Elon Musk attended a dinner Tuesday at the White House, held by President Donald Trump in honor of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). And it seems like we can officially call it. The public spat between Musk and Trump is done. For now.
How can anyone be sure the messiness between the two men is over? When President Trump entered the room with MBS, he gave Musk a pat on the stomach.
Trump gave a speech at the dinner, livestreamed by major media outlets, praising Saudi Arabia’s pledge to invest $1 trillion in the U.S. The president also announced he was elevating the country to a “major non-NATO-ally,” which means the two countries will work on economic and military issues more closely.
Trump also gave a shout out to Nvidia and Apple CEO Tim Cook from the stage for “all of the money that you’re investing in the United States.” The president didn’t mention Musk in his speech, but who needs a shout-out when you’ve got yourself a belly pat.
The White House dinner landed on a particularly odd day, with the U.S. House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly Tuesday to release Department of Justice files on late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The House voted 427-1 in favor of releasing the files, with Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana, as the lone vote against. Soon after, the Senate agreed to deem the legislation as passed without even a vote, and it’s now on its way to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.
It’s unclear when Trump might sign the Epstein Files Transparency Act since he’s a little busy tonight. But Musk’s presence at the East Room event is amusing, given how the billionaire oligarch exited his formal role in government on May 30. Musk was the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before he left in a bizarre spectacle witnessed by reporters in the Oval Office of the White House.
Musk’s supposed “exit” from government was about personal relationships more than professional ones. SpaceX didn’t lose any contracts, for example, but he did briefly lose the respect of the man he’d helped install at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It started when Musk showed up to the White House on May 30, with a black eye and an awkward demeanor (Musk stared up at the ceiling at one point), though the two men tried to make it sound like they were parting ways amicably.
Musk spent the next few days tweeting his criticism of the Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” arguing it didn’t do enough to restrict spending. And Trump eventually started pushing back at Musk, explaining by June 5 that he must have “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and ridiculing his black eye.
Later that day, Musk exploded on X, accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files. You don’t need to take Musk’s word for it, given the fact that reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates Pam Bondi has told Trump he’s in the files. The question is what being in the files actually means for Trump. The president’s name was in many of the emails recently released by a House subcommittee investigating Epstein.
After Musk’s public blow-up with Trump (he eventually deleted the tweets about Epstein), the billionaire pledged to start his own political party. Musk positioned his new party, dubbed the America Party, as something that would be more reasonable than the current Democratic and Republican parties. Musk, despite being a far-right kook, has often branded himself as a centrist in a world that’s gone too “woke,” with suggestions that the Overton Window has shifted to only make it look like he’s an extremist.
Not long after his falling out with Trump, Musk was asked on X where he would use his new political party to release the Epstein files, and he replied with an emoji reading “100.” However, Musk has let the idea for his party fizzle out completely. Perhaps Musk realized that third parties rarely make a dent in the U.S. system, which is designed to favor the two major parties. The best demonstration of this bias is the fact that Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote in the 1992 presidential election and didn’t receive a single Electoral College vote. The system is simply rigged against third parties.
Musk’s expected arrival at the White House on Tuesday won’t be his first physical brush with Trump since their messy break-up in June. The two men were seen talking at a memorial service for MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk in September. Members of DOGE are reportedly planning a party in Austin, Texas, this weekend to celebrate the thawing of Musk and Trump’s relationship, according to the New York Times. Though it seems unclear whether Musk himself will show up for that one.
Other notable attendees of the dinner at the White House on Tuesday, according to the New York Times: Paramount CEO David Ellison, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. is also slated to attend.
Musk is firmly back on the Trump train, no matter what he said in their months apart. The billionaire told allies back in August that he’s worried a political party would siphon off Republican voters and hurt the Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, according to the Wall Street Journal. It might seem weird for Musk to cozy up with Trump again after all that’s happened with the Epstein files, but as Gizmodo has frequently argued, these guys need each other. They clearly dislike each other personally, but oligarchies make for strange bedfellows.
Trump has built a powerful political machine and he holds the keys to federal contracts in the world’s wealthiest country. Musk is the world’s wealthiest person and he needs those federal contracts to keep his empire afloat. They don’t have to like hanging out together, but they have to work in tandem if they’re going to build the world they both want to see. It’s a world where they stay at the top in business and government. And it’s a world where masked men round up tens of thousands of immigrants (and the occasional Native American) in a quest to make America more white.
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