The Trump-Musk bromance may be going strong, but it wasn’t love at first sight for the first buddies.
A Politico report revealed that President Donald Trump and billionaire tech bro Elon Musk weren’t too fond of each other when they met at the White House in 2020 to discuss the creation of a Tesla factory.
Trump reportedly scheduled a meeting with Musk after he caught wind of the Tesla CEO’s plans to establish a megafactory in Mexico instead of Texas.
A person who was within earshot of Musk at that meeting told Politico that prior to the meeting, while at the White House, he called Trump “a f---ing moron” behind his back.
“We walk into the Oval, and he kind of looks around, and he’s looking around,” the source said. “He’s like, ‘Gosh, I tell you. I mean, I was just in China and man, their palaces just make the White House kind of look more like an outhouse.’”
Trump was said to have quietly fumed, according to the report, as then-National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and four staffers stood by in silence.
The president reportedly claimed to have two Teslas in his car collection but appeared to struggle to understand how the supercharging network worked, prompting Musk and a colleague to explain.
Both of them did agree, however, that COVID, which was not yet a full-blown public health crisis at the time, “was basically the flu and people are freaking out for no reason,” the person told Politico.
Musk served on three advisory councils to the Trump administration in 2017: the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, the Strategic and Policy Forum, and another group focused on infrastructure.
When Trump announced in June 2017 that he was pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, Musk made an exit. “Am departing presidential councils,” he wrote on X. “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
In 2022, Musk responded to a video of Trump ripping him on the campaign trail, saying, “It’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”
A day later, Trump took to his platform Truth Social to flame the billionaire.
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, “drop to your knees and beg,” and he would have done it,” he said, posting a photo of them together in the Oval Office.
The two have since made amends, thanks in large part to massive donations from Musk to the GOP during the 2024 election.
Still, their relationship hits its fair share of rough patches. A Michael Wolff book chronicling Trump’s 2024 campaign said the president was “bewildered” by Musk’s behavior at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally where the billionaire famously bounced around onstage, at times baring his stomach.
“What the f--- is wrong with this guy? And why doesn’t his shirt fit?” Trump reportedly said.
Shortly after he returned to the White House, Trump tasked Musk with slashing government spending and upending the federal government through the controversial Department of Government Efficiency.
