Elon Musk has said he will be 'sleeping' and ‘spending 24/7 at work' following a major X outage.
Following the January inauguration of President Trump, the Tesla CEO had been given a high-profile government role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
His controversial job cuts and slashes in federal spending sparked widespread criticism.
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Despite protests and vandalism to his Tesla stores, and some accusing the brand of becoming a political symbol, Trump stood firmly by him.
But now, it looks like Musk is officially stepping away from Washington and refocusing on his enterprises including Tesla, X and xAI rather than recruiting a new CEO.
After dropping several hints and investors urging him to step away, the SpaceX founder was reported to scale back to one or two days of government work.
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White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles stated that he 'hasn’t been here physically, but it really doesn’t matter much.'
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However, following a major outage on his X platform, it seems his exit is final.
Over the past weekend, X went down for thousands of users that the social platform later associated with a 'data center fire in Hillsboro, Oregon, which likely caused the issue.'
Musk announced his plans in response.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms," Musk wrote in response to the X outage announcement. “I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.
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“As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made. The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
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According to the outage-tracking site Downdetector, reports of service issues peaked around 8:51 am ET on Saturday, with more than 25,000 complaints. Users across the US, Britain, France, India, and Australia were reportedly affected.
Meanwhile, several social media users pointed the blame at H1B visa holders. But X's integrated AI Grok chatbot replied with: "There's no evidence H1B visa holders are responsible; the problem is infrastructure-related."
And with multiple product launches coming up for Tesla's robotaxis, a 'limited beta' of X Money and a scheduled Starlink launch today (27 May), there’s a lot on the billionaire's plate.
Speaking at an economic forum in Qatar last week, Musk said: “In terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future. I think I've done enough.
“If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it.”