Tech titan Elon Musk appears ready to mend fences with President Donald Trump, expressing regret over some of his social media activity attacking the president last week.
“I regret some of my posts about President @DonaldTrump last week,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X on Wednesday.
“They went too far,” the tech mogul added.
The president also seems ready to regard the tech titan’s social media campaign against him as water under the bridge.
“Look, I have no hard feelings. I was really surprised that that happened. He went after a bill that’s phenomenal. He just—I think he feels very badly that he said that, actually,” Trump told The New York Post’s Miranda Devine in a podcast released on Wednesday.
When asked whether he could forgive and reconcile with the Tesla CEO, Trump replied, “I guess I could.”
The public feud between the two men was remarkable, given that since Trump began campaigning for the presidency during the 2024 election cycle, Musk has become remarkably close to the Trump family. He even attended Thanksgiving dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, last year and was referred to by the president’s granddaughter as an “uncle.”
Musk’s companies rely extensively on government contracts, so it seems likely that the two men will reach a rapprochement.
In 2024, federal and local commitments pledged at least $6.3 billion to companies affiliated with Musk. The Washington Post found that for more than 20 years, Musk and his businesses have benefited from at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, tax credits, and subsidies.
Last week, the president mulled canceling Musk’s federal contracts.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” Trump said in a Truth Social post on June 5.
The two men’s public falling out escalated after Musk criticized congressional Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill for increasing the budget deficit and, in his opinion, for undermining the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—as well as recirculating old posts by Trump criticizing Republicans over deficit spending.
Musk spent last week trashing Trump by accusing him on X of being in the Jeffrey Epstein files and agreeing with a post that said the president should be impeached and replaced with Vice President JD Vance. The tech CEO doubled down on the Epstein claim, writing last Friday night that he would “apologize profusely as soon as there is a full dump of the Epstein files.”
The Epstein posts have since been deleted. When the claim was raised with Trump on Saturday, the president noted that it was “old news.”
“That’s called ‘old news.’ That’s been old news. That has been talked about for years. Even Epstein’s lawyer said I had nothing to do with it. It’s old news,” Trump told NBC News.
“It’s old news. This has been talked about for years and years. And as you know, I was not friendly with Epstein for probably 18 years before he died. I was not at all friendly with him,” the president said.
