One of Elon Musk's final evenings in President Donald Trump's White House ended with an impromptu toast that, according to a former aide, amounted to a farewell nobody in the room recognized at the time.

The tech billionaire and then-head of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency produced a lightning bolt-shaped bottle of Tesla-branded tequila — a product the automaker has sold since 2020 — and poured it 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.

DOGE had been created by executive order in the first days of Trump's second term, repurposing the existing U.S. Digital Service, and Musk, who served as a special government employee, had publicly floated savings targets as high as $2 trillion. By the time of the toast, courts had blocked or rolled back several of the initiative's actions, and independent reviews of its savings claims had documented errors and totals far short of those goals.

"Even great tequila couldn't mask the change in the room," Hassen wrote, describing an unusually heavy atmosphere as Musk's allies watched lawmakers begin to undo their cost-cutting campaign with billions in new spending — a tax-and-spending package the Congressional Budget Office projected would add trillions of dollars to federal deficits over the coming decade, the very kind of outlay DOGE had been built to cut. The toast came on the same day that Musk clashed heatedly with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a confrontation prior reporting tied to a dispute over the administration's choice to lead the Internal Revenue Service, the report said Thursday.

Musk's exit followed quickly; he had already told Tesla investors in April that his government work would soon wind down. Days later, he was officially out of the MAGA administration, and 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, in turn, 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."

The rupture, however, did not last. 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 — a pledge within reach for the 2024 cycle's largest individual political donor, who poured more than $250 million into that election, most of it supporting Trump.