Elon Musk on Saturday said he will be focused “24/7” on his work heading X, Tesla and SpaceX following an X outage that impacted tens of thousands in the US and more around the world.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” the billionaire posted on X. “I must be super focused on 𝕏/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”
The 53-year-old said the X issues this week showed “major operational improvements need to be made. The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
Users began experiencing problems Thursday afternoon following a fire at an Oregon data center that morning.
Earlier this week, Musk told reporters that he plans on cutting down his time with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which he heads as a special government employee only allowed to work up to 130 days a year.
Musk told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that he worked at DOGE – which says it has made $160 billion in cuts by firing federal workers and canceling contracts – “7 days a week, or close to 7 days a week,” but now plans to cut that down closer to one day a week.
“I’m willing to contribute one to two days a week, coming to D.C. every other week for one to three days—indefinitely, as long as the president wants me to do that,” Musk said. “It’s largely a volunteer organization.”
Musk said he is proud of the work DOGE has done so far, and “in the grand scheme of things, I think we’ve been effective,” just “not as effective as I’d like.”
DOGE has set a goal of cutting $2 trillion from the US budget.
Musk’s work for the Trump administration has also led to anti-Tesla protests by those who disagree with his politics.
He also told Tesla investors last month he would begin limiting his time at DOGE in May as the electric car company faces a slump in sales.
Musk reflected on his day-to-day for the first 100 days, saying that things “have to be very intense for the first three months, so trying to understand what’s going on and map out the government in general.”
“The federal government is a gigantic beast — very complicated — and so if you’re trying to figure out how to stop waste and fraud, you’ve got to map the territory,” Musk said. “That required three months of intense effort, and you have to build the team as well.”
“A new administration is like a start-up,” Musk continued. “Now, we’re getting more of a rhythm and so the amount of time necessary for me to spend here is much less and I can return to primarily running my companies, which do need me.”
