Is Elon Musk stepping down from DOGE in just days or weeks?

Is it all about to be over?

Is he leaving because he didn’t win the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last night?

Is there a growing rift with President Trump?

Is Elon finally quitting to go back and run Tesla because the brand damage has been so great?

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All of those things are going viral this morning thanks to posts like this saying Elon is leaving DOGE very soon:

Politico jumped on the bandwagon too with this:

So….is it all over?

We got Elon for two months and now DOGE is finished?

Not exactly.

Press Sec. Karoline Leavitt took to X to debunk the story, posting: “This ‘scoop’ is garbage”:

Big old FAKE NEWS as they say!

Elon will leave when his work is finished, and right now there is more work to be done.

There is, however, a 130-day impending time window that expands into May that isn’t exactly a secret.  This has been known from the beginning.

It’s essentially a carve out in the law that says a civilian can be a special advisor to the Government, exactly the way Elon is doing with DOGE, without becoming a full-fledged Government worker and needing to go through conflicts checks, etc.

So we all know that deadline has been impending for a while.  No story here.  No scoop.

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Bottom line?

Don’t trust the MSM:

I actually have a slightly different take on that…

Instead of ignoring the MSM, I often listen to what they say and just assume the truth is nearly 180 degrees from whatever they report.

It works really well!

I appreciated this reaction from BioClandestine:

I wonder though….speaking of Elon Musk and the Wisconsin Election, I wonder if we just set the best trap of all time?

Before the 2024 election, President Trump, Elon Musk and all of MAGA was fighting from outside the system.  And we still won.

But now we have much more control.

And I realize the Wisconsin Election is a state election, but what do you think the odds are that Elon and team caught the steal in realtime last night?

X22 wonders:

And so do I.

Because I have a brain and I know when things don’t add up.

How exactly can any rational-thinking person believe that Wisconsin voters passed a Voter ID law for elections at 60.3% support, but then also voted in a Far-Left Judge who has only a 21% approval rating?

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Hello?

Does that make sense to anyone?

Or did they just walk into the biggest trap thinking they could steal another one and did we catch it in realtime?

Back to Elon to wrap things up…

I thought this was a pretty decent video, although I certainly don’t agree with everything in here.

But you might find it informative:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

All right, I think we have succeeded in going live here. Let me just double check.

But it looks like, uh, there’s breaking news now that, uh, Musk is expected to step away, uh, from the White House “soon.” We’re going to go through the details of where this story is coming from.

Uh, it looks like—yeah—looks like—okay, okay, everything’s good in live. Still getting used to this new live streaming software, but that’s all right. We’re live.

So Trump tells inner circle, uh, that Musk will leave soon. Now this is really interesting.

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Because there’s been talk about Musk being distracted. And this comes on the same day as Tesla had pretty ugly delivery numbers—down 13% year-over-year on, uh, I think production was down 13% year-over-year.

Let me double check this really quick. But now there’s talk about Elon stepping aside as part of Doge—as part of the White House.

And a lot of folks are pretty excited about this because they see it potentially as meaning that Elon Musk will finally return to Tesla.

Now in this morning’s alpha report for course members, I mentioned—yeah—deliveries were down 13% year-over-year. Production was down 16% year-over-year.

And I mentioned this morning that, uh, Tesla often gets bought as a dip. We were at 258, and so I literally wrote in the alpha report this morning: dip buying to 271 to 274 would be normal, would basically be expected.

And sure enough, we got that dip buying to 274. But what’s happening now is we’re actually doing way better than that.

We’ve now launched off of 274. We’re at 280 because there’s a thought that Tesla’s CEO might be coming back.

Because there’s so much talk about that potential brand damage happening from these protests and aggression against Elon Musk that it’s really negatively affecting morale for Tesla workers.

It’s affecting morale for Tesla owners, which is also problematic.

People who own Teslas are concerned that their cars are going to get vandalized, which is the whole point of sort of this vandalism that’s happening.

They want people who own Teslas to feel concern so they don’t tell their friends to buy a Tesla, so sales go down, so that they can declare victory against Musk—whom, you know, they see as basically taking money away from causes that they support.

Now, the story is being broken right now by Politico. Politico says Trump tells inner circle that Musk will leave soon.

The president is pleased with Musk, but the decision comes as the tech mogul increasingly looks like a political liability.

Now this is really interesting because it makes me wonder if people are—like if people in the Trump administration think Musk is a liability?

Or is Musk seeing himself as a liability for his companies?

Or is this just a combination of both?

After all, remember what happened. Elon Musk just donated a significant amount of money—$20 million—to support the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

And that election took place yesterday. Elon Musk went into this saying that the future of civilization and the future of potentially the world was at stake.

This is kind of similar to what he mentioned during the, uh, Trump election. Well, this Wisconsin election didn’t go their way.

Republicans ended up getting the two seats they were looking for in Florida, but they didn’t end up getting the win in Wisconsin. They lost that win.

And so it’s possible that there’s some relation to that loss—and the very next day Tesla deliveries coming in poopy-dupy—and, uh, you know, Elon and the Trump team essentially leaking—or however you want to put it—that Trump’s going to be out of there very soon.

President Trump told his inner circle, including members of his cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner.

Now, I mean, in fairness, I think everybody says we saw this coming, right?

I mean, like, when Elon first started showing up and like living at Mar-a-Lago and hanging out at the White House, a lot of people were like, “All right, Donald Trump is not going to want to share the limelight with Elon Musk for very long.”

“This isn’t going to last. First buddy is going to get ejected soon enough—and hopefully peacefully. Hopefully he doesn’t get fired.”

Right? This is probably kind of like a “Hey, you should resign before you get fired” message.

But it’s honestly so good for Tesla and companies like Tesla. You know, one of the reasons this morning in the alpha report I reported that I think you’re going to see a lot of buy-the-dip on Tesla…

…is because I think a lot of true sort of Tesla investors are looking at this as a short-term sort of blip. They’re looking at this as a short-term poopy-dupy…

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…where Elon’s gotten himself way too entwined with politics. And it’s just a matter of time before he can get back to focusing on robo-taxis and humanoid robots.

That’s the focus. That’s the goal for all investors at Tesla.

And so a quarter of bad deliveries while you’re in the Model Y Juniper refresh—that’s the nickname for the refresh Model Y—during that refresh period, during potentially peak political hate…

Hey, any dips are just a buying opportunity. That’s consistently been what retail has seen Tesla as, in this sort of $200 range.

Obviously, if we’re going to avoid a recession—fantastic, great. If we do end up hitting a recession—eh, these numbers will end up looking still pretty darn rich.

Tesla’s not exactly the cheapest right now on a valuation basis. And a lot of that is really because there was a lot of enthusiasm priced in…

…around our ability to have full self-driving taxis—robo-taxis in Austin in June—followed by the Optimus release at ramp in 2027.

When we look at the financials currently, we really see the vehicle manufacturing as just paying for the future optionality at the company.

So when you look at the current earnings per share, they’re not great. Take 278 divided by December 31st estimates for EPS at 2.72…

We’re trading for 100 times. And that’s probably before analysts start making some revisions here based on these vehicle deliveries.

But if I divide their growth out for the next four years, Wall Street’s currently looking at about a 32 times growth estimate.

So if we grow at 32% a year and divide that into the 102, we’re trading right now for about a 3.1 PEG—definitely on the rich side.

You know, I’d rather see them somewhere closer to that 1.69. 3.1 vs. 1.69 puts them at about 83% expensive compared to just vehicle manufacturing.

But I don’t think that’s a way of saying that you could assume the stock is definitely going to fall 83% in price.

Mostly because—well, first of all, let me do that math a little bit differently.

If we just value them as a manufacturer—which not many people are—at that growth rate of 32%, it puts their valuation somewhere around $147 based on the current numbers.

But that assumes solely vehicle manufacturing and vehicle earnings per share.

And it doesn’t really price in any of the robotics or, you know, full self-driving revenue to the extent that those are not actually showing up in Tesla revenues yet—in their estimates yet—which I don’t expect many of them are.

So really, any premium above about $150 is robotics.

So at $280, that $130 difference you’re paying? You’re paying it for Optimus. You’re paying for full self-driving.

And you’re actually now paying for your CEO coming back—which is honestly really, really great news.

I mean, a lot of the perma-bulls have been very disappointed with Elon’s “distraction” and the brand destruction that has occurred…

…because of the relation Elon has to Donald Trump.

Because ultimately, you’re just going to piss people off in politics. You know, I always try to take a very middle-of-the-road approach with politics.

It’s not the most popular thing to do. You know, the most popular thing to do is just pick a side and then parrot the opinions of that side without providing logic.

And I don’t like that. I don’t do that.

So to me though, as an in-the-middle analyst here, this is fantastic for Tesla.

Now that doesn’t mean there are going to be, you know, straight-up green shoots again.

We’re still going to have to deal with Liberation Day. We’re still going to have to deal with these announcements.

And honestly, there’s some risk that Elon’s association—being removed from the White House, at least in a public role…

…maybe gives them a little bit less influence over some of those tariff exemptions.

We know that SpaceX, for example, is looking for exemptions on certain Japanese- and Chinese-made parts that they use in their Starlink division.

So we’ll see. You know, are they going to get those exemptions or not?

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Are they going to be treated like everybody else? Who knows—maybe everybody else is getting exemptions too.

Anyway, the article goes on: “The president remains pleased with Musk and his Doge initiative,” according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to describe the evolving relationship.

“But both men have decided in recent days that it will soon be time for Musk to return to his business and take on a supporting role rather than sort of a core role.”

Musk’s looming retreat comes as Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability…

…and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability—a dynamic that was thrown into stark relief Tuesday when a conservative judge Musk vocally supported lost his bid for the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat by 10 points.

Yeah, that’s interesting. That is interesting.

So, very interesting.

All right, let’s see here. It also represents a stark shift in the Trump–Musk relationship from a month ago…

…when White House officials and allies predicted Musk was here to stay and Trump would find a way to blow past the 130-day time limit.

This is sort of the, you know, Trump has talked about this like, “Oh, we’ll figure out how to get past these restrictions on federal employees, essentially. We’ll get through that.”

It looks like they’re not even going to take that fight. Like, this fight is no longer going to be an issue with Musk stepping aside.

One senior official said Musk is likely to retain an informal role as adviser and continue as an occasional face around the White House grounds.

Another cautioned that anyone who thinks Musk is going to disappear entirely from Trump’s orbit is fooling themselves.

Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t think Trump is going to vanish entirely—or, um, Musk.

But I think his influence could substantially fall if he’s no longer there on sort of a daily basis.

And I don’t think this bodes particularly well for Doge because Doge is really Musk’s baby.

It wouldn’t surprise me that Doge could end up disappearing and just being sort of written off as a political liability.

And if that’s the case, Donald Trump is going to be able to distance himself from that quote-unquote “damage.”

Because a lot of these protests that we’re seeing against Elon Musk are because of Doge.

And one of the problems that we face here is that Doge argues there’s about $140 billion that they’ve seen in savings.

Excuse me, but they’ve only provided receipts for about 30% of those estimated savings—and that’s using their numbers.

Right? They themselves are telling you, “We only have receipts for 30% of the savings that we’re claiming.”

Which, $140 billion times 0.3 is about $42 billion worth of savings.

The problem with this is, when you go into some of the individual contracts here, they’re not recurring contracts.

So certain contracts—oh, look at this—a lot of USAID contracts are unavailable for legal reasons. Interesting.

But there are also some of these where you’ll go into these and you’ll find that some of the savings are not necessarily substantiated.

And, you know, we don’t have to go through and nitpick this. There are plenty of news agencies that do this.

My point is Donald Trump could potentially distance himself from this entire initiative if he wanted to.

Right? If we truly only have evidence of about $42 billion of savings, and Trump thinks he’s going to earn $600 billion through Liberation Day through tariffs…

Then really what Doge is doing is sort of a one-time drop in the bucket—where Donald Trump’s goals are recurring in nature.

And I think there’s an opportunity here for Trump, if he wanted to, to distance himself from Musk’s version of Doge…

…while still pushing for efficiency. Right?

Because remember, there’s one side that’s pushing for the government just being more efficient…

…and then there’s the other side that alleges the government is full of fraud.

And then when we start researching that fraud, we’re like, “Wait, yeah, there is fraud—but it’s like a fraction of a percent relative to what’s being presented.”

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And this creates some potential political liabilities—and why there is some resentment against Elon Musk.

Anyway, Gene Munster over here says, “This is our first look at the impact of recent brand damage…

…and it appears to be the primary driver behind this quarterly’s delivery decline.

Absent brand damage, deliveries would likely have been up 10% year-over-year. Instead, they were down—well—9 to 13%, depending on whose estimate you’re counting from.”

Anyway, Tesla’s press release cites the Model Y production switchover, which they say resulted in several weeks of lost production.

That suggests part of the delivery shortfall was due to production constraints.

Still, despite the switchover, production outpaced deliveries by 8%, with 363,000 units produced and 337,000 delivered.

In other words, Tesla built more cars than it sold despite the shutdown.

That’s a very good point by Gene. I think Gene makes a very good point here.

This pattern is typical for the March quarter. Over the past three years, Q1 production has outpaced deliveries by an average of 8%—exactly in line with this March.

So there’s some seasonality here as well. That’s fair to talk about.

Now, if we jump into the further portion of this…

The transition, the insider said, is likely to correspond with the end of Musk’s time as a special government employee…

…a special status that temporarily exempts him from some ethics and conflicts-of-interest rules.

That 130-day time period is expected to expire in late May or early June.

It seems like Musk is probably going to step aside more rapidly than even this timeframe suggests.

Musk defenders inside the administration believe the time is right for a transition…

…given that there is a view that only so much more can be cut from government agencies without shaving too close to the bone.

Now that’s an interesting phrase as well, because it basically argues Musk has gone around and hacksawed as much as he can…

…and now just leave it to the government to kind of put everything back together.

Mind you, there is serious freaking out happening within many government agencies.

In fact, I saved a story on exactly this. I think I can pull it up—uh, yeah—and I haven’t actually made a video on this yet, but I have it saved.

So now might be the perfect time. I want you to see this story right here.

Some federal employees returning to office has meant expansion of their duties—including cleaning toilets and taking out the trash.

Mind you, a lot of people are going to hear that and go, “Damn right!”

The spending freezes have meant a shortage of toilet paper in some buildings.

They described logistical challenges, cramped conditions, and shortages of basic supplies that came with a blunt policy change for everybody to return to work.

They basically talk about how these government agencies were never built to be fully staffed…

…and all of a sudden with everybody being mandated to return to work, there’s just no room for all of them.

The cafeterias don’t have enough food. There’s not enough toilet paper.

There are not enough, you know, papers and pens for people to work with. “Go buy your own pens.”

At one campus, it takes 90 minutes just to leave because the parking lot is so full and the choke points are so busy.

An employee said at the CDC that it was never designed for all the employees to work at the office.

An IRS employee described having to choose between reporting to an office knowing there was not enough space—or continuing to work from home in violation of agency rules.

In some cases, employees at the Forest Service were told to look for any federal building within 50 miles of where they lived…

…it did not have to be a building leased by the Department of Agriculture—and instead, they should just show up and try to work there.

But then they complained that Wi-Fi was really bad at those other locations.

These in-person mandates are just one of the disruptive overhaul policies being driven by Elon Musk.

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See, this is what I’m talking about. This association with the federal government in chaos is directly being linked to Elon Musk.

And that’s what’s leading to this frustration over Musk—that, man, he should just be driving efficiency at Tesla…

…and get us full self-driving and get us robotics, and not worry about all this other stuff. Leave this to the politicians.

Oh, note just came out: Amazon said to make bid to buy TikTok. Oh, that’s interesting.

So you know, these are—look, to me, today is actually a great news day for Tesla.

To me, today is a day where Tesla is able to probably mark a bottom…

…and say, “Look, Elon’s coming back,” and—uh—let’s see here—yeah—Elon’s coming back.

The political drama related to Elon is coming to an end.

And now we can get back to repairing—repairing some of the brand damage that has occurred—or at least attempting to…

…and getting back to focusing on the Tesla mission, which is solar roofs, selling more vehicles, what I call the Model 2.5…

…you know, sort of a pared-down Model 3 with a smaller battery pack.

I don’t know if it’ll happen because batteries contain a substantial portion of the margin for these Tesla vehicles.

And battery costs are plummeting—which just increases, frankly, their margins.

And we’ll see what happens with this whole Liberation Day stuff.

Personally, I think we’re just going to be on a track towards a return to free trade at some point…

…and that’ll be even more free than it was previously—which is good, which is really good for the economy.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. It actually makes me bullish on sort of the entire economy, granted we avoid a recession.

Right? As long as we avoid a recession, this is absolutely fantastic news.

So if you’re not worried about recession, I think today is a fantastic day for Tesla.

Again, deliveries suck. Bloomberg Intelligence actually thinks we’re going to see a rebound.

Let’s see here—Bloomberg Intel just this morning—they had a piece, and I want to read it to you because I think it’s relatively useful here.

So, let’s see here. All right, here we go—BI—it was Tesla—Tesla—they expect—if I could find it here…

Basically, they expect a big rebound in Q2. Oh, here it is.

Tesla Q1 deliveries most likely reflect Model Y retooling and seasonal weakness, as well as a decline in European sales.

Chinese sales are starting to rebound, and we expect unit deliveries to recover in Q2—rebounding 20 to 25% sequentially.

So that’s not year-over-year. Sequentially means from this quarter.

So if we got—what did we get today? 337? I think it was—and then let’s add 20 to 25% to that.

So Tesla deliveries—I want to say it was 336. 336 times 1.2 puts you at about 403.

336 times 1.25 puts you at about 420. Let’s go 403 to 420.

So I actually see that as—honestly—bullish. You know, it’s—this is not bad.

And Elon stepping aside? Good. Get out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into.

I honestly believe that politics are some of the most, like, toxic things in life you can involve yourself with.

And that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about politics and share perspectives and opinions…

…but I think most of the people who watch my channel are logical people who are willing to understand the perspective of multiple different sides.

You know, people leave me comments all the time like, “Hey, here’s where I think you’re wrong, Kevin. Here’s a logical explanation why.”

And I think those are wonderful. I encourage that.

Otherwise, you know, sometimes when you look at some of these channels that only cater to the far right or the far left…

…or maybe not even the far right or far left—just cater just to the right or just to the left…

…comments mostly it’s just like, “Mega evil” or “Mega god.”

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You know, you get all sorts of ends of the spectrum.

Let’s see what some of the comments here are.

“Q1’s going to suck for Tesla.” Yeah, but see—that already gets built into the expectation today.

And honestly, Tesla’s fall below $300 probably pre-priced in a lot of this expectation of weaker deliveries.

We’ve been seeing these lower delivery forecasts and sales declines. You know, we saw it in February with January sales declines in Europe.

So we expected lower sales already. So a lot of this is not that much of a surprise.

Let’s see here… “No, I don’t think Elon’s going to dismantle Social Security.”

Let’s see here… Somebody says, “No need for Elon to be involved in politics.”

I agree.

Investing Nate says, “I think Elon Musk is amazing, but I think he’s got a big company to run. Very talented guy.”

Yeah, yeah—oh—oh Trump said that? Okay, I thought you were saying that.

“I think Elon Musk is amazing, but I think he’s got a big company to run.”

So at some point, he’s going to go back. He’s a very—

Well yeah, Trump did allude to that. I think it was last week.

This idea that at some point Musk was going to go back—we just didn’t have a timeframe yet in terms of when we thought that would happen.

It sounds like now it’s just within a few weeks.

Uh yeah, exactly. Okay, good.

So let’s see here—Tesla right now up about 3.5%. I want to take another look just to see if there’s anything else on this political story.

But obviously, this is major breaking news—this idea that Elon’s finally going to step back from Doge, likely within the next few weeks here.

See what else… Many at the White House see him as unpredictable and unmanageable…

…who has issues communicating his plans with cabinet secretaries and throughout the White House chain of command…

…frequently sending them into a frenzy with unexpected off-message comments on X…

…including sharing unvetted and uncoordinated plans to gut federal agencies.

It’s true. You see a lot of these comments that come out of nowhere from Musk.

Where it’s like, you know, he’ll leave a comment about defunding NPR.

And he just left a comment a few days ago where he’s like “in progress.”

And so people are like—is that an official White House statement? Is that actually coming from the White House?

Or is it coming from Elon?

And then of course, people inside the White House are like, “Crap, you know, if we don’t have a plan for this, how are we going to appear united?”

The political threat Musk poses was highlighted Tuesday after Democrats seized on Musk’s roughly $20 million investment in the Wisconsin race…

…some of which openly calling it a referendum on the polarizing mogul.

Right—Trump, however, has already started to ease the glide path…

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
 

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