It was a fairly extraordinary run while it lasted. Elon Musk — Tesla founder, SpaceX chief, owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter — spent the better part of late 2024 and early 2025 as the most talked-about unelected figure in Washington, chairing the Department of Government Efficiency and showing up in federal hallways in ways that made legal scholars reach for their bookmarks. Then it ended. And now, in a new interview reported by The Hill on Friday, Musk has offered the kind of line that tabloid front pages were invented for: “I got carried away.”
The three words land with some weight. DOGE, as the initiative was universally abbreviated, was billed as a surgical cost-cutting exercise. In practice it became one of the most contested bureaucratic experiments in recent memory, drawing lawsuits, congressional pushback, and a sustained public argument about what an unconfirmed private citizen could legally do inside the executive branch. Musk was its face throughout.
What followed was a measurable dip in public standing. Polling tracked through the spring of 2025 showed Musk's favorability sliding among demographics that had previously given him substantial benefit of the doubt — a notable development for someone whose brand had long floated above conventional celebrity-approval math.
The DOGE initiative has since been shut down, the administration moving to fold its stated goals into more conventional departmental structures. Musk, for his part, has signaled a return of focus to his private companies, where a Mars launch cadence and an autonomous-vehicle rollout both have timelines that don't wait for news cycles.
The interview offers no detailed accounting of what specifically tipped the balance from engaged to “carried away.” A fuller version of the conversation had not been released as of Friday afternoon.