A blue eye, a golden key and a crashing experiment: Elon Musk’s last day in the White House reveals how thin the balance of the tech billionaire is in truth.
Bastian Brauns reports from Washington
Perhaps it was the most interesting question that a reporter asked Elon Musk in the White House on this last day. While Donald Trump seemed rather listless to his advisor for his work, the multi -illiardaire was next to the US President’s desk in the Oval Office. Musk looked restless, fidgety, his eyes continued to walk around in the room. However, his blue and swollen right eye was particularly striking. So a journalist asked: “What happened to your eye?”
Musk’s answer: He was not near the French first lady, which Emmanuel Macron recently came into the face. He said the blue eye made his five -year -old son X. He offered him to really hit him in the face. “Do it, hit my face. And then he did,” said Musk. He was a little surprised at the bruise. And Trump fed in between: “I didn’t notice.”
video | The curious reason behind Musk’s blue eye
After 130 days as the main person responsible for Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency (Authority for Government Efficiency), Elon Musk also gets away with a blue eye. The billion-dollar Tesla technology and self-appointed destroyer of the US bureaucracy is no longer a consultant for President Trump. If it is desired, he is of course still ready, according to Musk.
How lean his balance is cleared on Friday when Trump said during the press conference in the Oval Office that the numbers are “considerable, but will become even more important over time”. Translated, this means that a lot has to happen to achieve the promised savings and efficiency goals. If so, you have to remember Elon, of course, and thank him, said Trump. In the end, it could even be $ 3 trillion, said Musk. Then Trump presented him with a wooden box with a golden key. He would only get very special people from him.
Which door should put the key in? Maybe in the next air castle. With his departure from the White House, an illusion also expires: that an individual entrepreneur, armed primarily with self -confidence and ruthlessness, can just convert a state apparatus grown over decades according to his ideas. Something like that just takes time, said Trump.
Elon Musk had promised the American taxpayers no less than gigantic savings of $ 2 trillion. The fully -announced savings have been corrected to 1 trillion, then $ 170 billion in the course of the past few weeks. And even these figures are increasingly doubted or relativized by court decisions. The list did nothing that Trump made, and also not his favorite example, according to which, so far, tens of millions of dollars have been wasted for gender conversions of mice.
What is left of Musk’s ambitions is above all this impression after 130 days: chaos, uncertainty, data protection scandals, numerous pending legal proceedings, legal defeats, internal power struggles and embarrassing backing. There are also Musk’s massive loss of public reputation, his publicly discussed drug and relationship chapades and the sales figures of its electric cars that come worldwide and the crash of the Tesla share.
This is mainly due to his obvious self -overestimation and poor communication skills – internally and externally. His propagated vision for the dog was less well thought of a well thought -out reform, but a demolition bulb. Musk ruthlessly let them crash into the Washington authorities and ministries. Criticism came not only from the opposition. The resentment in his own camp about the new powerful man on Trump’s side, who has meanwhile even referred to as a shadow president, grew from day one.
