Elon Musk has deleted a post on X in which he claimed that Donald Trump was “in the Epstein files”. The social media post was written on Thursday amid a bitter spat between the US president and his former DOGE head. The row first erupted on Wednesday and came after Mr Musk had left his role in the Trump administration and had publicly criticised the President’s new spending bill.
As the tete-a-tete escalated, the Tesla boss also suggested that President Trump should be impeached. “The Epstein files” refers to the US intelligence officials have on Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier who took his own life in 2019. By Saturday morning, however, Mr Musk had pulled the X post seemingly alleging that President Trump was somehow implicated in Mr Epstein’s wrongdoing.
While Mr Trump was seen with Epstein years ago, there have never been any indications of any wrongdoing against the now US President.
The US President appeared keen to move on from the spat and Mr Musk’s post, telling reporters during a flight to New Jersey on Friday: “Honestly I’ve been so busy working on China, working on Russia, working on Iran… I’m not thinking about Elon Musk. I just wish him well.”
The row between the South African-born business mogul and President Trump erupted over a new spending bill. Mr Musk branded it a “disgusting abomination” which would increase the national debt. However, the White House claimed Mr Musk was simply annoyed that the “big beautiful Bill” would end tax breaks for electric vehicles, costing Tesla billions of dollars.
“He knew it better than almost anybody, and he never had a problem until right after he left,” President Trump said. He also said on Wednesday, during an Oval Office meeting with Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, that the 53-year-old had “Trump derangement syndrome”.
Mr Musk hit back quickly, claiming that without his millions of dollars of support during the Presidential election race Kamala Harris would have won.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election. Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate… Such ingratitude,” he wrote on X.
While Mr Musk’s deletion of the post may be seen as an olive branch, Mr Trump kept the soured relationship with the billionaires in the public eye later on Saturday, as he said during a phone call with NBC News that the world’s richest man would “pay very serious consequences” should he decide to fund Democratic candidates to run against Republicans backing the tax bill.