Elon Musk is leaving Washington after a tenure in government marked by controversy.
He clashed with cabinet secretaries. He took a chain-saw approach to slashing government jobs. He never came close to cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget, like he had promised.
On Friday, President Trump gave him a send-off in the Oval Office that was meant to give him a boost as he turns his focus back to his businesses.
Mr. Musk, dressed in black and sporting a black eye, stood next to the president during a joint news conference. Here are six takeaways:
Trump is standing by Musk.
Mr. Trump wanted to send the message that he still supports his billionaire benefactor, who donated about $275 million to help him win the presidency.
The president presented Mr. Musk with a golden key and portrayed him as a victim of unfair scrutiny.
“He had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame,” Mr. Trump said.
Tesla, Mr. Musk’s carmaker, has faced protests, vandalism and plummeting stock prices as the billionaire deepened his involvement with right-wing politics.
The relationship between the two men started out rocky. Mr. Musk once suggested Mr. Trump shouldn’t run for office, and the president brushed him off.
“I could have said, “‘Drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Mr. Trump said on social media in 2022.
But they formed an alliance that helped Mr. Trump return to the presidency. Mr. Musk lavished the president with campaign donations and compliments and he, in turn, was given free rein to inject himself into any federal agency.
Musk once said it was easy to cut government. Now he says it’s ‘hard.’
While Mr. Musk seemed to delight to inflicting pain on government workers — celebrating layoffs and cuts to the federal government by wielding a chain saw — his so-called Department of Government Efficiency never came close to achieving his goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget.
Along the way, he changed his tune on how difficult it was to find the massive cuts in the federal government that he had promised.
In February, Mr. Musk leaped onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference with a chain saw and remarked “how easy” it was to “save billions of dollars sometimes in, in an hour.”
But on Friday, he cast the work of vetting government spending as extraordinarily time-consuming and difficult, scrutinizing line items in a tedious and painstaking manner.
“It’s mostly just a lot of hard work,” he said.
DOGE will live on.
Despite Mr. Musk’s departure, DOGE isn’t going anywhere, both men said.
The president said Mr. Musk had “installed geniuses with an engineering mind-set and unbelievably talented people in computers” in various agencies.
“Elon is really not leaving,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s going to be back and forth. I have a feeling it’s his baby.”
Mr. Musk promised the $1 trillion in savings would eventually be found. The DOGE website currently claims $175 billion in cuts. But Mr. Musk’s team has repeatedly inflated its cost-saving efforts, at times posting erroneous claims that they later deleted.
“This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning,” he said, before comparing DOGE to Buddhism and saying “it’s like a way of life.”
Musk dodged questions about his drug use.
Mr. Musk refused to answer a reporter’s question regarding The New York Times’s report that he had been using drugs far more intensely than previously known.
He did not address the contents of the report, but attacked the paper’s credibility, before saying, “Let’s move on,” as Mr. Trump watched silently.
What about that black eye?
Mr. Musk appeared to be sporting a black eye. When a reporter asked about it, he explained that he had been “horsing around” with his 5-year-old son, X.
“I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’” Mr. Musk recalled. “And he did.”
Musk fades into the background.
Friday’s news conference was meant to honor Mr. Musk, but he was not the center of attention.
Members of the media allowed into the Oval Office directed a majority of their questions to the president, and Mr. Musk at times looked distracted, admiring the office’s ceiling and fidgeting as Mr. Trump held court on a variety of topics, including his signature spending bill and his desire to do away with the debt ceiling restraint on federal spending.
“I think you should get rid of it. It’s too catastrophic,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Musk did jump back into the question-and-answer portion of the news conference to express his displeasure with federal judges who have upheld limits on the administration’s power.
Trump officials have intensified their attacks on judges as the administration’s court loses have mounted, and Mr. Musk seemed to enjoy getting in some final shots against the judiciary.
He accused judges of “immense judicial overreach that is constitutional.”
“It needs to stop,” he said. “It’s gone too far.”
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
The post A Bruised Musk Leaves Washington: Takeaways From the Trump News Conference appeared first on New York Times.
