Steve Bannon isn’t ready to bury the hatchet with Elon Musk just yet.
The MAGA firebrand reignited his feud with Musk on Wednesday after he was asked about the billionaire’s announcement that he would soon be limiting his work with DOGE to return to his floundering Tesla empire.
“Have you won?“ Semafor editor in chief Ben Smith asked Bannon at the outlet’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C.
Bannon smirked at the question before acknowledging that DOGE is a “blunt force instrument” necessary to “deconstruct this choking administrative state,” though he demanded an in-depth accounting of the cost-cutting task force’s achievements so far as pointed out that Musk has dropped DOGE’s savings goal from $2 trillion to $150 billion for the year.
“He’s questioning the integrity of the system,” Bannon said. “We need to have a very specific accounting of what he found, as far as fraud goes, and waste… None of this makes sense. The cuts you’ve seen that have been announced are programmatic.”
“Also, I think we have to have a letter of certification that not one data set or piece of data of the United States government or citizens of this country are held by anybody except for the Trump administration,” he added.
The War Room podcast host also threw shade at Musk as he spoke highly of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Eyewitnesses told Axios earlier on Wednesday that Musk and Bessent had an expletive-laden screaming match at the White House, which required an aide to physically intervene.
“President Trump’s a very sophisticated businessman, but Scott is a safe pair of hands that understands capital markets deeply,” Bannon said. “He’s done this for 30 years. He has a very strong sense of what markets need to hear as far as information goes.”
Steve Bannon tells @semaforben he views Scott Bessent as “a safe pair of hands,” but believes Howard Lutnick would have been an “unmitigated disaster” as Treasury Secretary #WorldEconomySummit pic.twitter.com/7dXWs7xJJV
— Semafor (@semafor) April 23, 2025
Bannon recalled that his “first big fight” with Musk was over who should be named Treasury chief. Bannon was in Bessent’s corner while Musk wanted the role to go to Howard Lutnick, who is now the Commerce Secretary.
“I’ll be blunt: if Howard Lutnick had been Secretary of the Treasury, it would have been an unmitigated disaster,” Bannon said. “This is about people putting their own interests first, like Elon, versus putting the nation’s interest first.”
Bannon and Musk have been at odds since Trump returned to power in January, starting with a fiery clash over a work visa program that Musk supports but Bannon despises.
Tensions forced the president to play mediator in March, with Trump reportedly wanting the two men to sit down and hash out their beef, though it remains unclear whether that ever occurred.
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