Steve Bannon on Musk: 'Hey, Told You'

The messy public feud between President Trump and Elon Musk may be calming down, but when hostilities were at their height on Thursday, Steve Bannon relished the chance to say, "I told you so." The former White House strategist, who called Musk a "truly evil guy" earlier this year, told Politico that MAGA is "done" with the billionaire. He said he took a lot of flak for criticizing Musk in the early days of DOGE, but "MAGA is now seeing exactly what he was" all along. "I'm just saying, 'Hey, told you—knew this was gonna happen, folks. Not a hard one," Bannon told Politico, which describes him as the "godfather of MAGA."

Bannon said Musk miscalculated when he thought spending hundreds of million dollars on Trump's campaign would buy lasting influence. "Trump is the least donor-responsive political figure in history—he doesn't give two f---s," Bannon said. "Elon was under some impression that you write Trump a big check and eventually there's going to be some sort of payoff. Trump doesn't work like that." He predicted that Musk would continue attacking Trump to try to get in Democrats' good books. "He's got to sell some cars—and he's not going to sell any cars to MAGA," Bannon said.

• Later Thursday, Bannon called for investigations of Musk and said he should be deported "immediately." On his War Room podcast, he said Trump "should sign an executive order calling for the Defense Production Act to be called in on SpaceX and seize SpaceX tonight," the New York Post reports.
• Musk, who had eased up on his attacks on Trump, replied with what the Daily Beast describes as a "slur favored by middle-school bullies." Bannon, he said in a late-night post on X, is a "communist retard."