A black eye and a gold key: Musk's subdued farewell from Trump's White House
If Elon Musk's headline-grabbing stint in the Trump administration straddled ecstatic highs and horrific lows, Friday's farewell was more like a Buddhist on Valium.
Cameras were invited into the Oval Office to watch President Donald Trump deliver lengthy remarks praising Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting razor gang he led during his 130-day tenure as a special government employee.
'He does love our country, I know that very much,' Trump said of the world's richest man, and presented him with a golden key to the White House. 'He's all about the USA. Americans owe him a great debt of gratitude.'
Musk cut a dark figure in a black suit, black T-shirt bearing the words 'The Dogefather' and a signature black cap, this one marked with 'DOGE'. He also sported a slight bruise on his right eye, apparently the result of a play-fight with his young son, X.
The president said Musk had endured 'outrageous abuse and slander and lies and attacks' in the line of duty, something Musk himself has lamented in recent weeks as he stepped back from his constant presence at the Trump White House in favour of his companies Tesla and SpaceX.
Meanwhile, a sanguine Musk exhibited little of the outrage about alleged corruption and waste by public servants that characterised his early days at DOGE, and often sparked furious, middle-of-the-night rants on his social media platform, also named X.
Rather, he spoke about 'the banal evil of bureaucracy', and offered mundane examples of profligate spending, such as government departments retaining excess software licences with 'zero people using them'.
'You can't even blame the individuals,' Musk said, noting bureaucratic culture often prioritised minimising complaints. 'I think it was an important thing, a necessary thing and I think it will have a good effect in the future,' he said of DOGE.
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