Elon Musk and Donald Trump joined forces before the 2024 presidential election to help each other out. Trump needed Musk’s money to buy votes and Musk needed Trump to decimate the federal government while making sure contracts with his own companies remained untouched. But the two men had a very messy falling out back in late May, when Musk departed his government role with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
But no matter how much the men may bicker in public, they keep trying to signal through their public statements that all is not lost. The men flip back and forth between loving and hating each other in a very public way, issuing their little tweets with petty jabs before tweeting again about how they support what the other is doing. Where does the relationship between the two men stand today? Judging by Trump’s post to Truth Social on Thursday, the president wants to make it clear he likes Musk. Well, at least he likes his businesses.
“Everyone is stating that I will destroy Elon’s companies by taking away some, if not all, of the large-scale subsidies he receives from the U.S. Government. This is not so! I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before!” Trump wrote.
“The better they do, the better the USA does, and that’s good for all of us. We are setting records every day, and I want to keep it that way!” Trump continued.
What prompted Trump’s tweet? It might have something to do with a recent article from the Wall Street Journal that claimed the Trump administration was trying to figure out ways to harm Musk by cancelling some of his SpaceX contracts. According to the newspaper, a senior official at the General Services Administration asked the Department of Defense to provide information on June 9, laying out all the contracts DoD had with SpaceX. Unfortunately for Trump, the vast majority of the contracts, with agencies like NASA, Space Force, and the Air Force, were deemed vital for the country.
But the fact that Trump was trying to figure out ways to pull contracts from Musk and his companies wasn’t exactly news last week. Trump had previously said he wanted to do that during a contentious back-and-forth that played out in the media. Trump first said he was “very disappointed” in Musk during a press conference in the White House on June 5, after the billionaire Tesla CEO had been criticizing the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The president even said Musk might be developing “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and made fun of Musk’s black eye in the Oval Office, saying, “Do you want a little makeup?”
The criticism prompted Musk to go nuclear, writing, “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” That set off Trump who noted on Truth Social, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Musk replied to Trump’s threat with his own tweet that same day: “In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.” Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, would later back off his threat to decommission the Dragon spacecraft. And while it’s not clear why, one imagines he had a little chat with the COO of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, the person who seems to be the person who actually runs the company. Folks at NASA really like Shotwell and distrust Musk, according to several reports.
We now know that Trump’s name is indeed in the Epstein files, and the president was told as much by the Department of Justice in May, according to the Wall Street Journal. The White House denies this is true, but Trump was friends with Epstein before they had a falling out in the mid-2000s and appeared in photos and videos together during the 1990s.
This on-again, off-again relationship between Musk and Trump is strange to see play out in public. But that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with men who seek the limelight. Both Musk and Trump have built their reputations by airing their grievances on social media. And the modern MAGA movement is built on whining about all the ways that people are oppressing you and being unfair. But the way that the relationship keeps swinging wildly between love and hate suggests these guys really do need each other.
Musk has formed his own political party, dubbed the America Party, as a threat to Trump’s candidates at the Congressional level. But it remains to be seen whether Musk really follows through on his third-party ideas. Musk, after all, said on a Tesla earnings call Wednesday that his vehicles would have unsupervised full self-driving by the end of the year. The billionaire has been saying that so much that his failed promises even have their own Wikipedia page.
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