Elon Musk crawled back to President Donald Trump after coming to regret his attacks against the president during their public spat last week.
The billionaire, eager to make amends, called Trump late Monday night, three people briefed on the call told The New York Times. Their conversation culminated in Musk posting his groveling retraction on X Wednesday.
“I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,” Musk wrote.
The Times said advisers on both sides worked behind the scenes to broker a truce, despite Trump’s public declaration that he has no interest in reviving his relationship with the world’s richest man. Before reaching out to Trump, Musk held talks with Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday, according to the report.
The White House declined to comment on the reported conversations when asked by the Daily Beast.
The first public sign that the Tesla CEO was trying to smooth things over and restore his alliance with the president came on Sunday, when Musk reposted Trump’s Truth Social posts about the L.A. protests.
It’s still unclear how Trump will respond to Musk’s peace offering. He seemed uninterested in patching things up with Musk on Friday, telling CNN, “I’m not even thinking about Elon. He’s got a problem.”
Both men, however, have reasons to make up. Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has billions of dollars worth of contracts with the federal government, which Trump threatened to cancel at the height of their feud.
For his part, Trump’s alliance with Musk—who once backed Democrats—has become a financial lifeline, channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into his campaign and GOP allies. In addition, he is keen to avoid a repeat of his first term, when disgruntled former aides turned on him and wrote tell-all book, according to the Times.
It’s all a question of whether the thin-skinned president can look past Musk’s social media tirade, which came only days after he exited his role as a “special government employee.”
During his furious posting spree, Musk said Trump’s tariffs “will cause a recession in the second half of this year,” and agreed with a post that Trump should be “impeached” and replaced with Vance.
The billionaire also claimed on that Trump “is in the Epstein files,” before deleting his post. Trump had a longstanding relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late New York financier and convicted sex offender, starting in the late 1980s, but he says their relationship ended in the early 2000s and that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
