Elon Musk and Donald Trump may have a strong relationship now, but it wasn’t always that way.
A report from Politico, shared by The Daily Beast, revealed that in 2020, when Musk and Trump met at the White House to discuss building a Tesla factory, they didn’t exactly hit it off. Trump set up the meeting after he learned Musk was planning to build a huge factory in Mexico instead of Texas.
According to a source who overheard Musk during the meeting, Musk called Trump “a f—ing moron”. The source described Musk as looking around the Oval Office and commenting, “I was just in China, and their palaces make the White House look like an outhouse.”
Trump, apparently not pleased by this, stayed silent as his economic advisor Larry Kudlow and other staff members were in the room.
Trump later mentioned he had two Teslas in his car collection but seemed confused about how their charging network worked, so Musk and his colleague had to explain it to him.
Both men did agree on one thing: at the time, they thought COVID-19 was no worse than the flu and that people were overreacting.
Musk had been involved with three of Trump’s advisory councils back in 2017, but he left after Trump announced the U.S. would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Musk tweeted at the time, “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
By 2022, Musk took a jab at Trump after a video surfaced of the former president criticizing him. Musk said, “It’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.” The next day, Trump responded on Truth Social, mocking Musk for needing help with his projects and calling him a big Trump supporter.
Despite these ups and downs, the two have patched things up, mostly due to Musk’s big donations to the GOP during the 2024 election.
Their relationship still has its awkward moments, though. In Michael Wolff’s book about Trump’s 2024 campaign, it’s mentioned that Trump was confused by Musk’s behavior at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Musk was acting strangely and even showed his stomach. Trump reportedly said, “What the f— is wrong with this guy? And why doesn’t his shirt fit?”
After returning to the White House, Trump asked Musk to help cut government spending and overhaul the federal government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
