Elon Musk Reportedly Gave a Tequila-Fuelled White House Goodbye That Nobody Recognised in the Beginning

Elon Musk reportedly spent one of his final nights in President Donald Trump's White House in May 2025 in a cramped West Wing office, quietly pouring Tesla-branded tequila for his top Department of Government Efficiency aides in a farewell toast that, according to an upcoming memoir, nobody realised was a goodbye at the time.

The tech billionaire Musk had been brought into Trump's administration as the high-profile head of the now-shuttered Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an aggressive cost-cutting project that became a symbol of the White House's push to slash federal spending.

According to an excerpt from former DOGE aide Tyler Hassen's forthcoming memoir, that late-night tequila ritual unfolded just as Musk and his allies saw their campaign being dismantled in real time by a flood of new spending on Capitol Hill.

Elon Musk, Tequila and a Sudden Shift in the West Wing

Musk's relationship with Trump visibly deteriorated in the spring of 2025, turning from a high-octane alliance into a messy public feud within days.

Hassen writes that roughly a dozen DOGE deputies squeezed into Musk's small office as the department chief produced a lightning bolt-shaped Tesla tequila bottle and began filling plastic cups, a strangely low-rent detail for one of the world's richest men.

'Even great tequila couldn't mask the change in the room,' Hassen recalled, describing how the mood shifted from camaraderie to something heavier as they watched lawmakers move ahead with what he called a reversal of their hard-line cuts in favour of 'billions in new spending.'

According to the memoir, the toast came on the same day Musk clashed heatedly with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a confrontation that underlined how far the internal fight over spending had gone.

It can be recalled that DOGE had been pitched as the sharp end of Trump's promise to squeeze 'waste' out of Washington.

Musk, who built his public image on engineering discipline and brutal efficiency, was an unconventional but potent choice to front that drive. By the time tequila was being poured into plastic cups, Hassen suggests, it was obvious inside the building that the tide was turning.

In his account, Hassen says he felt his phone light up with messages from colleagues as news of fresh spending plans and internal rifts filtered through, leaving his stomach 'in knots and sweat forming as his enthusiasm for DOGE sank to its lowest point.' It reads like the moment when Musk's experiment in government collided with the grubby reality of politics, and lost.

From Private Toast to Public Meltdown Between Elon Musk and Trump

Days after that quiet West Wing gathering, Musk was officially out of the MAGA administration. Within a week, what had been a powerful political partnership unravelled into an ugly, very public row.

According to the memoir excerpt, Musk publicly branded Trump's new spending package a 'disgusting abomination,' framing it as a betrayal of the fiscal discipline DOGE had tried to enforce. He then went further, allegedly suggesting that Trump would be implicated by unreleased Jeffrey Epstein files, a nuclear-level claim in today's conspiracy-saturated climate.

Trump did not hold back either. He hit Musk as having gone 'crazy' and labelled the billionaire a 'big-time drug addict.'

For a president who had once embraced Musk as a superstar ally and given him a bespoke government department to run, the shift was whiplash-inducing, even by Trump-era standards.

DOGE itself has since been wound up. No official in the administration has publicly contradicted Hassen's description of the department as effectively defunct, though the White House has not yet commented directly on his reported claims about the tequila toast or the internal atmosphere in May 2025.

The US Treasury has also not issued a detailed account of the reported clash between Musk and Secretary Bessent.

Without that, readers are left with one side of the story, filtered through a former aide who, by his own admission, watched his dream project collapse in slow motion.

JD Vance Steps in as Elon Musk and Trump Recalculate

The falling-out was not the end of contact between the two men. Hassen writes that Vice-President JD Vance, a vocal Trump loyalist with strong ties to the tech and venture capital world, helped broker a truce after the public slanging match.

According to the excerpt, that intervention led to Musk accompanying Trump to a May summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. There, Musk is said to have told Trump 'exactly what he wanted to hear,' including a pledge of at least $100 million to help keep Republicans in control of Congress in the November midterm elections.

On its face, that is a wild swing from 'disgusting abomination' to quietly promising a nine-figure sum to shore up Trump's political project. Hassen does not provide documents in the excerpt to back the $100 million figure.

Still, the account tracks with a pattern that has defined Musk's political life in recent years, veering between ideological outrage and hard-nosed calculation. The tequila toast, as Hassen now frames it, looks less like a quirky late-night bonding exercise and more like a pivot point that everybody in the room missed.

'It had been a goodbye,' Hassen writes of that evening, 'even if none of them realised it at the time.' If his memoir holds up under scrutiny, the story of DOGE and that lightning-bolt bottle becomes a neat little parable about Silicon Valley swagger colliding with Washington power and finding out which one actually runs the show.