“No,” Trump says, he does not want to repair relationship with Musk

Trump has made it official: He and Elon Musk are (probably) never getting back together.

In an interview with NBC News on Saturday, the president was uncharacteristically restrained when asked if he had any desire to repair the relationship with the ex-DOGE head following Musk’s meltdown on X this week. Asked if he wanted to repair his relationship with Musk, Trump answered simply: “no.”

The blowout was caused by a series of posts on X. Musk railed against Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and his tariffs, which Musk claimed will cause a recession in the second half of this year. Musk also alleged Trump is in the Epstein files (that post has since been deleted). When NBC asked if Trump thought his relationship with Musk was over, Trump reportedly replied: “I would assume so, yeah.”

“I’m too busy doing other things” to talk to Musk, Trump told NBC, adding, “I have no intention of speaking to him.”

“I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful,” Trump added of Musk’s statements. “You could not disrespect the office of the President.” Trump also told NBC that Musk’s since-deleted claim that he was involved with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation of minors was false and “old news,” and that he had not given his prior threat to cancel Musk’s companies’ government contracts any further thought. He said he believes Musk is “so depressed and so heartbroken” and that his opposition to the reconciliation bill was ultimately “a big favor” because it “brought out the strengths of the bill.”

But Trump does not appear to be fully confident that Musk will not affect the bill. If Musk funded Democrats to run against Republicans who vote to pass the bill, “he’ll have to pay the consequences for that,” Trump told NBC. He added that they would be “very serious” but did not provide further details. Musk does not appear to have specifically suggested he plans to fund Democrats for this purpose, but he has urged voters to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people” in the next election.

As I reported last week, Musk told CBS Sunday Morning that bill “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” adding, “I actually thought that, when this ‘big, beautiful bill’ came along, it’d be like, everything he’s done on DOGE gets wiped out in the first year.” (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill would add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, which would essentially cancel out DOGE’s purported government savings of $175 billion.) The personal attacks he launched against Trump on X just a few days later came as a stark reversal for Musk, who said in the CBS interview that while he did not agree with everything the administration did, he did not want to create “a bone of contention” by publicly feuding with officials.

Trump’s glib assessment of the death of what was probably the world’s most powerful—and insufferable—bromance runs counter to the hopes of other top Republicans who are hoping the men will reconcile. On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told host Jonathan Karl that he hopes “these two titans can reconcile.”

“I think the president’s head is in the right place…he can’t get caught up in a Twitter war,” Johnson added. “I think all this will resolve. There’s a lot of emotion involved in it, but it’s in the interest of the country for everybody to work together and I’m going to continue to try to be a peacemaker in all this.”

And in a Friday appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance said Musk’s comments attacking Trump were “a huge mistake” but said that he hoped Musk would come crawling back to Trump’s corner. “I hope that eventually Elon kind of comes back into the fold,” Vance said. “Maybe that’s not possible now, because he’s gone so nuclear, but I hope it is.”

“Cool,” Musk responded to a clip of Vance’s comments posted on X.