WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will not be calling billionaire Elon Musk on Friday after their feud exploded into public, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said.
“There are no plans for that today,” Wiles told NBC News when asked about reporting by Politico that White House aides scheduled a call Friday with the billionaire Tesla CEO to try to patch things up between the two men.
Trump is “not interested” in a call, a senior White House official told NBC News.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is focused on the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the GOP domestic policy bill that Musk trashed, which triggered their falling out. “That’s the mindset he left the Oval Office in yesterday,” she said.
A Trump administration official added, “There could be anything — I’d like to de-escalate a very unfortunate situation. But there are no calls on the books, at least not now.”
The spat began Thursday when Trump criticized Musk’s recent attacks on the Republican policy measure over its estimated increase to the deficit, and turned into a full-scale blow-up that sent ripples through the halls of Congress and Tesla’s stock prices.
“I’m very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
“I’m very disappointed in Elon,” Trump said. “I’ve helped Elon a lot.”
Trump suggested that Musk, who earlier this week called the GOP bill a “disgusting abomination,” was upset that the bill cut out a tax credit implemented by the Biden administration to incentivize electric vehicle purchases.
Musk denied he was knowledgeable about the legislation.
“False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!” Musk wrote in a post on X.
The two men spent the rest of the day Thursday lobbing insults at each other on their own social media platforms — Musk on X and Trump on Truth Social.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in an interview on CNBC that he found Musk’s posts on X “surprising and disappointing.”
Johnson also pushed back on Musk’s claims that he is responsible for the Republican victories in November.
“Elon was a big contributor in the last election, but this was a whole team effort,” Johnson said. “I mean, President Trump is the most consequential political figure of his generation, of modern American history. He is the one responsible for that. But we all worked hard. We delivered the House majority.”
