WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said he has no plans to talk to billionaire Elon Musk after the former governing partners got into an explosive public fight over the merits of the president’s signature tax and policy bill.
“I’m not even thinking about Elon. He’s got a problem. The poor guy’s got a problem,” Trump told CNN, according to reporter Dana Bash.
Bash said Trump told her he won’t be speaking with Musk for a while, but wishes Musk well. A White House official told USA TODAY that Trump had no plans to have any conversations with Musk
The Trump-Musk fight took off this week when Musk called for Republicans to kill the House-passed tax bill that is a signature part of the second-term president’s legislative agenda, calling it a “disgusting abomination.” Two days later, Trump told reporters at the Oval Office that he was “very disappointed” with Musk and suggested their “great relationship” was over.
It only escalated from there, with Musk claiming Trump wouldn’t have won the presidency without his help, endorsing a third impeachment for Trump and alleging that the president’s name was in undisclosed classified files related to the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The president responded by saying he had asked Musk to stop working at the White House and also threatening to end billions of dollars of federal contracts with Musk’s companies.
In a phone call with POLITICO later on June 5, Trump said of his fight with Musk: “Oh, it’s okay. It’s going very well, never done better.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also played down the feud, calling it an “unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the One Big Beautiful Bill because it does not include the policies he wanted.”
Musk spent four months working in Trump’s administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency – a perch for the world’s richest man to try to help the president gut the federal bureaucracy. His final day was May 30.
Contributing: Joey Garrison and Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, USA TODAY
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump says he won’t be calling Musk: ‘The poor guy’s got a problem’
