Elon Musk briefly tried to patch up his on again, off again bromance with President Donald Trump with $15 million in political donations following the pair’s spectacularly messy public divorce.
The Tesla CEO made the payments, parceled out as $5 million each to super PACs MAGA Inc., the Senate Leadership Fund, and the Congressional Leadership Fund, on June 27, Axios reports.
Roughly a month prior, Musk had prefaced his departure from the Trump administration’s cost-cutting DOGE initiative by saying he was “disappointed” in the president’s spending proposals, which he said threatened to undo his work as head of the government efficiency drive.
That relatively restrained admission of disappointment later exploded into an outpouring of vitriol on X, with Musk attacking Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” as a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled disgusting abomination,” calling for the president’s impeachment, and, most spectacularly, suggesting Trump had delayed release of new findings in the Jeffrey Epstein case because his name features prominently in the investigative documents.
The last of these attacks would prove prescient. The White House has since found itself embroiled in mounting scandal after the Justice Department issued a memo stating it had found Epstein’s 2019 death in police custody was almost certainly a suicide, and that he the convicted sex trafficker kept no “client list” of uber-wealthy co-conspirators.
Revelations have followed that DOJ staff had allegedly been directed to comb through more than 100,000 investigative files on the case, flagging each time Trump’s name appeared in them. The president is now also suing The Wall Street Journal for $10 million following a report on a 2003 birthday note he’s alleged to have sent the disgraced financier, featuring a hand-drawn sketch of a nude woman alongside a weird imagined exchange about “enigmas” and “wonderful secrets.”
Axios further reports that only the day after alleging online that Trump’s name did indeed appear in the “Epstein files,” Musk hopped on a call with Vice President JD Vance and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to ask how he might go about making amends. The following morning, he deleted his posts, going on to publicly state he had taken things “too far.”
Not that the ceasefire held for long, with it only three days after donating the $15 million to pro-Trump super PACs that Musk resumed his trolling of the White House with threats of launching an “America Party.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Musk’s representatives for comment on this story.
The post Elon Musk Gave Trump Millions to Make Up for His Epstein Bombshell appeared first on The Daily Beast.
