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The relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk went from fairy tale to horror story very fast. The two started as fast friends during the campaign, and then once Trump was elected, Musk was holding court with Trump, giving press conferences alongside the President from the Oval Office. But then things took a turn pretty quickly, with Musk taking aim at Trump on X (formerly Twitter). The feud began escalating on social media, with Musk suggesting Trump was on the Epstein List and that was the reason the list wasn’t being released. Ouch.
“Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after their public fallout. And things got worse, as the two exchanged a back-and-forth about Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
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“He’s worn that hat, ‘Trump was right about everything’ — and I am right about the great big, beautiful, bill,” Trump said.
Musk, meanwhile, called the bill “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination.” In fact, Musk was so disgusted by it that he even suggested he was ready to form a third party called the America Party, which he said would represent voters unhappy with the two major political parties. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, Musk is now backing away from that idea and is reluctant to alienate powerful Republicans and siphon off GOP voters. Instead, Musk is believed to be considering backing US VP Vance if he decides to run for President in 2028. Trump cannot run in 2028.
Vance had been urging Musk to remain committed to the Republican Party publicly. “My advice to Elon would be to try to fix the Republican Party. Try to push it in your own way. Disagree with me all you want, disagree with the president of the United States, but don’t pretend that you can make a big difference with a third party,” Vance said.
“I think Elon would make a much bigger difference if he stayed loyal to President Trump’s Republican Party, and if he had disagreements, express those disagreements from the inside as opposed from the outside,” he continued.
Though this isn’t exactly a sign that Trump and Musk are personally on good terms these days, it’s at least a sign that things have cooled off and no one’s going to do anything to jeopardize the status quo. At least not now. Neither of them has said anything about the other on social media lately, and the last time Trump mentioned Musk online, in late July, he posted on Truth Social that he wants Musk and his businesses to “thrive,” because his success is good for the country.
Similarly, though President Trump had suggested he wanted to terminate Elon Musk’s federal contracts, a review of SpaceX’s contracts found that he couldn’t just do that because those agreements were actually critical for the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Kinda what happens when you give one company so many important contracts, you can’t just then cancel them all.
And, last week, Trump took another step that was thought to benefit Musk and Jeff Bezos as well. Trump was said to be looking to relax environmental rules for commercial spaceship companies. The President signed an executive order titled “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,” explaining it’s of the utmost importance to national security that the private rocket-ship industry find a way to increase launches “substantially” by 2030. The only two companies that benefit from this are SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Not overt friendship, but at least not overt animosity either. We’ll see how long that lasts.
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