"Do you want a little makeup? We'll get you a little makeup," said President Donald Trump to the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.
That, at least, was Trump's account of the moments before Musk went on camera in the Oval Office to end his term as a "special government employee" last May, sporting a black eye that he blamed on his five-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii.
The journey of the tech mogul as “first buddy’ of the world's most powerful man was among the strangest and most chaotic stories of 2025 — and it didn’t end there.
As Trump embarked on his first year back in the White House, Musk was brought in as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency”, mounting a campaign to slash the federal budget.
The effort was unprecedented. Thousands of scientific and medical research grants were cancelled or frozen, affecting 74,000 patients in clinical trials, and tens of thousands of federal employees were laid off or placed on administrative leave. The United States Agency for International Development - which Musk declared he had fed “through the wood chipper” - had 80 percent of its aid programs cancelled, nearly all employees were put on leave and its offices closed.
While some of the cuts have since been reversed by court order, precisely what DOGE cut, and who was responsible for each decision, remains shrouded in secrecy.
Perhaps inevitably in the president’s mercurial world, his partnership with Musk was always destined to be short-lived. But when the relationship imploded, it was accompanied by a vicious war of words that had far-reaching impacts. Twelve months on, the two men are reportedly undergoing a ”fragile” reconciliation.
DOGE: From meme to menace
It started as a joke, and not a very good one.
In early 2010, photos of a Shiba Inu dog named Kabosu went viral, spawning thousands of memes and a spoof cryptocurrency. By the 2024 election, the word ‘doge’ — a mispelling of ‘dog’ had become one of Musk's favorite in-jokes.
Thus was born DOGE, an acronym for the “Department of Government Efficiency”. Pitched by Musk in summer 2024 as an advisory commission to eliminate “wasteful” spending and maximize taxpayer value, it was never a real government “department” (only Congress can create those).
Musk — a major Trump donor during the 2024 election cycle — promised that DOGE would cut roughly $2 trillion from the federal budget.
In private, Musk reportedly had more radical ideas. According to The New York Times, he’d mused to attendees at a Republican fundraising dinner in 2023 that he could rapidly downsize government bureaucracy by getting direct access to federal computer systems.
Those dreams moved closer to reality with Trump’s election win in November 2024. In the weeks that followed, Musk’s plan for radical cost-cutting was refined in backroom brainstorms with top Trump aides Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, the Times reported.
Instead of setting up a mere advisory committee, Trump made Musk a special government employee and gave his team control of the U.S. Digital Service, allowing him to embed staff members in agencies across the federal government.
After the inauguration, this hand-picked squad — including a 19-year-old programmer with a checkered past known online as "Big Balls", and a 25-year-old with a history of racist online posts — began demanding, and often gaining, access to, email servers, databases, and payment systems. Career officials who tried to resist them resigned or were removed from their posts.
Federal employees were fired in their thousands and grants cut off without warning. In the chaos, it was rarely clear who had ordered what and under what legal authority. But according to The Washington Post, Musk's team effectively shut down USAID by blocking its payments in the government system.
AIDS patients in Kenya, Senegal, Sudan, and across sub-Saharan Africa suddenly lost access to lifesaving medication, which had been provided by local groups but funded by the U.S., under a Bush-era program called PEPFAR.
NGOs in Ethiopia were forced to stop handing out food after the payments system that funded their purchases stopped functioning. Hundreds of USAID shipments of anti-malaria drugs and other medical supplies, intended for children in more than 40 countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, were delayed or never delivered.
All in all, the health economist Brooke Nichols estimates that U.S. aid freezes led to the deaths of nearly 250,000 adults and more than 510,000 children, and could lead to four million extra deaths by 2030.
"This is a heist. It’s a hostile takeover by malicious actors of our entire government," one federal employee told ProPublica.
Musk leaned into the outrage, waving a chainsaw around on stage at CPAC, the major annual gathering for American conservatives that February. "I am become meme," he gleefully declared. "I'm living the meme." (Musk later said he regretted the stunt, admitting his behavior “lacked empathy.”)
Trump and Musk appeared to be close in those early months of 2025, attending press conferences and Cabinet meetings together. Musk dubbed himself the "first buddy", while Trump joked: "Elon won't go home. I can't get rid of him."
In March, Trump responded to a slump in Tesla sales — which account for a giant chunk of Musk’s estimated $766 billionn fortune — by turning the White House lawn into an impromptu car showroom and urging Americans to buy more of the electric vehicles.
“I think [Musk] has been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people, and I just want people to know that he can’t be penalized for being a patriot,” he told reporters.
"Wow! Everything's computer!" the president added, as he looked over a Tesla’s touchscreen controls.
Early skirmishes — and that black eye
As an engineer like Musk should know, every action tempts an equal and opposite reaction. So it was with DOGE.
Lawsuits against DOGE’s actions came thick and fast, with multiple judges ruling that Musk and his cronies had likely acted illegally. In an NBC News poll in March 2025, a plurality of voters supported the cost-cutting idea of DOGE but disagreed with its strategy.
Tesla sales started to slump globally as angry customers boycotted Musk's company. Tesla shares crashed by more than half from a peak of $479.86 in December 2024 to $217.80 in early April 2025 (though they have since recovered).
The company also suffered vandalism and even the alleged firebombing of a showroom in New Mexico, with Trump branding the culprits "domestic terrorists."
Musk’s favorability rating in polls also began to plummet, hitting -14 percent by April 1.
Inside the federal government, knives were being drawn. A planned security briefing with Musk on America's war plans against China was scuttled after news of it leaked to the press. Experts and reporters questioned why a private businessman with no official government job, and enormous potential conflicts of interests in China, would get access to such critical military secrets.
Meanwhile, one Trump official told Rolling Stone: "Talking to the guy is sometimes like listening to really rusty nails on a chalkboard. He’s just the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with, and that is saying something."
Under this pressure, Musk’s bromance with the president appeared to disintegrate. In March, according to Politico, Trump convened his Cabinet to remind them that they, and not Musk, had final say over their departments. In May, Musk complained in an interview with The Washington Post that DOGE had unfairly been made "the whipping boy for everything" wrong with the new administration.
Special government employees are limited by law to work no more than 130 days a year, so Musk had always been meant to leave the White House in May 2025.
At his farewell press conference on May 30, speculation about Musk’s black eye abounded. About six weeks earlier, the Tesla and SpaceX mogul had reportedly gotten into a “WWE’-style shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that was so intense it had to be broken up by aides.
“Is your eye okay?” one reporter asked Musk.
The tech mogul laughed it off. "Yeah, no, I was just horsing around with lil' X, and I said 'go ahead, punch me in the face'. And he did. Turns out, even a five year old punching you in the face actually does [damage]. I didn't really feel much at the time, but I guess it bruises up."
The press conference culminated with Trump presenting Musk with a ceremonial golden key to the White House.
“Elon gave an incredible service.” Trump said. “There’s nobody like him, and he had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame, because he's an incredible patriot.”
A feud goes nuclear
Less than a week later, that bonhomie appeared to have dissipated entirely.
"Time to drop the really big bomb. @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!" Musk posted on X on June 5.
“The Epstein files” referred to a cache of unpublished documents related to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which could shed light on allegations that he also trafficked victims for elite “clients.” Trump had vowed on the 2024 campaign trail to release all the documents, but the process is still ongoing.
The president, who was friends with Epstein in the late Nineties and early 2000s, has said he cut off their relationship some time between 2004 and 2007. Epstein died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.
For a president obsessed with winning, Musk’s next X post on June 5 may have stung even more.
"Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Musk claimed.
Signs of tension had been accumulating for weeks. In April, Musk had publicly denounced another Trump aide, Peter Navarro, and in May he admitted during a CBS News interview that he was “disappointed” by the “massive spending” in Trump’s flagship ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’.
After his key-granting ceremony, Musk was reportedly disgruntled by Trump's apparent sudden refusal to install his friend and longtime business associate Jared Isaacman as head of NASA, the federal space agency which regularly awards lucrative contracts to SpaceX.
On June 3, Musk further decried Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill as “a massive, outrageous... disgusting abomination” that would “defeat all the cost savings achieved” by DOGE.
On June 5, asked about Musk’s comments by reporters, Trump admitted he was “very disappointed in Elon”, accusing Musk of turning against the bill because it cut electric vehicle subsidies.
In the space of an hour, Musk posted on X denying Trump’s claims and accusing him of “ingratitude”. Alongside his claim about the election, he made a flurry of attacks at Republican congresspeople who’d backed the bill.
In response, Trump posted on Truth Social claiming he’d asked Musk to leave government service because he was “wearing thin” and threatened to yank contracts for his rocket company, SpaceX.
Musk in turn accused Trump of telling an “obvious lie” and said he would found a new political party to challenge Republicans. He also threatened to “decommission” SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft — which would leave the U.S. with no currently approved method of retrieving astronauts from the International Space Station, outside of Russia’s Soyuz program.
The market reaction was immediate, wiping an estimated $34 billion off Musk's personal fortune and cutting Tesla's shares by as much as 15 percent over the course of June 5.
Musk later deleted many of his posts, and expressed regret for attacking Trump. But the social media attacks continued sporadically.
On July 1, Musk threatened to donate money to Republican congressman Thomas Massie, a Trump critic.
Trump then told reporters outside the White House that he would "take a look" at deporting Musk (The billionaire was born in South Africa and is a naturalized U.S. citizen).
The aftermath — and what comes next
In November, Tesla shareholders gathered to award Musk $878 billion pay package, the largest ever offer to a corporate CEO. His personal wealth has more than recovered, soaring to a new height of nearly $800 billion.
Though the deal is conditional on meeting ambitious targets, it was a striking vote of confidence in Musk — even as Tesla lost its title as the world's best-selling EV maker to Chinese rival BYD over the course of 2025.
Meanwhile, Musk and Trump appear to be slowly reconciling. According to reports, Vice President JD Vance has been working the phones and acting as a backchannel to Musk.
In November, Isaacman was re-nominated and ultimately confirmed to lead NASA. Musk reposted Trump’s announcement of the appointment on X, adding a heart emoji and a rocket ship emoji.
At a memorial service for the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, the two men shook hands — though Trump was quick to downplay the significance of the moment by saying it was “nothing to do with” any reconciliation.
Two months later, the president was seen giving Musk a friendly pat on the arm at a dinner in Washington D.C. honoring Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Soon, Musk had more or less confirmed that he would once again devote his fortune to electing GOP candidates in the 2026 midterms. "America is toast if the radical left wins," he said. “They will open the floodgates to illegal immigration and fraud.”
On January 5, Musk confirmed with a photograph posted on X that he had enjoyed a "lovely dinner" with the president and First Lady Melania Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Musk's SpaceX is reportedly in line to win a $2 billion satellite contract as part of Trump's Golden Dome missile defense project. The company continues to garner contracts from the U.S. Space Force to launch missile tracking satellites and other experimental military hardware.
The Pentagon announced last week that it would integrate Musk’s Grok AI chatbot into its military network. Grok is currently being investigated by multiple governments for allowing its users to generate non-consensual synthetic pornography of anyone they like (including people under 18). X has since said it is blocking users from requesting sexualized images of “real people”, and that there will be “consequences” for those who try.
In the meantime, Trump has enlisted Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system to help Iranian protesters evade the country’s near-total internet blackout. Demonstrations against high inflation and food prices have spread across the country since late December, leading to a government crackdown that reportedly killed at least 646 protesters.
"Elon's great. I say about Elon, he's 80 percent super genius, and 20 percent he makes mistakes. But he's a good guy. He's a well-meaning person," Trump told reporters on January 4 aboard Air Force One. "But he's a good guy. He's a well-meaning person.”
Trump says he has a top choice to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair
House Republicans vote to lift 20-year ban on mining near pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area
Trump appears to confuse Greenland with Iceland in speech on taking territory
Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes asks Trump to commute her sentence
SNL criticized for releasing ICE sketch after it was cut from live broadcast
Minnesota toy shop claims DHS began auditing it after owner criticized ICE on TV
