Insider exposes the tequila-fueled goodbye Elon Musk gave in Trump’s White House

Tech billionaire Elon Musk spent one of his final nights in President Donald Trump’s White House by pouring Tesla-branded tequila for his top DOGE lieutenants in what became a goodbye toast that no one recognized at the time.

The leader of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency produced a lightning bolt-shaped bottle and poured the tequila into plastic cups as roughly a dozen deputies crowded into his small West Wing office in May 2025, according to an excerpt from former DOGE aide Tyler Hassen’s upcoming memoir, obtained exclusively by The Daily Mail.

“Even great tequila couldn't mask the change in the room,' Hassen wrote, describing an unusually heavy atmosphere as Musk’s allies watched lawmakers start to undo their cost-cutting campaign with billions in new spending. The toast came the same day Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent clashed heatedly, the report said Thursday.

Days later, Musk was officially out of the MAGA administration. Within a week, he and Trump were locked in a public war of words.

Musk labeled Trump’s spending package a “disgusting abomination,” the new reporting said, before alleging that Trump would be implicated by unreleased Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump accused Musk of going “crazy” and called him a “big-time drug addict.”

In his upcoming book, Hassen recalled freezing as messages from colleagues flooded his phone, leaving his stomach “in knots and sweat forming as his enthusiasm for DOGE sank to its lowest point,” The Daily Mail reported.

“It had been a goodbye,” Hassen said of the tequila toast, according to the outlet, “even if none of them realized it at the time.”

But Vice President JD Vance reportedly helped broker a truce, resulting in Musk accompanying Trump to a May summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. There, Musk told Trump “exactly what he wanted to hear,” pleading at least $100 million to help keep Republicans in control of Congress in November.