Elon Musk stood next to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Friday, but the physical proximity belied a growing philosophical divide between two of the world's most powerful men, resulting in the tech mogul's abrupt announcement that he is departing Washington — without having achieved his goal of decimating the federal government.
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Trump took a more charitable view of Musk's tenure during a sprawling news conference in which he also declined to rule out pardoning Sean "Diddy" Combs, who is on trial on charges of sex trafficking and other alleged crimes; said he dislikes "the concept" of former first lady Jill Biden being forced to testify before Congress about her husband's mental fitness; and predicted again that Iran is on the cusp of making a deal that would suspend its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
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In a battle of plutocrats against populists, Bannon, a longtime advocate for reducing the size and scope of government, found Musk's methods and policy preferences to be sharply at odds with those of the MAGA movement. So, ultimately, did Musk, who broke with Trump repeatedly on agenda items as narrow as limiting visas for foreign workers and as broad as Trump's signature "big beautiful" budget bill — which Musk belittled for threatening to add trillions of dollars to the national debt.
“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," Musk said in an interview with CBS' "Sunday Morning," which will air this weekend.
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"I love the gold on the ceiling," he said.
Musk has argued that inertia throttled his efforts to reduce government spending — a conclusion that raises questions about whether he was naive about the challenge of the mission he undertook.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington Post this week. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
On Friday, he drew an implicit parallel between American government and the Nazi regime that committed a genocide, invoking the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt used to describe the atrocities in Germany.
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