Is it really the end for Elon Musk and Trump?
Sam Hawley: Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Elon Musk has spent a lot of time inside the Oval Office, and it was from there, sporting a black eye, that the world's richest man was farewelled from his role in the Trump administration. Today, staff writer at The Atlantic, Ashley Parker, on Elon's exit, his black eye, and whether that's really the end of his role in politics. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Sam Hawley: Ashley, we're going to discuss Elon Musk's time in the Trump administration. Let's start back in July last year, because that's when the relationship, I guess, really started to blossom after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Ashley Parker: Yeah, it was that assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, that was really the turning point for Elon Musk when he kind of immediately afterwards decided he was going to be all in for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump: Where is he? Come on up here, Elon.
Elon Musk: I'm not just MAGA. I'm dark, gothic MAGA.
Elon Musk: And we had one president who couldn't climb a flight of stairs and another who was fist-pumping after getting shot. Fight, fight, fight!
Ashley Parker: He ended up being Donald Trump's single biggest donor, and when you have the richest man on the planet as your single biggest donor, that makes a real difference.
Sam Hawley: Sure does. And he backed the right horse, of course, Musk. But he also helped Trump to win. And then after that, he was appointed as a special government employee, running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Elon Musk: This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw!
Sam Hawley: So, he was really there all the time with Donald Trump, wasn't he? He was in the Oval Office, he was even allowed to bring his son into a meeting in the Oval Office.
Donald Trump: This is X, and he's a great guy. High IQ. He's a high IQ individual.
Ashley Parker: Yeah, and it started actually even before Trump became officially president, during the transition, where Trump spent almost all of his time at his private club in Mar-a-Lago, Elon Musk was always down there, he stayed in a place on the property. It should be noted he has many children. He has one son named X, who's five years old, who he really seems to favour. He was down there with X, and X continued to be a frequent presence, almost always, but not always, on Elon's shoulders.
Sam Hawley: Yes, yes, literally. Alright, well of course in the final days of Elon Musk's time in the White House he criticised Donald Trump's so called so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a spending bill, that's making its way through congress, he told CBS News, well he basically didn't like it.
Ashley Parker: I mean, he basically said, I believe either a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful, but probably not both. That was his view.
Elon Musk: I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing. I think a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it could be both, my personal opinion.
Ashley Parker: And, look, it goes with Elon Musk's worldview, and particularly his view as the head of Doge, which is that he believes that government should be smaller. I mean, being for smaller government in general is a very kind of classic Republican position, but it's a position that is fine to hold philosophically, but often what we see on both sides of the aisle is that when push comes to shove, you know, when those cuts mean cutting programs or benefits for people who live in your state and rely on them, or people you need to vote for you who like them, it's really hard to do. And that's why one of the operative words in this big, beautiful bill is big.
Sam Hawley: Yes. All right, well, let's come to how much Musk actually managed to save the administration in a moment. But, look, he's left the political sphere for now, after 128 days.
Donald Trump: Americans owe him a great debt of gratitude. So I just want to thank Elon for his time, as special government employee.
Sam Hawley: And, Ashley, there was this extraordinary Oval Office press conference with Musk and Donald Trump on his final day, where he was sporting a black eye.
Reporter: I wanted to ask quickly, Mr Musk, is your eye OK? What happened to your eye?
Sam Hawley: Just tell me what happened there.
Ashley Parker: So, you know, there are a ton of rumours, and there continue to be a ton of rumours, many of which you can find on X, about why he was sporting that black eye. The list of suspects is quite long.But if we believe what Elon Musk said, Elon said that he was horsing around with his young son, X, and he sort of told X, go ahead, punch me in the face.
Elon Musk: Turns out even a five-year-old punching you in the face actually does.
Donald Trump: That was X, I tell you. X can do it.
Ashley Parker: So he claims he got it from X.
Sam Hawley: Wow. OK. All right. But as you say, there's a few other ideas of what that might have been all about. All right, well, let's look at what Elon Musk actually did at Doge and in the White House, because you've been reporting on this a lot for The Atlantic. He really up-ended several federal agencies, didn't he?
Ashley Parker: Yeah, he sure did. Perhaps what he is best known for was he came in and he basically, to use his own words, he put USAID through the woodchipper. And that is an agency that falls under the State Department that provides humanitarian aid and assistance around the globe. And he just went in and really gutted that agency. That's one thing he did. And he also came in with a mandate from the president to try to reduce the number of federal workers and bureaucrats throughout the government at every agency. And so another thing he did was something he had done at Twitter, where he basically sent an email, and it was the same title of the email he used when he was at Twitter, or I guess now X under him, but called Fork in the Road that basically encouraged any federal worker who was interested, essentially, to leave government and in many ways terrorised the federal workforce. And it led to a lot of people leaving. And the irony was Donald Trump and Elon Musk, they have this sense that federal bureaucrats are sort of lazy, do-nothing workers, just punching a pay clock. But a lot of the federal workers who actually left under what Doge was doing were not these people. It was people who were highly talented and could make way more money in the private sector, but for whatever reason had chosen public service. He certainly reduced the workforce, but it was not necessarily the exact, precise types of people he necessarily wanted to lose.
Sam Hawley: And the thing is, your reporting shows that it was really quite toxic behind the scenes. We don't want to use the F word, of course, on this podcast, but you write about this extraordinary scene in the White House between Musk and the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent. Just tell me about that. What happened?
Ashley Parker: So, we reported this scene in a piece we did for The Atlantic on Elon Musk, in part because we thought it was illustrative of what happened when Elon Musk came to Washington, all cyber trucks and chainsaws, and ran up against the behemoth that is government. And so, in this particular instance, he and Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, were essentially fighting over who got to appoint the next IRS commissioner, which is someone who reports to the Treasury Secretary. And Elon had kind of gone in and put in his own guy. The view from Bessent and Treasury was, why does Elon Musk, this guy who knows nothing about the Treasury Department, who isn't really working here, why does he get to choose the new IRS commissioner? Eventually, one day in the White House, just outside of the Oval Office, where Trump can most certainly hear Scott Bessent start shouting at Elon Musk, an expletive, we'll leave it there, repeatedly. And Musk is kind of egging him on and calling him a failed hedge fund owner and saying, I can't hear you, I can't hear you, say it louder. But what we know 100% for certain is these two men were very close to each other, up in each other's faces, shouting at each other as they kind of careened through the corridors of the West Wing.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, and you found that really, Musk found himself isolated within the upper reaches of the administration.
Ashley Parker: Yes, so Musk came in with a, sort of move fast, break things approach that has worked at his companies, that we associate with Silicon Valley and big tech, but that does not work, and in this case, did not work with the federal bureaucracy. And as someone put it to me in my reporting, if your ethos is that you're gonna go in and set these agencies on fire, and of course there's gonna be some ash and some cinder to clean up, then you at least need to sort of work to have strong relationships with these cabinet secretaries and agency heads and get them on your side and make them understand why it is you're doing what you're doing, and he didn't really have the patience for that. So a lot of the top people are more than happy to see him go.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, and he came nowhere near the targets for cost cutting, did he? He initially said he'd cut $2 trillion in federal spending, but no, that did not happen.
Ashley Parker: No, he originally promised 2 trillion, then at one point he defined it downwards to 1 trillion, which like, let's just pause there to be clear, that's a pretty big backtrack. Yes. And then he revised the goal down yet again, but he did not come close. You know, the New York Times did some very good reporting on this where Doge was sort of keeping track of all of their cuts, but it turned out some cuts, they were just being sloppy. They would say they cut X billion when in fact it was million. It was just a typo, right? They were wildly over counting. There were some cuts they did make that then got frozen by the courts or reversed by the courts. And then there was other stuff that they took credit for, but programs that had already been cut under the Biden administration or money that was not gonna be reappropriated this time around. But the end result is that they did not come anywhere close to their stated goal, originally of 2 trillion, then of 1 trillion and then of even less.
Elon Musk: And I'm confident that over time we'll see a trillion dollars of savings. The calculations of the Doge team thus far are over 160 billion and that's climbing.
Sam Hawley: All right, well, Ashley, Musk is now going back to business, back to basics, I suppose. He's got SpaceX, of course, he's got Tesla, he's got X. SpaceX, you know, they had a rocket launch recently that failed, Tesla's shares have slumped, of course, we all know that. Can he turn it around, do you think?
Ashley Parker: So, I will say Elon Musk has had a lot more success at his private companies than he has in government. It's something not just that he knows how to do, but it's also a place where the way no one, not even the president in government gets to reign supreme like a king, Elon Musk can be the king or the monarch of Tesla or SpaceX or X. So yeah, I think when he re-engages, he will be able to have a much more direct impact on these companies. One interesting question is Tesla, which has just become sort of so politicised right now. There's some people who liked the idea of electrical vehicles, liked Tesla, and are getting rid of their Teslas or would never buy a Tesla, in part because of Elon Musk's outsized role in the Trump administration. And then there's other MAGA people who might have never considered a Tesla before who now find it very appealing for precisely the same reason. So I do think Tesla may be, those vehicles may be politicised, at least for the foreseeable future.
Sam Hawley: Yeah. All right. Well, he also, of course, wants to send unmanned starships to Mars by the end of next year. It's very ambitious, of course. Do you think that's it for him in terms of politics? Is it over?
Ashley Parker: I don't think so. You know, he disagrees with some things the Trump administration is doing, but he likes Trump. Trump likes him on the whole. And I also just having covered Trump for as long as I have, which is going back to 2015, I think of sort of Trump world as like the Hotel California you can check out, but you never quite leave. So I would not be surprised if we see Elon Musk have a second or a third act, or at the very least become one of these unofficial outside advisors who frequently calls the president and plants ideas in his ear that we all then end up chasing as reporters and as the public.
Sam Hawley: Ashley Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead. Audio production by Adair Sheppard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
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