Post-DOGE, Elon Musk Faces Challenges at Tesla and SpaceX
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Alpha Sense, powering the world's biggest decisions. Learn more by visiting alpha-sense.com. Hey, T&B listeners, before we get started, heads up. We're going to be asking you one more question at the top of each show this week. Our goal here at Tech News Briefing is to keep you updated with the latest headlines and trends on all things tech. So we want to know more about you, what you like about the show, and what more you'd like to be hearing from us.

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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, June 2nd. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. A new month and a new focus for tech billionaire Elon Musk. For 130 days, he was locked in on his mission to dismantle bureaucracy in Washington. But today marks the start of his first full week officially in office.

on the outside of the Department of Government Efficiency he created. Today, we'll take a look at his Doge report card and discuss what's next as Musk brings full attention back to his bruised business empire. Over the past four months, plenty of ink has been spilled on the twists and turns of Elon Musk's slash-and-burn strategy at Doge. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.

That was him on stage at the CPAC conference back in February, literally wielding a chainsaw before a cheering audience. The thing is, many of the widespread layoffs his new department initiated are being held up by the courts. The so-called wall of receipts that was designed to show the total cost savings achieved has been controversial. And

And in the process of retaining his status as first buddy to President Trump, Elon Musk's businesses have felt the brunt of the backlash from customers who do not support the administration's vision. So today, we've assembled a dynamic duo to help us dig into how successful Musk's doge was at applying Silicon Valley's move-fast-and-break-things approach to the notoriously slower-moving government.

and we'll evaluate what's next for the world's richest man as he returns to corporate America. WSJ columnist Tim Higgins, who's been with us the last few months for our 100 Days of Musk series, is back again alongside WSJ reporter Becky Peterson, who focuses her coverage on Tesla and Elon Musk. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us.

So, Tim, I want to start with you because let's do a review, a report card of sorts for Elon Musk and Doge. He initially targeted $2 trillion in cost savings for the federal government through Doge. $2 trillion with a T. Yes. How close did he get to that goal? Still far, far away from that. On Friday in the Oval Office, he says they're getting close to maybe $200 billion with a B.

He's still holding out, though, for $1 trillion, possibly by next summer. He says the work of Doge will continue. He was wearing a T-shirt.

In fact, that called himself the Doge father. And a black Doge hat, too. So he came decked out. What happens next with Doge, though? Because as you say, the president said the numbers could double or triple with cost savings from Doge. We'll remember you as we announce billions of dollars of extra waste, fraud and abuse. Just as an example, Doge canceled $101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education. $101 million.

Where could those cost savings come from? And who takes the Doge baton from here? What happens to that now? The president says that many of the Doge workers will remain, though we know that the engine of that effort, Elon Musk, is taking a step back. The journal has reported that Steve Davis, a longtime lieutenant in the Elon Musk world, is also stepping back.

So the question becomes, who is the leader? Who is the kind of the power behind the scenes? And it's something we just don't really have a good grasp on at this point. But like Buddhism, as Musk likes to say, the Doge effort will continue. And one of the things that's really of concern is that while Doge is highlighting areas that could see savings, it seems as if Congress will really have to cement that.

the president hinting that that effort will be made there. But so far, we haven't really seen that. And the budget bill that is moving way through Congress is projected to increase the U.S. deficit. So kind of going the opposite direction. And Becky, I want to come to you because staying in the conversation in the Oval Office, Elon Musk said that he is happy to stay on in an advisory capacity to the president.

I expect to remain a friend and an advisor. And certainly if there's anything the president wants me to do, I'm at the president's service. You wrote a piece for the journal that said that Elon Musk is ready to get obsessed with his companies again. And that's been a real question for the last several weeks and months about how much focus this CEO is paying to many of his companies. So what happens from the corporate side of things with Elon Musk?

Elon's message at the White House was so different from what we've been seeing him say in other pressers in recent days. When SpaceX did its launch on Tuesday of Starship, that test run, he was telling everyone his mind is on Mars. He's just thinking about the ceramic tiles that are on the spaceship.

And a few days before that, he had some press visit the Austin factory where he was talking about how excited he is for Tesla to launch his robo taxis in Austin in June. So there's a lot going on at the companies. It does seem like he's trying to do it all, but we've seen him.

spend more time at Tesla and SpaceX publicly in recent weeks than we have since Trump won the election. And will this focus on his companies become harder in his post-Doge era? Because that's sort of been the conflict for the companies themselves dealing with the backlash from customers who have been opposed to how involved

Elon has come in and out of his companies a lot. In recent years, he's been distracted by the Twitter acquisition. So I don't think it's an issue for him to come back after being gone. The question with Tesla is whether customers are going to respond to the brand the same way that they did before and whether he can turn around that company, improve its revenue. Yeah.

We saw sales figures for Tesla in Europe last month in April. They fell behind one of his Chinese rivals for the first time. So what are his priorities then, not just at Tesla, but at all of his other companies as well? It's the Elon Musk story to try to develop technology that's new and cutting edge when he's at his best. And all of the companies seem to be on the precipice right now of big change, if he's to be believed.

So Tesla's Robotaxi ride-hailing service is scheduled to be made public in June.

SpaceX is trying to get the Starship rocket ready to go to the moon for NASA and to go to Mars by the end of 2026. And XAI is competing with ChatGPT by OpenAI, Anthropic, and some other brands to develop AGI. And those are all really big projects for any CEO, but he's doing all three right now.

Coming up, Elon Musk has made a clean break from Doge, but how will he balance a desire to remain at the president's service with a need to refocus on his companies? Tim and Becky dig into those questions after the break. How businesses connect with customers defines their brand. Sierra is the AI platform for building better, more human customer experiences. Fast answers, no canned responses, no hold music, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.

In his Oval Office goodbye on Friday, Elon Musk was asked which is harder, slashing wasteful spending in the U.S. government or getting humans to Mars? It's a tough call, but I think colonizing Mars and making life multi-planetary is harder. A tough call and a tough mission, which he returns at least some of his focus to now that he's passing the Doge Baton. The question many are asking is how well can he balance running his companies while staying in President Trump's orbit?

We're back now with WSJ's Tim Higgins and Becky Peterson. Tim, in a recent piece of which the headline was Angry Elon is Back, you write about how he needs to go forward and focus on his companies. But the question is also, how does he play that sort of advisory friend role to the government in whatever capacity that might still look like? Musk has said he's planning to scale back his involvement in politics, maybe just a couple days a week.

He's a guy who measures his workload by 60, 70, 80, 120 hours a week. But really, he seems to be signaling that he's gotten the message that it's time to focus back on his companies, whether it's Tesla or SpaceX and Tesla.

That is exciting. Some investors, especially at Tesla, they're saying that the wartime CEO is back. He's had some public appearances where he's been pretty feisty with questions about the status of Tesla. For example, he feels the stock is the indication that the company is back on track. The stock is up since he has announced he's pulling back his duties at the White House. And it's somewhat understandable because the valuation of Tesla

more than a trillion dollars. The only automaker in the world to have such a valuation, really putting it in that elite league of publicly traded companies is incredible.

about the vision of the future that Elon Musk is selling. And that vision with Tesla is a world of robots, robots that are like humans that can do human work or robots that drive cars. And so the idea that he's back in the trenches doing that gives people a lot of hope. The challenge, however, is, is this the time he's really going to execute? He has been talking about driverless cars and being on the verge of being able to deploy this technology for years and years.

And other companies have been able to do this. We look at Alphabet's Waymo or Amazon Zoox, and they have vehicles traveling around public roads in places like San Francisco, where I'm based.

without people behind the steering wheel. Tesla has not demonstrated that ability yet, though Musk says they are doing it, but they haven't deployed it. And so this is a kind of a make or break moment. Think of it as he's betting the company yet again to show the world that he can do this and turn it into a real business. And so investors are excited about that, but there are also some investors who perhaps are saying, let's see it. We want to believe it when we see it kind of thing because he has talked about it for so long.

long. Becky, to that point, I wonder if you have a sense of how patient investors and people who work at and with some of Elon Musk's companies will be with how long it takes to achieve some of that progress, at least in some of these companies. Because you worked on a story last month that Tesla's board had begun the search for a CEO successor to Musk. That was something that the company denied. But it does beg the question how much patience is left for

from not just Tesla, but Elon Musk's other companies as well. Tesla's investors have already priced in all of the success. So I'm also wondering how patient they'll be. But like Tim said, they've already been waiting a really long time. The difference between now and in the past when he said robo-taxis are around the corner or Mars is around the corner is

At both Tesla and SpaceX, he really has bet the company. Tesla doesn't have a new car in its lineup for customers to get excited about over the next few years. There's only the cyber cab, which doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals. So that's a very big commitment to this vision that he has.

And at SpaceX, we know that they are moving people off of Dragon, which is the spaceship that currently takes astronauts to the space station.

They're trying to reduce the number of people who are working on these existing successful programs, which means there's more bodies on the dream programs, but it also means that if the dreams don't work out, there's no backup plan. You know, in a lot of ways, this is classic Elon and something that really very few people can pull off at these big kind of companies. If you're

The CEO of a company like General Motors, it's very hard for you to give up an existing business line and say, I'm just going to take this wild gamble on something else because you make all your money on pickup trucks, right? That's the business. And so what Elon is able to do is use his celebrity, use his goodwill with the market to really create value.

These kind of huge bets that might not pay off, but if they do pay off, they literally change the world. And that is part of the excitement around these companies, too. He's not doing something easy. He maybe is doing something that is unwise. But if he's right, it could be a big deal.

That was WSJ reporter Becky Peterson and journal columnist Tim Higgins. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with deputy editor Chris Densley. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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