Fox News host Brian Kilmeade finally admitted what everyone else has been thinking: Elon Musk isn’t gone for good.
The Tesla billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) supremo announced his departure from the White House this week after a contentious tenure spent slashing the federal government.
But Kilmeade doesn’t think he’ll stay away for long.
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“He’ll be back,” Kilmeade said during a Thursday episode of Fox & Friends. “I think he is going to take a little while off and he will be back in some way, shape, or form.”
Kilmeade continued: “Because he was also special assistant to the president. And I know they appreciate each other’s input. And I think what’s most laudable is they don’t always have to agree.”
Musk and President Donald Trump’s four-month-long bromance was strewn with bumps in the road, with the two disagreeing on more than one occasion and sometimes even publicly clashing about the president’s position on tariffs.
His companies also suffered during his tenure at the White House. Tesla sales are drastically down, especially in Europe where they fall by almost half in April. Tesla dealerships and the electric vehicles have also been targeted by vandals. On Tuesday, SpaceX’s Starship tumbled out of control during a test flight, which appeared to be a brutal metaphor for Musk’s own professional tailspin.
But fellow Fox anchor Lawrence Jones said he believed the two “will remain friends” and that Musk will “advise the president on a host of issues outside of the White House as well.”
Musk has dedicated his time in Washington, D.C. to axing the federal budget and rooting out “fraud and waste.” As a special government employee, he was only permitted to work up to 130 days in a 365-day period. On Wednesday, he wrote on X that his “scheduled time” had come to an end.
“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” he wrote on X, which he owns.
Trump has yet to comment on Musk’s departure. The duo have worked together since the president’s inauguration to drastically cut federal spending, a hotly debated move that has led to thousands of layoffs and a reduction in funds that some deem critical—like money for cancer research.
Reuters reported in early May that at least 260,000 federal employees had been fired due to DOGE. The billionaire’s original aim was to save U.S. taxpayers at least $1-2 trillion.
He fell far short of his goal. DOGE has reported that it has only saved around $170 billion, just 17 percent of the $1 trillion goal and 8.5 percent of Musk’s $2 trillion “best-case outcome.” Other reports put the tally at much lower.
Musk, the richest man alive, has admitted that his experiment was harder than expected. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington Post. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
Musk’s time in the White House has been riddled with controversy, especially in recent weeks as Musk disagrees with the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in an interview with CBS News.
He has since butted heads with Capitol Hill representatives.
“I think the elephant in the room is he is disappointed with Congress, and frankly, I’m disappointed at them as well,” Jones said Thursday. “You have this man, with all these business experts that took a leave of absence from their careers, and they helped us cut all this spending. And we thought that Congress, especially since the Republicans won, that they were going to codify a lot of these things and legislation. But they didn’t.”
Jones continued: “They were weak on it. Well, they did some of it. But they didn’t cut nearly the amount as they should have cut.”
