Back Before Their Bromance, Trump Said Musk Would Drop to His Knees and Beg

He was desperate.

Frenemies

Although Donald Trump and Elon Musk have recently been acting like lifelong best friends, their relationship was hostile for many years. At one point, Trump even snarked that he could have made the billionaire “drop to [his] knees and beg” if he wanted to. 

Trump posted the jab to Truth Social, the right-wing alternative to X-formerly-Twitter that he started after being banned from social media sites following his fans’ Capitol insurrection in 2021. 

“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless,” the ever-gracious Trump wrote in 2022, “and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it…” 

Now that Musk is back to being Trump’s lap dog — much to the frustration of the future president’s inner circle — it’s hard not to wonder whether history is poised to repeat itself with the two tempestuous characters. 

Back and Forth

Musk has always been drawn to power, even in issues wholly related to his experience in electric vehicles and space exploration. Biographer Walter Isaacson revealed that Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 because he saw himself as a “fire-breathing dragon” prepared to shield the site from dissolution, showing a far-reaching savior complex. 

So with Trump again ascendent — and with Musk leaning ever-rightward after a series of divorces and troubled family relationships —  it feels as though Musk remodeled his once-centrist beliefs in a bid for sway with the White House.

As such, it can be startling to recall Musk’s previously harsh critiques of Trump. The same week in 2022 that Trump made his derisive Truth Social post, Musk complained that Trump’s incumbency led to “too much drama” — and in 2023, Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he’d rather have a “normal person with common sense” as president. 

For now, though, Musk is all in on MAGA. On November 6, he posted an edited photo of his painfully awkward “let that sink in” meme from when he purchased Twitter, this time remixing the shot to show him inside the Oval Office. Musk seems desperate for a place in government, and to Trump’s credit, it is easy to imagine him down on his knees begging for it.

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