By Aaron Gregg —
Elon Musk now says he ‘went too far’ in some of his posts about Trump
Elon Musk walked back some of his criticism of President Donald Trump early Wednesday in an apparent attempt to mend their relationship after last week’s dramatic falling out.
“I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said in a post on X shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern time. “They went too far.”
Musk did not say which of his posts he regrets. Still, the rare walk-back from a billionaire known for acerbic social media posts suggests he is trying to defuse tensions with the White House after the president threatened to retaliate against his companies.
Musk’s businesses have received at least $38 billion in government funding over the years, according to a Washington Post analysis, and they remain intricately tied into government funding and policy. SpaceX is a key launch provider for NASA and the Defense Department.
Tesla relies on tax credits to bolster consumer demand for its expensive electric vehicles, and it will need the cooperation of federal regulators as it rolls out self-driving taxis to compete with those run by Alphabet-owned Waymo.
The spat started last week when Musk, who was tasked with trimming the federal bureaucracy through the U.S. DOGE service, publicly criticized the White House–backed tax bill as wasteful. The falling-out accelerated Thursday as the two men blasted each otheron their respective social media platforms.
In a stream of X posts, Musk publicly mused about starting a third party, called for Trump’s impeachment and said Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession in the second half of the year.
Trump responded by saying the easiest way to cut spending would be to “terminate” government subsidies and contracts going to Musk’s businesses, and later called Musk a “big-time drug addict” in a phone call.
Musk later asserted that Trump is included in unreleased files about the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and threatened to decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which NASA relies on to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station – an assertion he later walked back.
By Tuesday, Musk had pivoted to other topics, posting about the Los Angeles protests and Tesla’s upcoming robotaxi launch. He took to criticizing Stephen K. Bannon, another erstwhile Trump ally.
It’s unclear whether Trump and Musk have really made up, or whether their political alliance will continue. Trump said in a recent podcast interview that he could reconcile with Musk, but added that it wasn’t high on his list of priorities.
“I guess I could, but, you know, we have to straighten out the country, and my sole function now is getting the country back to a level higher than it’s ever been,” Trump said in an interview with the New York Post columnist Miranda Devine that was conducted before Wednesday’s post from Musk.
“I don’t know what his problem is, really,” Trump said of Musk. “I haven’t thought too much about it – him – in the last little while.”
Musk officially left the White House in late May, but he said DOGE would continue without him.
Tesla stock sank 14 percent Thursday before recovering some of that value in the intervening days. On Wednesday, the stock was up about 2 percent shortly after trading began.
