Elon Musk and President Donald Trump sat down for a cozy dinner Saturday night, according to a photo posted to X by the SpaceX CEO. And while it might seem odd for Musk to have a friendly meal with the man he publicly suggested was a sexual predator, this isn’t the first time they’ve been seen palling around since their messy political split back in June.
“Had a lovely dinner last night with @POTUS and @FLOTUS,” Musk tweeted on Sunday, using the official X handles for the President of the United States and First Lady Melania Trump. “2026 is going to be amazing!”
Had a lovely dinner last night with @POTUS and @FLOTUS.
2026 is going to be amazing! pic.twitter.com/1Oq35b1PEC
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2026
Trump spent New Year’s at his Mar-a-Lago resort and home in Palm Beach, Florida, where the dinner took place. Video posted to X appears to show the two men walking through a crowd at the club, where other attendees applauded.
Elon Musk showed up at Trump’s party in Mar-a-Lago tonight, even though just a few months ago he called him a pedophile who appeared in the #EpsteinFiles. This whole spectacle is disgusting. #EpsteinList pic.twitter.com/7c0v6yVVBR
— Freiheitsmensch (@Freiheit_m2030) January 5, 2026
Musk became a very public supporter of Trump during the 2024 presidential election, reportedly raising at least $277 million to get the president and other Republicans elected. After Trump won, he brought Musk on to take a chainsaw to the federal government under the banner of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which unlawfully fired about 300,000 federal workers and dismantled USAID. Hundreds of thousands of people have died globally due to the cuts, according to public health researchers at Boston University.
But Musk officially departed his role as the head of DOGE on May 30 during an absolutely bizarre appearance in the Oval Office, where the billionaire had a black eye and looked blitzed out of his mind, staring into space and gazing at the ceiling. After that, the fireworks truly started and the two men trade insults back and forth until Musk tweeted that Trump was in the Epstein files, a reference to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. (As it turns out, Musk is mentioned in documents released about Epstein as well.)
It wasn’t exactly news that Trump would be in the files, given the fact that many people had described Epstein and Trump as “best friends” for roughly 15 years before their own falling out in the mid-2000s. But it was shocking to see Musk say it so publicly, especially since the suggestion was that Trump himself may have preyed on little kids. Trump has denied all wrongdoing, though he’s given conflicting statements about why he and Epstein stopped hanging out.
Musk was last seen in the same room with Trump back in November 2025, when the president gave a dinner at the White House in honor of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). At the time, Trump entered the room by giving Musk a loving tap on the stomach. That just so happened to be the same day that the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to release Department of Justice files on Epstein. Some of those files have been released, but it sounds like DOJ could have over 5.2 million more files that haven’t been made public, a brazen violation of the law.
What did Trump and Musk talk about over the weekend? We don’t know that part yet. But there are so many potential topics for the two men to cover. There is, of course, the Epstein stuff. But Musk has varied business interests that rely on government funding and oversight, from SpaceX launches for customers like the Air Force to government approvals for his Neuralink brain implants. Trump briefly threatened to pull Musk’s SpaceX contracts after he accused the president of being in the files, and that appeared to scare Musk enough to get him to back down and delete his tweet about Epstein.
Tesla’s business has also been suffering since Musk came out to publicly support Trump and gave two Nazi salutes on the day of the president’s second inauguration. One can imagine Trump might be able to help Tesla by fast-tracking regulatory issues for products like the Cybercab or the Optimus robot, which Musk has bet his electric car company’s future on.
There’s also the topic of Venezuela, where Trump abducted President Nicolas Maduro this weekend. Maduro was brought to New York and appeared in court on Monday, where he professed his innocence against drug trafficking charges. Trump claims that the U.S. now runs the country despite not having a physical presence to do so. SpaceX announced Sunday that it would be providing free Starlink mobile internet service through Feb. 3. Musk cheered the abduction of Maduro, and it would be reasonable to assume that the billionaire, now the wealthiest person in the world at $730 billion, would have an interest in controlling parts of the Venezuelan economy.
There’s also Greenland, which Trump is fixated on and would be a strategic asset for guys with enormous military contracts—or for people hoping to turn a new U.S. territory into a playground for utopian state-capitalist experimentation. Greenland has just 50,000 people, making it a much more enviable place to start from scratch, as it were, for any crazy billionaire who wants to simulate a new feudal society. Or maybe Musk could just run demos of what living on Mars might look like. The possibilities are pretty endless if you’re both wealthy enough and evil enough.
But who knows? Things just keep getting weirder in the U.S., and everyone seems to just keep rolling with it, no matter how many laws and norms President Trump breaks. After all, this is the guy who tore down a third of the White House, plans to build a monument to himself across from the Lincoln Memorial, and is soon putting his own face on the $1 coin. Maybe Musk wants his own mug on some currency. Weirder things have happened in authoritarian states.
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