Elon Musk made himself the face of a humiliating political defeat in Wisconsin on Tuesday night. He’s rubbed cabinet members the wrong way and alienated several advisers close to President Trump. Republican lawmakers face angry questions about Musk’s influence from their constituents when they return to their districts.

It will come as a relief to many in Trump’s orbit when Musk completes his 130-day service as a special government employee, which according to federal law is due to end in late May or early June.

But the President has no intention of cutting ties with the world’s richest man, even after he leaves government, according to two people with knowledge of the President’s thinking.

Musk has become, for better or worse, an essential component of both Trump’s political operation and the broader Republican Party apparatus. He’s the party’s moneyman, having committed $100 million to Trump’s outside groups, on top of the nearly $300 million he spent on the 2024 election. And he controls the most important media channel in GOP politics — the website X, formerly known as Twitter — which makes Republicans terrified of getting on his bad side.

At a closed-door J.P. Morgan conference last week in Montana, Musk was asked by the investor Michael Kives how long he believed his “bromance” with Trump would last, according to a person in the room. Musk, speaking via Zoom before a group that included his foes such as Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman and allies such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, said he would be finished with most of his work in “three to four months”.

Trump genuinely likes Musk, according to people who have observed their private interactions and have discussed their relationship with the President. Trump has also foreshadowed Musk’s departure in the past two weeks, saying publicly he expects Musk to leave government “at some point” to go back to his companies, and privately telling cabinet officials on March 24 that they had limited time to get things done given Musk’s status.

But Trump continues to see far more upside than downside to Musk. The billionaire has become a heat shield for a President who avoids blame at any cost.

The Wisconsin judicial race provided a case study of the risks and rewards of Musk’s engagement in politics. He came through with more money than Republicans could have imagined. He spent, along with an outside group he backed, at least $25 million, a record for a State Supreme Court race. But his millions have strings attached: To accept Musk’s help is to also accept his polarising personality, quixotic ideas about political strategy and thirst for attention.

Musk threw himself into the Wisconsin race in the most over-the-top way imaginable, flying to Green Bay for a rally on Sunday, precisely when candidates typically make a carefully choreographed closing argument. His chosen candidate, the conservative judge Brad Schimel, did not even attend Musk’s event, at which the billionaire wore a cheesehead hat and handed out million-dollar checks to two Wisconsinites who signed a petition opposing “partisan judges”.

Musk’s personal involvement in the race backfired spectacularly; in fact, he appeared to become a powerful turnout machine for the Democratic Party base. At the same time, he is not as popular with Republicans as Trump is. That meant Democrats could demonise Musk to fire up their base, with less of a risk of energising Republican voters.

The morning after the drubbing — with the liberal judge Susan Crawford beating Judge Schimel by 10 percentage points in a state Trump won by a point — headlines predictably portrayed Musk as the architect of the Republican defeat. Advisers to Trump were happy to let Musk be the scapegoat.

Judge Schimel even lost Brown County, where Musk’s rally was held and where the billionaire wanted to juice conservative turnout. Still, Schimel got more votes than the conservative candidate did in 2023 — but Democratic turnout increased even more so, outperforming margins for other Democrats in recent races.

The defeat, while concerning to many Republicans, is unlikely to cause a split between Musk and the party. Yet the entire effort underscored that when Musk makes donations, he expects to have a strong presence. While GOP lawmakers and prospective presidential candidates will continue to solicit his checks, they may be less eager for Musk to campaign publicly on their behalf.

Musk, who normally posts incessantly on social media, has said next to nothing about the results. When he did briefly speak up, in a reply to another account on X, he spoke cryptically of a game of chess, saying he “expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain”.

For Musk, and the Republican Party, the race is the latest reminder that off-year elections bring out a different kind of voter.

“The people waiting in line to vote last night looked a lot different than those in November,” said Bill Stepien, a Republican strategist who was Trump’s second campaign manager in 2020 and his White House political director before that. He said that the notion that Musk was going to persuade people to back Republicans with his presence or his political group did not reflect reality.

“Because special elections draw an audience that is almost exclusively partisan, and highly partisan at that, it’s a matter of turnout, not persuasion,” he said.

People close to Musk’s political operation acknowledged to allies that the race was an uphill climb — Musk said as much in Green Bay — but they predicted a much smaller margin than the eventual 10 points, one person with knowledge of the discussions said.

A memo from a Musk-aligned group 10 days before the election said that the group’s polling found Judge Schimel down by just five points.

But Musk’s team found that polling to be Judge Schimel’s high-water mark. In the days after that memo, they soon saw Schimel’s numbers deteriorate.