According to an inside source who spoke with Politico, the relationship between tech billionaire and Twitter owner Elon Musk and current President Donald Trump hasn’t always been the chummy, friendly one we know and loathe today.
The new report hails back to a meeting between Musk and Trump 5 years ago in 2020, during Donald’s first presidential term.
Politico’s Adam Wren writes, “That Musk later became Trump’s biggest financial backer — giving $288 million to his 2024 presidential bid — and then one of his closest advisers, is the latest example of how both men make decisions and build relationships based on a real politik calculus. And how both see themselves as engaging in a transactional relationship.”
Back in 2020, the Tesla CEO and then-president met at the White House, where they discussed the prospect of building a Tesla gigafactory in Mexico rather than in Texas. According to Wren, Musk also met with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner that same day, before his meeting with Donald.
“A person who was within earshot of Musk — who West Wing Playbook granted anonymity to describe a private conversation — later recounted that Musk called Trump ‘a f—— moron’ behind his back while in the White House,” Wren writes in his Politico report.
“We walk into the Oval, and he kind of looks around, and he’s looking around,” the anonymous inside source revealed. “He’s like, ‘Gosh, I tell you. I mean, I was just in China, and man, their palaces just make the White House kind of look more like an outhouse.'”
According to the source, Trump “fumed” over this.
The pair went on to discuss Teslas, with Trump stating that he had two. However, Donald seemed quite confused about how the electric car’s supercharging network actually works.
Back in 2017, Musk was actually on three different Trump advisory boards. However, the tech billionaire resigned from those positions after Trump announced that he would be pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords.
“Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” Musk announced in a tweet at the time.
The Tesla CEO would go on pen a 2022 tweet, saying, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
In response to that, Trump took to his Truth Social echo chamber the next day and posted a photo of himself at his desk in the Oval Office, with Musk standing to his right. In the caption, Donald wrote, “When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it…”
It’s certainly funny how easily things can change…
Featured image via screen capture