Elon Musk let his senior aides have the floor. Only after they had finished did he turn to the bottle.
It was late on a Thursday night in May 2025, and roughly a dozen of Musk’s top DOGE deputies had squeezed into his unexpectedly modest West Wing office, hemmed in by walls covered with photos of the billionaire in his familiar black T-shirts.
The world’s richest man asked whether anyone wanted a taste of his Tesla-branded tequila, then pulled out a lightning-bolt-shaped bottle and began pouring it into plastic cups.
The group lifted the cups for a quick toast. Several aides passed, but Texas oilman Tyler Hassen drank his serving — then finished a second after a colleague handed him an untouched cup.
Within days, Musk was gone from the administration. Less than a week later, he and Donald Trump were locked in open conflict.
That bizarre West Wing moment is described in Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider, a new memoir by Hassen, one of the leading figures in Musk’s government cost-cutting operation, according to a copy obtained exclusively by Our News Outlet.
Hassen, a Houston-based energy executive, joined DOGE in January 2025 and was quickly given broad authority at the Interior Department by Musk.
In the months since the controversial department was wound down, most former DOGE staffers have either erased their public profiles or avoided speaking on the record. Hassen has chosen a different route, breaking ranks with a memoir that lays bare the internal power struggles that engulfed Musk’s agency.
Musk poured shots of his Tesla-branded tequila into plastic cups just before his falling out with Trump, according to the book
The surreal scene is revealed in Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider, a new memoir by Hassen, one of the most senior figures in Musk’s cost-cutting army, according to a copy exclusively obtained by Our News Outlet
Hassen (pictured at the White House) has released the first memoir form a member of Musk’s DOGE that reflects on his time at the agency
Set for release on September 22, the book takes readers inside Musk’s trench warfare with the federal bureaucracy, his bitter falling-out with Trump and the ensuing media frenzy before ending with a call for ‘DOGE 2.0.’
Hassen writes that the toast came at one of Musk’s last meetings with his team, on the same day, he says, that the billionaire had clashed with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The atmosphere in the room was heavier than usual, he recalls, with frustration crowding out the team’s normal optimism.
‘Even great tequila couldn’t mask the change in the room,’ Hassen writes.
Musk’s opposition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill ultimately drove the world’s richest man from a White House he had spent hundreds of millions helping Trump reclaim in November 2024.
Hassen and his fellow Musk loyalists inside DOGE, meanwhile, watched helplessly as lawmakers unraveled months of their work by loading Trump’s bill with billions of dollars in new spending.
Musk, unlike Hassen, was more vocal about his opposition.
Within days of leaving the government, Musk had turned his fire on Trump’s signature legislation, branding the bill a ‘disgusting abomination.’
Behind-the-scenes, Vance began working to repair the rift within a day of the blow-up
Musk’s ultimate falling out with Trump came after he accused the president of being linked to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein
He then went much further 48 hours later by claiming the Jeffrey Epstein files had not been released because Trump was in them.
Trump the next day fired back while sitting in the Oval Office, telling reporters he was ‘very disappointed in Elon.’ Trump has consistently denied that his past relationship with Epstein played a role in his administration’s handling of the financier’s investigative files.
The president later unloaded on Truth Social, claiming he had forced Musk out, accusing the billionaire of going ‘crazy’ and threatening to strip his companies of billions of dollars in federal contracts and subsidies.
The mudslinging was even nastier behind closed doors, with The Washington Post reporting that Trump worked the phones and branded his former ally a ‘big-time drug addict.’
Musk, who insists he is not an addict and that his ketamine use is prescribed, shot back that Trump would have lost the election without him, and even endorsed a post calling for the president to be impeached and replaced with JD Vance.
Behind-the-scenes, Vance began working to repair the rift within a day of the blow-up, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The vice president believed that with insults that were already severe in public, there was little left to lose in trying to lower the temperature.
Over the following months, as Vance continued talking with the billionaire and his allies, Musk shelved plans to launch a third party to avoid jeopardizing the relationship.
Hassen, a longtime oil executive, was one of Musk’s top deputies in DOGE
Trump reportedly remains deeply distrustful of Musk and has told his closest advisers their relationship will never be as close as it once was
Vance, for his part, believed Musk was too valuable a figure for Republicans to lose, the report said.
The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, also stayed close to Musk, and his firm 1789 Capital invested in xAI, SpaceX and Neuralink around the time of the split.
The peace effort between Trump and Musk culminated in a May reconciliation, when the Tesla billionaire boarded Air Force One to join the president at his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.
There, Musk told Trump exactly what he wanted to hear, pledging to spend at least $100 million to help Republicans retain control of Congress in November.
Yet despite the temporary ceasefire, Trump reportedly remains deeply distrustful of Musk and has told his closest advisers their relationship will never be as close as it once was.
For Hassen, however, he had a front-row seat when their relationship fell apart.
When Musk and Trump started trading jabs online, he recalls freezing as texts from colleagues flooded his phone, his stomach in knots and sweat forming as his enthusiasm for DOGE sank to its lowest point.
The threat of DOGE being dismantled felt so real that Hassen headed to the department gift shop and bought National Park Service golf balls, T-shirts for his daughter and a Yeti mug for his wife, keepsakes in case he was about to be shown the door.
Musk deleted the Epstein posts days later, but the tequila toast had already taken on a different meaning.
It had been a goodbye, even if none of them realized it at the time.
The Daily Mail reached out to Musk for comment on the book’s claims.
