number of so-called “robots” apparently serving drinks and fulfilling other basic functions in front of guests at the gala, making it look as if Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) could easily handle such tasks by itself. Since that appeared to be the case, investors and potential investors were led to conclude that such an effective A.I. would be able to drive Tesla cars by itself out on the open road.
But in reality, the “robots” weren’t handling any of the tasks by themselves. They were being operated by technicians via remote control. The technicians were purposely hidden from the guests’ view that evening.
“This was not disclosed, and many thought they were operating autonomously,” Gordon Johnson, a business stocks expert who has criticized Tesla operations in the past, declared in a note a few days after the event.
“In our view, this is very deceptive,” added Johnson.
Thus the whole ‘display of Tesla’s A.I. capabilities’ was a mere show, “the kind of spectacle that should remind everyone that the world’s richest person,” declared the CNN article, “is someone who promotes and appears to relish misinformation and hyperbole on a mass scale.”
The CNN article added that this truth remains valid, regardless of “whether [Musk is] speaking to investors, his millions of followers on X” or simply “whichever politician he feels is most likely to agree with his increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-laden worldview.”
In part two of this study, we’ll provide a focus on Musk’s misrule at X (formerly Twitter), and point out that his errors here most closely resemble his chaotic activities as a member of the U.S. government.
