After days of provocation, Donald Trump finally erupted at Elon Musk on Thursday—but the president and his team may already be preparing an olive branch, according to Politico.
White House aides have been urging the president to dial back his public attacks on Musk to prevent further escalation, and have scheduled a call on Friday with the billionaire to negotiate a truce, Politico reported late Thursday night.
And Trump himself apparently played the drama down in a phone call, telling the outlet of the fiery dispute, “Oh, it’s OK.”
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“It’s going very well, never done better,” Trump said, before bringing up his favorability ratings, claiming they are “through the roof.” (He has seen a slight uptick lately to a net approval rating of -4).
It seems Musk might be receptive to a truce. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO responded to a post on X from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman that called for Trump and Musk to “make peace for the benefit of our great country.”
“We are much stronger together than we are apart,” Ackman wrote.
“You’re not wrong,” Musk replied Thursday evening.
According to Politico, Trump’s aides also pushed him to soften his responses on Truth Social on Thursday as Musk repeatedly hurled bitter attacks.
Musk has for days been trying to tank Trump’s “big beautiful” spending bill, a key pillar of the president’s domestic agenda that Musk says would burden the nation with “crushingly unsustainable debt.”
Uncharacteristically, Trump declined for days to respond to the increasingly ferocious attacks. But he caved on Thursday after a wild posting spree from Musk.
“Elon is upset because we took the EV mandate which was a lot of money for electric vehicles,” Trump told reporters, still with relative calm. “They’re having a hard time the electric vehicles, and they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy. Elon knew this from the beginning.”
Mid-afternoon, Trump finally took to Truth Social, writing: “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”
But when Musk then went scorched earth with a deeply personal dig claiming Trump is “in the Epstein files,” Trump didn’t directly bite back on that claim, instead pushing back on the policy dispute.
“I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago. This is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress,” he posted.
The White House similarly worked to frame the fight as a disagreement over the budget bill, which includes a proposal to remove an electric vehicle tax credit that would impact Tesla.
“This is an unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ because it does not include the policies he wanted,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s reelection effort, stepped back last week as head of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. While cracks had begun to show in their high-profile friendship, tensions exploded this week, reaching a fever pitch on Thursday.
