Elon may be good at making money but politics requires different muscles. He will be chewed up and thrown up by DC before he can say yikes!
And when the Dems come back, which they will eventually, he will have their vengeance to deal with. 
This is why billionaires have historically avoided political exposure like this

I suspect the plan is to fold changes into budget reconciliation, will be much harder to re-implement. Would also assume his PAC will also spend money to primary non-compliant senators. Feels like he might be around for a while.

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

If the Times' story is to be believed it looks like he lost this round.

Who is the source for the Times story and what agenda do they have? :)

which they've been pushing since election day (many different stories about people calling him President Elon)

It's hard to misreport a meeting attended by 20 very famous people. But yes there's always an agenda, NYT by extension of the democratic party would love a rift between Musk and Trump.