The bromance between President Donald Trump and Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk seems dead now that Musk has departed from his role at the Department of Goverment Efficiency (DOGE), leaving Trump wondering Musk delivered on his promises to cut $1 trillion from the annual budget. 

'Was it all bull****?' Trump reportedly asked, according to a source close to the situation.

DOGE claims that $175 billion, or about one-sixth of the promised amount, was cut.

When NPR tried to confirm the cuts, it came up with a figure of $63 billion, while the BBC could only confirm $32 billion in cuts.

Cutting the fat

DOGE's cuts have led to 280,000 government layoffs since February, and will be largely responsible for an expected uptick in the overall unemployment rate, from 4.1% to 4.2%.

Labor is expensive, and it's a good thing to cut the fat in many of these agencies, which have become bloated and wasteful over the years.

But even $175 billion in cuts seems like a drop in the bucket when Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" currently before Congress seeks to add another $4 trillion to the deficit.

And reportedly, there were problems with the way Musk ran DOGE, including a lack of communication with the White House about staffing and the exact cuts suggested by the agency.

Backlash on Tesla

On the other hand, Musk faced a lot of backlash from the public about his work with DOGE, including vandalism of Teslas and dealerships, and trouble with the board over his absence.

Musk began to complain about the toll the work was taking on his companies, and decreased his visits to the White House as time went on.

He also criticized Trump over tariffs, suggesting that they were bad for business.

Everyone knows that Musk is no conservative--he just sees Trump as the lesser of two evils right now.

He's an eccentric billionaire with ideas that aren't exactly mainstream, but most of his customer base at Tesla are extremely liberal and see his work with Trump as a betrayal.

It's too bad, because given enough time Musk probably could have come up with an algorithm to optimize federal spending and solve the budget crisis before the debt sinks us, but his humanity got in the way and now we as a country are probably doomed to drown in debt.