Elon Musk is clearly proud of his time at DOGE. He posted this yesterday.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2025
But he’s also facing some real backlash from the left, some of it violent, over his position with DOGE. That pushback is starting to impact the bottom line for Tesla. Today, after the market closed, Tesla held an earnings call to announce sales were down about 9% compared to the same quarter last year.
Tesla’s overall revenue – including automotive, energy generation and storage, and services and other revenue – came in at $19.3 billion for the first quarter, decreasing 9% compared to last year’s first quarter.
According to the company, fewer vehicle deliveries “in part due to the Model Y update across all four vehicle factories” contributed to the drop in its total revenue as well as “reduced vehicle average selling price, due to mix and sales incentives” and other factors.
The 9% decline was company wide, but the decline for cars was steeper.
The electric vehicle maker, run by CEO Elon Musk, generated $13.97 billion in automotive revenue in the first three months of 2025, marking a drop of nearly 20% from the same quarter last year, according to its earnings release.
So with Tesla needing some additional attention, Musk announced that he was going to significantly reduce the time he spends on DOGE starting next month. He made clear this did not mean he was walking away from it and said he still planned to put a day or more per week into that effort. But more of his time will now be spent on Tesla.
“I think I’ll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do, and as long as it is useful. But starting next month, I’ll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla,” Musk said in opening remarks at an audiocast Q&A after the March quarter numbers…
He said he thinks much of the heavy lifting at DOGE is done, allowing “my time allocation … to drop significantly.” He said he will continue to be involved in DOGE likely for “the remainder of the President’s term, just make sure that the waste and fraud that we stopped does not come roaring back.”
He reassured Tesla shareholders, who have knocked the stock lower this year, that despite the weak quarter the company has “been through many near death experiences … and this is not one of those times … not even close.”
The company posted this statement on X highlighting some of the positive news from this quarter.
Q1 2025 Shareholder Update → https://t.co/sXBSeLibSL
Highlights
– Changed over production lines of the world’s best-selling vehicle across 4 factories simultaneously – an industry first– It’s also outpacing all past ramps (LFG)
– Model 3, Y & Cybertruck now drive… pic.twitter.com/xqO95tSHyd
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2025
Musk has said for some time that his tenure as a special government employee would be limited. Eventually, he was always going to return to his many companies and all of their various efforts. So I don’t think this is really a change of plans but the timing also isn’t entirely coincidental. The left has done enough damage to his leading company that he needs to return to it and build it up again.
Maybe you’ve noticed that he hasn’t been in the news as much in the last couple weeks as he was last month, when it seemed like he was the top story every day. The NY Times published a review of polling on DOGE and Musk today. It sums up the results of the left’s efforts to demonize Musk over the past couple months.
Views of Mr. Musk have taken a hit, as well. Over the last four years, he has gone from having a mostly positive approval rating among the voters who had heard of him to a deeply negative one.
Mr. Musk’s drop in popularity has come almost entirely from Democrats and independent voters, while his ratings have improved among Republicans.
Along with that came an intentional effort to damage Tesla as a way to punish Musk. We’ve all seen the nutjobs setting dealerships on fire and vandalizing stranger’s cars. So, mission accomplished I guess. As of now I think only one elected Democrat has explicitly denounced this behavior but quite a few of the perpetrators have been caught and will be spending some time in prison.
Here’s audio of Musk’s statements about DOGE and his plan to take a step back toward Tesla.
BREAKING: Musk says he’ll be cutting down time at DOGE starting in May to dedicate more time to Tesla but will spend a couple of days at DOGE a week for Trump’s entire presidency.
“The large amount of work necessary to get the DOGE team in place… is mostly done.”
“Starting… pic.twitter.com/S6cy9kUB5m
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 22, 2025
