Trump and Musk display their rapport on Fox News: ‘I couldn’t find anyone smarter’

The relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, is going from strength to strength. The two made this clear on Tuesday in an interview recorded and broadcast on the conservative Fox News channel, the first they have given together. People try to drive a wedge between them and confront them, but their relationship is stronger, said Trump.

“Elon called me,” the president said. “He said, ‘You know they’re trying to drive us apart.’ I said, “Absolutely.’ You know, they said, ‘We have breaking news: Donald Trump has ceded control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will be attending a Cabinet meeting tonight at 8 o’clock.’ And I say — it’s just so obvious. They’re so bad at it. I used to think they were good at it. They’re actually bad at it, because if they were good at it, I’d never be president because I think nobody in history has ever gotten more bad publicity than me. But you know what I have learned? The people are smart. They get it.” Trump also said that before meeting Musk he respected him even if he was doing “things that were so advanced and nobody knew what the hell they were.”

Musk, for his part, said that the assassination attempt against the Republican candidate in Butler, Pennsylvania, was what made him decide to join his campaign, describing it as “a precipitating event.” The tech magnate defined Trump as “a good man who has been unfairly attacked in the media [...] At this point, I have spent a lot of time with the president, and not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or wrong.”

The interviewer was Sean Hannity, a veteran conservative talk show host and longtime Trump colleague, and the tone was friendly from the start, to put it mildly. “I’ve known him for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anybody take as much as he’s taken,” he said, before declaring that among his goals that night was “to get the public to know Elon a little bit better.”

The conversation aired hours before Trump marked his first month in the White House, which is also the first month of Musk — owner of the Tesla car company, the social network X, and the astronautics company SpaceX, among others — at the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The newly created entity is charged with reducing government expenses and trimming U.S. bureaucracy. The plan is to save between $2 and $3 trillion and the task has begun with a massive offer of incentivized redundancies, which some 75,000 officials have accepted, along with the dismissal of tens of thousands of public employees.

In that role, Musk has received criticism from Democrats for turning the administration upside down, despite the fact that “no one elected him at the polls.” Reprimands from judges have stopped many of his initiatives in the courts, and he has faced accusations from some media outlets and legal experts that he is “provoking a constitutional crisis.”

“I guess that means we’re doing something right,” the mogul, wearing his usual uniform of a suit and black t-shirt with the message “tech support,” said. “If the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented, and that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.” The trio also criticized the spending of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), DOGE’s first target, for “spending huge amounts of money overseas and not on what Americans need.”

Trump expressed his satisfaction with Musk’s work. “You know, I wanted to find somebody smarter than him. I searched all over. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t,” he said. “But the team we have is really unbelievable. Those executive orders, I sign them, and now they get passed on to him and his group and other people, and they’re all getting done. We’re getting them done.”

Musk — who noted that he is not paid for his work in the administration, did not address, nor was he asked about, potential conflicts of interest in his role as a businessman with numerous public contracts — recounted how his friendship with the U.S. president has affected his life. “I used to be adored by the left, you know,” he said. “Less so these days.” He also spoke of something he defined as “Trump derangement syndrome,” the symptoms of which, he added, he observed at a friend’s birthday party in Los Angeles, “a month or two before the [November] election.” “I happened to mention the president’s name, and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies,” he said. “You just can’t have a normal conversation. And it’s like they become completely irrational.”

At that point, Hannity once again agreed with Musk. “If you’re friends with Trump, you pay a price,” the host said, to which the tycoon added that after making public his support for the Republican’s candidacy, to whose campaign he became the largest donor with more than $260 million, he learned that from that moment on, when he entered a room, everyone gave him “the eye-daggers.” “If looks could kill, I would have been dead several times over,” he added, laughing.

It was their first joint interview, but not the first time the two had spoken to the press. Last week, in one of the strangest moments of the start of Trump’s second presidency, the two appeared in the Oval Office, alongside Musk’s four-year-old son. Musk explained the motivations for his work at the helm of DOGE, acknowledged that “mistakes” would be made, and promised that he would admit to them and fix them. Trump, who remained silent for most of the half-hour meeting with the media, supported the work carried out by the tycoon. Both said that DOGE was finding large amounts of “waste, fraud and abuse” in the U.S. government, but did not offer evidence of this.

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump, who spent the day at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, signed a handful of executive orders, as he has done each day since returning to the White House, and answered questions from reporters. Among the signed orders was one to expand access and reduce the cost of in vitro fertilization, as well as a presidential memorandum calling for “sweeping transparency requirements” from the government, which he suggested could reduce wasteful spending.

He also referred to Musk and the news — which emerged that morning from the White House — that he is not officially considered the head of DOGE. “You could call him an employee, you could call him a consultant, you could call him whatever you want. But he’s a patriot,” the president said.

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