Is Elon Musk really getting the hell out of DOGE?

is a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg. Elon Musk isn’t as publicly, obviously involved in Washington as he used to be, that much is clear. But celebrations of his political exile are premature. Sure, it’s true that Musk and Donald Trump’s bombastic joint press conferences have faded. Trump is no longer shooting Tesla ads on the White House lawn. And Musk has said that he’ll be stepping away from government and focusing on Tesla. DC is famously Hollywood for ugly people, which meant a lot of big egos were not particularly amused by Musk Musk’s use of spectacle, up to this year, had saved Tesla a need for a marketing budget. (Why would you need to buy ads when your celebrity CEO is hosting Saturday Night Live?) He cultivated an intense fan base, who bought Tesla stock and sent it sky-high. For much of the world — and much of the tech industry — Musk was a synecdoche f ... Read full article.