By T N Ashok
NEW YORK: Elon Musk, the $250 million funder of Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2024 that brought the Republican maverick back into the White House for a 2nd non-consecutive term, bid adieu to the White House, leaving as a bruised administrator who could not achieve the “Mission Impossible” unlike Ethan Hunt , the protagonist of the film of the same name.
He stood next to Trump at the Oval office of the White House said he was leaving the White House having completed the task as the DOGE administrator that saw tens of thousands of government employees lose their jobs that the GOP led regime of Trump considered redundant and was a drain on the exchequer causing a deficit in the budget.
Musk achieved what he wanted, sacked thousands of employees. Saved billions in government expenditure by eliminating jobs, but still nowhere near the $3 trillion target , and in tandem Trump did not achieve the revenues to be earned in the budget to capitalize or consolidate on the gains achieved by Musk.
Steve Bannon, a close advisor of Trump, said thus “He came, He saw, and he folded up”. That’s an apt description of the abrupt departure of Musk, who wanted to decimate the bureaucracy in Washington DC.
He stood next to Trump at the Oval office. His son nose picking son was not there this time. Nor was his son seated on the top of Musk’s shoulders. Musk was alone and the physical proximity was also not the same but more distant. The body language said it all, Musk was leaving as a dissatisfied man.
The popular adage that even the best of friends has to part sometime or the other was very much in evidence. The time had come for Musk to part with Trump as his bromance or money-romance-honeymoon with the US President was over.
So, What is next: Musk said he will remain a “friend and adviser” to the president, whose campaign he supported with more than $250 million. It’s unclear whether Musk’s foray into politics will have staying power — but for now, he’s left a polarizing mark that has impacted his net worth by tens of billions and one that’s unlikely to fade quietly.
Musk’s net worth soared to $400 billion from some $250 billion since his association with Trump began in 2024 when he emerged as the single largest donor to Trump, who was badly bruised by the litany of court cases against him which put a massive hole in his wallet as also the GOPs campaign funds. While Kamala Harris raised $950 million in campaign donations and yet lost the race to the white house, Trump with just $350 million won a 2nd term, thanks to Musk’s additions and a vigorous campaign.
A bruised Elon Musk thus departed Washington. Musk left as a “special government employee” with his goals in flux and a more negative public image, as Trump bid farewell in an Oval Office event.
Elon Musk stood next to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Friday, but the physical proximity belied a growing philosophical divide between two of the world’s most powerful men, resulting in the tech mogul’s abrupt announcement that he is departing Washington — without having achieved his goal of decimating the federal government.
“He came, he saw, he folded up,” Steve Bannon, a senior White House adviser during Trump’s first term who is influential with the working-class wing of Trump’s MAGA base, said in a text exchange with NBC News.
Musk, who stood with his arms folded across his chest as he and Trump took questions, sported a bruise near his right eye — an unmistakable metaphor for his tumultuous government service — that he said he incurred while playing with his 5-year-old son, X.
Trump took a more charitable view of Musk’s tenure during a sprawling news conference in which he also declined to rule out pardoning Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is on trial on charges of sex trafficking and other alleged crimes; Trump said he dislikes “the concept” of former first lady Jill Biden being forced to testify before Congress about her husband’s mental fitness; and predicted again that Iran is on the cusp of making a deal that would suspend its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“He had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame because he’s an incredible patriot,” Trump said of Musk. Trump was recalling the Shakespearean quote from Hamlet: To be or not to be, whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune or to take up arms against a sea of trouble.
Musk literally took up a job where he had to swim against the tide of 100s of years of a tightly controlled bureaucracy in DC, whether Republican or Democrat, to singlehandedly try to unwind it, or decimate its influence. Trump had done it in part in appointing non bureaucrats in key government positions, most of them were from the communications field and others from the business world.
In a battle of plutocrats against populists, Bannon, a longtime advocate for reducing the size and scope of government, found Musk’s methods and policy preferences to be sharply at odds with those of the MAGA movement.
So, ultimately, did Musk, who broke with Trump repeatedly on agenda items as narrow as limiting visas for foreign workers and as broad as Trump’s signature “big beautiful” budget bill — which Musk belittled for threatening to add trillions of dollars to the national debt, succeed in his mission.
“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in an interview with CBS’ “Sunday Morning,” which will air this weekend.
The tech billionaire also disagreed with Trump’s imposition of sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners last month, pointing to the trade relationship with Europe as one where he would like to see a “zero-tariff situation.“ Musk has factories set up for TESLA outside the US and he was one of the victims of the Tariffs which made his cars costlier giving a competitive edge to others making EVs including China’s BYD that cost less, which ultimately saw his last quarter of earnings shrink by a whopping 71%.
But what Musk will most be remembered for in Washington is an approach to slashing the government that critics described as haphazard, inhumane and counterproductive. His Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, a project conceived as he poured more than $250 million into electing Trump in 2024, shuttered government agencies, fired federal workers — some of whom had to be rehired — and cancelled federal contracts.
At the end of the day, despite all of the upheaval, Musk fell far short of his announced goal of saving $2 trillion. By his own agency’s account — which has been found to contain errors that inflate the numbers — the figure stood at $175 billion Friday. An analysis by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, which has been a vocal critic of DOGE, said that its actions have cost taxpayers $135 billion.
Trump and Musk both contended that DOGE would continue to wring savings by rooting out waste and fraud without the tech billionaire as its face.
“This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning,” Musk said, vowing to reach the trillion-dollar mark in cuts by the middle of next year. At the same time, he spoke of cutting government spending, Musk lauded Trump’s remodelling of the Oval Office. I love the gold on the ceiling, Musk said
Musk has argued that inertia throttled his efforts to reduce government spending — a conclusion that raises questions about whether he was naive about the challenge of the mission he undertook, US media critics observed.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington Post this week. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
On Friday, he drew an implicit parallel between American government and the Nazi regime that committed a genocide, invoking the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt used to describe the atrocities in Germany. It is the banal evil of bureaucracy, Musk said of profligate spending. The 130 day relationship ended for the time being but Musk is unpredictable and Trump finds in him a maverick like him, . So the relationship will continue and there is every possibility of Musk’s return to the Trump administration in another form in near future. (IPA Service)
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