Elon Musk Swipes Back at Trump After Apparent Peace Offering

Yesterday, President Trump seemed to offer an olive branch to his former “first buddy,” Elon Musk, amidst their ongoing spat. In a post made to Truth Social, Trump claimed that he didn’t wish any harm on Elon or his businesses. “Everyone is stating that I will destroy Elon’s companies by taking away some, if not all, of the large-scale subsidies he receives from the U.S. Government. This is not so! I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before!” Trump wrote.

Trump’s screed may have been a response to a recent article published by the Wall Street Journal that claimed the Trump administration was interested in potentially cancelling some of the federal contracts associated with Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX. The WSJ story notes that only days after Trump floated the idea of cutting ties with Musk’s companies, “the Trump administration initiated a review of SpaceX’s contracts with the federal government.” The review was reportedly ordered by a senior official at the General Services Administration.

Not long after Trump’s seemingly conciliatory post, Musk replied on his own social media platform, X. “The ‘subsidies’ he’s talking about simply do not exist,” Musk wrote. “DJT has already removed or put an expiry date on all sustainable energy support while leaving massive oil & gas subsidies untouched. SpaceX won the NASA contracts by doing a better job for less money. Moving those contracts to other aerospace companies would leave astronauts stranded and taxpayers on the hook for twice as much!”

Gizmodo reached out to the White House, Tesla, and SpaceX for comment. We’ll update this post when we receive a response.

So much for a truce between America’s two oligarchic doofuses. The crumbling of the Trump-Elon bromance is one for the literal history books—but it would also probably make a really good comedic movie, as well. The story of how an aged former reality TV star and his campaign sugar daddy fell in—and then out of—like with one another has been chortle-inducing at every turn. Take note, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Musk is likely still sore about Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which nixed the federal government’s EV mandate. That mandate notably provided a key revenue source for Elon’s company, Tesla, via the regulatory credit market. The regulatory credit market stemmed from state and federal fines against automakers who didn’t adhere to certain environmental standards. CNN notes that the plan for OBBB was to roll “back those standards” and strip “states of the power to set their own emissions rules,” which would have the net result of destroying the “market for those credit sales.”