Elon Musk is leaving his government role as a top adviser to President Donald Trump after spearheading efforts to reduce and overhaul the federal bureaucracy.

Looking less likely that this is just a distraction. I think the breakup is pretty official 💔

Just to be clear though, most of what Musk was doing under DOGE was planned by Thiel during Trump’s first administration, when he brought Michael Kratsios in to OSTP to help Trump with technology issues.

June 2018: The president’s most senior technology advisor claims the White House is quietly pursuing an aggressive AI plan.

Speaking at EmTech Next, a conference held at MIT, Kratsios, who is deputy assistant to the president and deputy US chief technology officer, said the government is looking for ways to open up federal data to AI researchers. “Anything that we can do to unlock government data, we’re committed to,” Kratsios told MIT Technology Review. “We’d love to hear from any academic that has any insights.”

Data has been a key factor behind recent advances in artificial intelligence. For example, better voice recognition and image processing have been contingent on the availability of huge quantities of training data. The government has access to large amounts of data, and it’s possible that it could be used to train innovative algorithms to do new things. “Anything we can do to figure that out, we will work very hard on,” Kratsios added.

Elon first began to step back from government once Kratsios was confirmed to serve as Trump’s Science Advisor during his second term.

Odd timing that as of yesterday, Neuralink raised $600M and is now valued at $9B. It would appear Musk at least got something out of being the official face of taking a chainsaw to American government