Elon Musk has issued a groveling retraction over the attacks he launched against Donald Trump during their explosive public spat last week.
“I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,” Musk wrote on X Wednesday.
The walk-back is the clearest sign yet that Musk may be trying to smooth things over and revive their fractured alliance. Musk offered an olive branch by resharing Trump’s Truth Social posts in a bid to show solidarity with the president amid the ongoing riots in Los Angeles.
During a furious posting spree, which followed a period of growing tensions between the pair, Musk said the president’s tariffs “will cause a recession in the second half of this year.” Musk also agreed with a post from on X that Trump should be “impeached” and replaced with Vice President JD Vance.
Musk, who pumped over $250 million into the president’s 2024 campaign, also claimed during his rampage: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election.” He also dropped what he called the “really big bomb” that truly ignited the feud.
“Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public,” Musk posted.
Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire sex offender, died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting federal sex trafficking charges.
The Justice Department has vowed to release files related to Epstein, but has so far only made public documents that the Justice Department described as “previously leaked but never released in a formal capacity.”
Trump and Epstein were at the very least acquaintances, with the president calling the financier a “terrific guy” he had known for 15 years in a 2002 interview with New York Magazine. Epstein also described himself as being Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years” in bombshell tapes first published by the Daily Beast last year.
There is no evidence the president is connected to Epstein’s offending, and the pair fell out around 2004 over a real estate deal. Trump also shrugged off Musk’s claims about his links to Epstein, calling the allegations “old news” and saying that: “Epstein’s lawyer said I had nothing to do with it.”
Musk hasn’t specified which of his attacks he regrets, but he has since deleted several of the more scathing posts, including the one alleging Trump’s name appears in Epstein files.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
Trump, for his part, seems uninterested in patching things up with the world’s richest man.
“I’m not even thinking about Elon. He’s got a problem,” the president told CNN on Friday. “The poor guy’s got a problem.”
Musk’s scorched-earth tirade against Trump came just days after he exited his role as a “special government employee” overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) federal cost-cutting task force.
Musk lost roughly 25 percent of his net worth—around $113 billion—in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term amid backlash to his White House role, Bloomberg reported in April.
While sharing the headline on X on Wednesday, a defiant Musk wrote: “Worth it.”
