Elon Musk admits DOGE is taking a toll on him in rare confession: 'Digging my own grave'

WASHINGTON, DC: It looks like Elon Musk just had a rare moment of vulnerability.

Responding to his nosediving popularity numbers, the billionaire admitted on X that he’s “at times” been “digging my own grave way better than my enemies do.”

Musk didn’t say what exactly he meant, but it came after a brutal new “popularity tracker” showed only 39.6% of Americans view him favorably, while 53.5% don’t. That’s a grim -13.8% net favorability rating. For context, President Donald Trump is doing much better with a -5.1% net score.

Elon Musk laments aftermath of working for Donald Trump

Blaming the backlash on bad press, Elon Musk wrote that his ratings are “the inevitable outcome of having a political propaganda war waged against me” and complained he has “almost no countervailing campaign.”

This has been building for a while. Musk was still in the positive zone in January last year, sitting at +5.9%. But after he endorsed Trump in July and took over Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his popularity went into freefall, the Daily Mail noted.

Once in office, Musk went scorched earth with the sole aim of downsizing the government like it was a bloated startup. Thousands of federal workers got pink slips — and protests erupted almost overnight.

During a recent Fox News appearance, Musk vented: “It turns out when you take away people’s, you know, the money that they’re receiving fraudulently, they get very upset. They basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we’re stopping the terrible waste and corruption in the government.”

“And, well, I guess they’re bad people,” he added. “Bad people do bad things.”

Tesla stock plummets amid rumors of Elon Musk's exit

Tesla sales in Europe plummeted 45% in January from the previous year, while competitors surged ahead by 37%. Meanwhile, Tesla’s market cap has dropped 46% since its December 17 high of $1.5 trillion. It now sits at $811 billion, erasing nearly every post-election gain after Elon Musk helped bankroll Donald Trump’s victory.

Trying to stop the financial hemorrhage, Trump stood by his favorite billionaire buddy in March — showcasing electric vehicles on the White House lawn and even buying one himself.

Standing next to Musk at a press conference, the President declared that “anyone enacting violence against Teslas and the dealerships” would be labeled “domestic terrorists.”

But in mid-March, Politico dropped a bombshell report that Musk would be stepping away from DOGE “in the coming weeks,” per Trump’s inner circle. The scoop sent shockwaves through DC and rattled Tesla’s already-shaky stock.

Musk brushed the report off as “fake news.” Trump’s press team also went into full damage control.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the story “garbage,” while spokesman Harrison Fields blasted Politico as a “tabloid paper that would rather run fake news for clicks than real reporting.”

Elon Musk's goal of slashing $1 trillion in federal spending, Donald Trump's take

Elon Musk’s job as a special government employee was never supposed to be long-term — he signed on for 130 days, which puts his departure sometime at the end of May.

That said, he’s laser-focused on his greater mission to cut $1 trillion in federal spending. He told Fox News that he’s confident he’ll hit that milestone before his short-term role ends.

Meanwhile, Trump has been supportive but also realistic. “I think he’s amazing, but I also think he’s got a big company to run,” the president recently told the press. “At some point, he’s going to be going back. He wants to.”