Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk may be careening toward an epic falling-out with President-elect Donald Trump, according to a new report.
NBC News' Dasha Burns reported Wednesday that the world's richest man is quickly ruffling feathers among the incoming president's inner circle. Musk, who was one of Trump's biggest financial backers in the 2024 campaign, is reportedly "pushing his own agenda" even above Trump's, and one unnamed Trump advisor confided to the outlet that the centabillionaire was "overstaying his welcome at Mar-a-Lago."
"He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it," one source close to the president-elect told NBC of Musk. "And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory."
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Musk's America PAC, which spent more than $200 million to elect the GOP nominee, was powered in large part by the tech billionaire himself. He also turned his social media platform X into what NBC News called a "pro-Trump echo chamber," elevating baseless conspiracy theories about the Democratic ticket and tweaking the app's algorithm to push far-right content into users' feeds.
Burns' source said Musk was turning people off by "bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen," and that he was "trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him." Now, the South African billionaire is reportedly at Mar-a-Lago "at all hours," and is joining Trump on important calls, including a recent call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Another one of NBC's sources said Musk has an "opinion on and about everything," and that he "wants to be seen as having say in everything (even if he doesn’t)." And his level of visibility in the president-elect's orbit has been criticized as "overly aggressive" and that it "may hurt his standing in the long run."
According to NBC, Musk's private jet was tracked heading to West Palm Beach, Florida last Tuesday night before heading back to Texas on Wednesday morning. The jet returned that same night, and remained there for the next four days. Musk was photographed in Florida with Trump's granddaughter, Kai, who tweeted that the Tesla CEO was "achieving uncle status."
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Should Musk have a falling out with Trump prior to Inauguration Day, it wouldn't be the first time a major Trump surrogate got sidelined between the election and Day One of the presidency. In 2016, Trump transition team co-chair and then-New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie was suddenly demoted as vice chair and replaced by then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Christie's fall from grace came as Democrats were considering impeaching him over his role in the 2013 "Bridgegate" scandal.
Musk's friendliness with Trump is also a relatively new phenomenon. He and Trump exchanged barbs on social media in 2022, when the former said of the latter that he should "hang up his hat & sail into the sunset." That remark was in response to Trump calling Musk a "bulls— artist." Trump clapped back in a Truth Social post, writing that 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."
"I could have said, 'drop to your knees and beg,' and he would have done it," Trump wrote.
Click here to read NBC's report in its entirety.
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