Elon Musk’s image is “permanently damaged,” agreed former Obama aides and Pod Save America hosts Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer, and “no amount of rehabilitation is going to help.”
Favreau and Pfeiffer roasted Musk, who they dubbed the “Kato Kaelin” of the White House, for tarnishing his image by helping Donald Trump “implement a series of really, really, really unpopular policies” with DOGE, the government agency they say is as good as “toast” now that the Tesla CEO is out of the White House.
“I just don’t see it having any sort of the same impact that it had in the first a hundred or so days,” Pfeiffer said on Friday’s podcast episode.
“Elon Musk had the ability, he did it in the most—the least effective—most chaotic way possible. But because he was someone with real political capital, a massive media platform in the ear of the president, he was able to end-run the cabinet secretaries and make some of these cuts,” Pfeiffer explained. “Most of them got upended by the courts, but he was able to do things that are not going to be possible with some flunky in charge of the program now.”
On top of that, what Musk was able to do with DOGE is likely to have damaged his image for years to come, the hosts theorized. “The damage to Musk himself and to Tesla and the other companies, I think is pretty close to permanent,” Pfeiffer added.
The scathing take comes just as a bombshell report from the New York Times Friday alleges Musk took so much ketamine it damaged his bladder on the 2024 campaign trail, and regularly indulged in ecstasy and magic mushrooms. There’s some hope for Musk to turn things around, if he could resist what the host called his “thirst” for attention.
“He might be able to recoup some of the shareholder value of Tesla’s other companies by being less public and cutting less cancer research and maybe showing up to work every once in a while,” Pfeiffer said, but he believes Musk lacks the “self-discipline” to go all the way.
“He’s going to be going through withdrawal here very quickly. He was the center of the universe for over a year,” Pfeiffer said, illustrating the point. “Back in the 2024 campaign, he’s out on the campaign trail. He’s got his black MAGA hats on. He’s in the Oval Office the whole time, he’s doing press conferences. He’s the center of attention. He loves attention.”
An alternate universe where Musk just tweets about the “latest features in a Tesla car or the latest SpaceX loss” just after he was killing “legislation” and “appointments with his tweets,” just seems “hard to believe,” Pfeiffer said.
Whatever happens with Musk, Favreau posited that Musk’s exit makes it easier to get eyeballs on more important matters.
“I’m hoping that less attention on Elon, who does consume quite a bit of attention, means more attention on all the people who we can defeat in an election,” he explained, like “Republicans in Congress, who I feel like haven’t been getting the attention they deserve from people because they have been just rubber stamping every single thing Trump does.”
That said, Favreau added, “I’ll be looking forward to the first profile that’s done in like a month or two, about how Elon’s feeling and how he’s been a little depressed since leaving Washington and all that, and what his next moves are.”
“Because I agree with you,” he added, “that it seems hard to believe that he’s just going to stay out of the spotlight after this.”
