WASHINGTON – Donald Trump and Elon Musk are mending fences. But the president could not resist the opportunity to take a swipe at the Tesla CEO when he signed a resolution blocking California’s electric vehicle mandate.
At a bill signing event at the White House, Trump invoked his high-profile former aide: “Now I know why Elon doesn’t like me so much.”
“Which he does actually, he does,” Trump added before he moved on.
Trump and the wealthy businessman have been sparring over a separate piece of legislation: the GOP’s tax cut bill, which passed the House at the end of May and is pending before the Senate.
At the height of their dispute, on June 5, Musk said that Trump appeared “in the Epstein files.” The allegation referred to documents the federal government compiled on disgraced financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting prosecution on sex trafficking charges. Musk took down this post less than 48 hours later.
Musk said in a June 11 post that he regretted some of his posts about Trump during the spat without specifying which ones. “They went too far,” he said.
The two men reportedly spoke by phone before the written apology.
Trump at a June 12 event at the White House called Musk a “friend of mine” while conveying a different exchange about electric vehicles that he said they’d had prior to their falling out.
Apology accepted? Elon Musk called Donald Trump before expressing ‘regret’ for harsh attacks
The president said Musk did not push him off his bid to abolish California’s electric vehicle sales mandate. He said that when he raised the issue with Musk, who campaigned for him in 2024, the businessman told him, “As long as it’s happening to everybody, I’ll be able to compete.”
Trump said he told Musk that his response was “very cool.”
“After that, he got a little bit strange. I’m not sure why, over much smaller things than that,” Trump said of their dispute.
Trump previously claimed that Musk went “CRAZY” over his plans to undo California’s law, which required a shift to EVs in California by 2035.
“Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
Contributing: Joey Garrison, Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump says Elon Musk ‘doesn’t like me’ at EV mandate repeal event
