Elon Musk Tried to Sabotage a Trump Deal With a Rival Company

Elon Musk’s proximity to Donald Trump offered him unparalleled influence on the U.S. president—influence that he tried to weaponize.

The tech executive openly objected last month to a massive data-center deal in the works between OpenAI—one of Musk’s rival companies in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence—and the United Arab Emirates, according to White House sources that spoke with The New York Times. He complained to Trump’s AI adviser David Sacks, protested the deal to other White House officials, and claimed that the arrangement shouldn’t go to OpenAI, citing fairness toward other AI companies.

Meanwhile, Musk tried to shoehorn his own AI company, xAI, into the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. He failed.

The problem arose when Musk learned that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman would be joining Trump on his tour of several Middle Eastern countries. News of the emerging deal made Musk angry, according to the Journal. So angry that he insisted on joining the trip, appearing beside the U.S. president in Saudi Arabia. Musk also threatened members of G42, an Emirati AI development firm controlled by the brother of UAE’s president, claiming that the deal would not move forward unless his company xAI was one of the startups involved.

Musk did manage to land himself a massive business deal during Trump’s trip. On the second day, Musk announced Saudi Arabia had approved the use of Starlink within the country.

Musk’s exit from the government has been swift and complicated as key players across Trumpworld turned against the world’s richest man. In the few short months that Musk ran DOGE, reports emerged that practically everyone in the White House hated him. He had stomped on the toes of Trump’s Cabinet, failing to consult them before paring down federal agencies technically under their control. Earlier this week, Musk whined that DOGE had become a “whipping boy” for the administration’s failures. He told CBS that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” was actually a bad idea.

Musk was Trump’s top financial backer in the 2024 election, spending at least $250 million in the final months of the president’s campaign after Trump was shot in July. Musk had also promised to funnel funds toward other Republicans, declaring in the wake of the November election that his super PACs would “play a significant role in primaries.” In the following months, Musk threatened to use his money to fund primary challengers to Trump’s agenda and go after Democrats, and that he would be preparing “for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.”

The week after Trump returned from the Middle East trip, however, Musk announced at the Qatar Economic Forum that he had “done enough” political spending.

“I think in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk said.

Representative Ashley Hinson told a town hall audience on Wednesday that God saved Trump’s life last July, when a would-be assassin narrowly missed him “for a reason.” She was met with an overwhelming chorus of boos.

Tuesday was Mike Flood’s turn. On Wednesday, Hinson started hearing it from her constituents during her prepared remarks, well before she opened up the floor to questions.

“We were seeing hardworking men and women in Iowa and our country feel like their voices were not heard. Families in Iowa have told me for the last four years that we wanna make sure we have safe streets, we have affordable groceries and gas,” Hinson said. “And that kids have the opportunity to live out the American dream. That is what President Trump is delivering for us. The president is, I believe, fighting for you and fighting for me—”

“NOOO!” the crowd roared in reaction to Hinson’s last claim.

Hinson dug in deeper.

“And I think God saved President Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, for a reason. I think that he is helping us to save and redirect the future of our country. He is helping deport criminal illegal aliens rather than letting them roam our streets freely—”

Another explosion of boos and angry jeers erupted, with one “You liar!” rising distinctly above the frustrated din of the crowd. Some members of the crowd started calling her a fraud.

It keeps happening when Republican representatives and senators are forced to reckon with the politically corrosive, corrupt actions of the Trump administration. They’re forced to reckon with their own actions too. The “big, beautiful” budget bill—which is expected to leave 13.7 million people without health insurance by 2034 while giving tax cuts to the wealthiest—is just the latest example.

FBI Director Kash Patel lost his cool when asked a simple question about his wildly overdue budget.

During an interview on Fox News Wednesday, Patel clumsily dodged a question when host Brett Baier asked whether he ever planned to provide a complete budget for the fiscal year 2026, after missing the deadline to turn one over.

“Do I have a budget at the FBI? Sure, of course I do. But the Office of Management Budget at the White House sets the budget for the United States government. And so, if they have a budget which we agree with, they need to roll that out. And they’re doing so on their one timeline, and working with Congress on that,” Patel said.

Patel continued, insisting that “we’re not the guys running around on private jets.”

“And somebody, maybe in Congress, should ask for how many flights on a private jet Director [James] Comey took or my predecessor, Director [Chistopher] Wray, took and how many personal trips they took,” Patel said.

“I know they want to take pot shots at me, but I have been working nonstop on this job, including pretty much every single weekend. And somebody should ask the tens of millions of dollars that were wasted on personal junkets by prior FBI directors before lecturing me on a budget for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he continued.

Patel’s rant about aircraft comes after he faced scrutiny from lawmakers over reports that he used government planes for his own personal use to travel from his home in Las Vegas, visit his girlfriend in Nashville, and attend sporting events.

Earlier this month, Patel testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee without the spending plan he was required by law to complete. When asked for a timeline on when he planned to have it done, Patel said he had no timeline.

Despite his failure to provide a detailed budget, Patel requested a whopping total of $10.1 billion in salaries and expenses to carry out the FBI’s mission—$1 billion more than the current budget. This presented a problem, as Donald Trump had planned to cut the agency’s budget by $1 billion.

The president is trying to overstep the judiciary in his quest to defang America’s newsrooms.

On Truth Social late Wednesday, Donald Trump claimed that his defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board had forced the journalism association to rescind an award they had given to The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2018 for investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race and its ties to Trump’s campaign.

But in reality, a Florida court had simply allowed the case to progress.

“BREAKING! In a major WIN in our powerful lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding the illegal and defamatory ‘Award’ of their once highly respected ‘Prize,’ to fake, malicious stories on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, by the Failing New York Times and the Washington Compost, the Florida Appellate Court viciously rejected the Defendants’ corrupt attempt to halt the case,” Trump wrote.

“They won a Pulitzer Prize for totally incorrect reporting about the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax,” he continued. “Now they admit it was a SCAM, never happened, and their reporting was totally wrong, in fact, the exact opposite of the TRUTH.

“They’ll have to give back their ‘Award.’ They were awarded for false reporting, and we can’t let that happen in the United States of America,” the president said. “We are holding the Fake News Media responsible for their LIES to the American People, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

In 2021, Trump contacted the Pulitzer Board asking them to “strip” the country’s highest journalism honor from the teams that had investigated him. After a thorough and independent review of the stories, the board determined that the articles were verifiably accurate. It rejected Trump’s request on the basis that the “the separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

But Trump took issue with that language. In reaction, he sued 20 members on the Pulitzer Board, claiming that the statement defending the award amounted to defamation.

Three years later, in a seven-page opinion issued Wednesday, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled that the case could move forward—despite protestations from the defendants that this would violate due process and that Trump’s expanded presidential immunity prohibited such a suit. In the opinion, the appeals court wrote that “such privileges are afforded to the President alone, not to his litigation adversaries,” noting that only Trump could assert his immunity privileges and that he had not done so in this case.

“Allowing any president to pursue civil claims against private citizens in state court while simultaneously claiming that private citizens cannot pursue civil claims against him in the same exact court is extremely troubling and should raise concerns for all Americans. The Pulitzer Board is evaluating next steps and remains committed to continuing our defense of journalism,” a spokesperson for the board said in a statement in March, when the same court rejected their request to pause the case until Trump leaves office.

A Harvard University scientist detained by immigration authorities for over three months was granted bail by a federal judge Wednesday in a rebuke to the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss ruled that Kseniia Petrova’s detention and the revocation of her J-1 visa for failing to declare frog embryos at Boston’s Logan Airport in February should not have happened, and raised serious legal concerns.

“There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions,” Reiss said in her ruling, adding that the samples Petrova brought into the U.S. were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.”

“Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” Reiss added, which the Trump administration has said it plans to do. Petrova has said that she fears returning to the country due to her protests against the war in Ukraine.

Over three months ago, Petrova arrived back in the U.S. from a vacation in France with frog embryo samples, which she agreed to bring from a laboratory affiliated with her own at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School. When her bags were inspected at the airport, a customs official immediately canceled her visa and began deportation proceedings.

“What happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” Reiss said. If she did not take action in Petrova’s case, Reiss said that “there will be no determination” if Petrova’s constitutional rights were violated.

Petrova was recruited from Russia in 2023 to work at Harvard’s Kirschner Lab, studying the earliest stages of cell development as part of the lab’s work to find ways to repair cell damage that leads to diseases such as cancer. She has admitted to failing to declare the embryo samples, and her lawyer says that this would normally be punished with a minor fine.

Petrova still may not be released, as she also faces felony charges in Massachusetts for allegedly smuggling the embryos into the U.S., and is currently in federal custody in Louisiana. For now, though, Reiss’s ruling is another rebuke to an administration that is trying to fast-track mass deportations of immigrants while ignoring the law.

Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has spent the last month cozying up to Donald Trump—but the president is still considering pardoning her attempted kidnappers.

During a press conference Wednesday, Trump was asked whether he’d considered pardoning the nine men convicted of charges related to a conspiracy to kidnap Whitmer in 2020, in an attempt to liberate the state from her Covid-19 safety policies.

“I’m gonna look at it. I will take a look at it. It’s been brought to my attention,” Trump said. “I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job, I’ll be honest to you. It looked to me like some people said stupid things, you know? They were drinking, and I think they said stupid things.”

Trump insisted that he’d heard that question from “both sides, actually.” Earlier this week, the Department of Justice’s new pardon attorney Ed Martin Jr. said that he would give the case a “hard look,” comparing the convictions to those of the January 6 insurrectionists Trump pardoned upon entering office.

It should be particularly unsurprising that Trump would consider pardoning those accused in the plot; he called the scandal a “fake deal” in 2022. Whitmer even blamed Trump’s incendiary rhetoric for giving “comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.”

But in recent weeks, Whitmer has become a surprising defender of the president’s disastrous tariff policy, and in doing so, kneecapped any chance she had to be a Democratic presidential nominee in 2028. Whitmer even appeared for a photo op in the Oval Office—seemingly against her will—where she stood awkwardly behind the president as he signed an executive order asking the Justice Department to investigate two former White House aides for treason.

During an address at the Council of Foreign Relations in April, Whitmer said she and Trump agreed on tariffs as a way to bolster domestic manufacturing. “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you, here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America—more cars and chips, more steel and ships. We do need fair trade,” she said. “We should be able to celebrate good policy no matter where it comes from, and also criticize bad policy no matter where it comes from.”

But Trump’s stop-and-start economic policies have yet to yield positive results, as CEOs warn that rising prices are on the horizon and Wall Street has adopted a new term for Trump’s cowardly negotiations.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of his own administration’s new restrictions on student visas. 

When asked by a reporter when the U.S. would resume interviews for student visas, which were halted Tuesday, the president was clueless.  

“When do you think your administration could resume these interviews?” the reporter asked. 

“On what?” Trump replied, clearly bemused. 

The reporter then said “on the foreign student visas.” Trump thought she was saying “French,” but then others around clarified that she was referring to all foreign student visas. Trump was still unclear, and seemed to be stuck on previous questions. 

“What are you refer—foreign visas for what? Are you talking about for colleges?” Trump asked. The reporter replied in the affirmative, to which Trump said, “OK, so you’re off of Israel, so now you’re talking about colleges, right?” 

The reporter again said yes, which seemed to clear things up for the president. His answer, though, was meandering, and he started to rant about Harvard University, which he said “has been a disaster,” accusing them of taking “$5 billion-plus” which “nobody” knew about. 

“I’d rather see that money go to trade schools, and by the way, they’re totally antisemitic at Harvard, as you know, and some other colleges too, in all fairness to them, and it’s been exposed. Very exposed,” Trump said, bragging about “exposing” how much money the university is taking, before expounding his idea to boost funding to trade schools.

The Trump administration’s ban on new international student visa interviews doesn’t just apply to Harvard, however. All new student visa interviews are frozen until the administration can determine how to vet the social media activity of applicants, according to a cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to U.S. embassies.

Trump’s mind seems to be all over the place, with noticeable signs of cognitive decline. Even if his initial answer to the reporter’s question was off due to not being able to hear, his answer once he understood the question wasn’t on topic. This suggests that Trump didn’t know about the halt in student visa interviews, even though the decision came from Rubio the day before. Perhaps Trump’s fellow conservatives should be worried about the current president’s mental fitness, instead of being fixated on Joe Biden.

Donald Trump is planning to kill Voice Of America and replace it with a MAGA propaganda machine.

The remaining 800 employees at the federally funded, award-winning newsroom are expecting to receive termination notices as soon as Wednesday, multiple unnamed sources told Politico. This would effectively shutter the agency, following the roughly 600 VOA employees who were fired earlier this month.

In March, it appeared that the Trump administration was attempting to interfere with the organization’s journalistic independence, suspending one of its top reporters for relaying others’ criticism of the president, and reassigning VOA’s veteran White House bureau chief to a different beat.

Later that month, Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the agency that oversees VOA, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, altogether, as part of a wider reduction in force throughout the federal government. The move sparked a lawsuit from journalists, federal workers, and their unions alleging that USAGM had not fulfilled its duty to protect the freedom of the press or maintain a separation of powers.

Further, by conducting a mass reduction in force, USAGM may have potentially violated its collective bargaining agreement with its employees. A representative for the American Federation of Government Employees, representing VOA employees, declined to comment to Politico.

Kari Lake, a Trump acolyte serving as a senior adviser to the USAGM, announced earlier this month that the agency was planning to partner with the pro-Trump One America News Network to provide its right-wing newsfeed to the outlets VOA oversees.

President Trump just awarded Emil Bove, his personal lawyer, with a nomination for a lifetime federal judiciary appointment.

Bove, who unsuccessfully defended Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, could now soon be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, if confirmed by the Senate.

“It is my great honor to nominate Emil Bove to serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Emil is a distinguished graduate of Georgetown Law, and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for nearly a decade, where he was the Co-Chief of the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. “Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone. He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!”

Bove was serving as acting deputy attorney general before Todd Blanche was confirmed. He was key in dropping the multiple corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in exchange for Adams’s loyalty. He also fired prosecutors who investigated January 6 and accused the FBI of “insubordination” for not turning over the names of other staffers who worked on January 6 investigations. As a New York state prosecutor, he was described by colleagues as someone who could not “be bothered to treat lesser mortals with respect or empathy.”

“In my experience litigating against him, what he enjoyed most as a prosecutor was wielding power — the single worst possible trait for a public servant,” former federal prosecutor and Bove legal opponent Christine Chung told the Associated Press. “But people won’t speak against him publicly because he’s also vindictive, as he is now making abundantly clear.”

This story has been updated.

President Trump on Wednesday confirmed reports of a disagreement he had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding Netanyahu’s desire to bomb Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities—while Trump is in the middle of negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.

“Did you warn Prime Minister Netanyahu against taking some sort of action that could disrupt the talks there, in a phone call last week?” a reporter asked Trump, after he swore in former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. district attorney for D.C.

“Well, I like to be honest,” Trump said. “Yes, I did. Next question please?”

Rather than taking another question, Trump continued to describe the latest spat between himself and the Israeli prime minister.

“It’s not a warning. I said I don’t think it’s appropriate.”

“What exactly did you tell him?”

“I said I don’t think it’s appropriate, we’re having very good discussions with [Iran], and I said, ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate right now.’ Because if we can settle it with a very strong document, very strong … no trust, I don’t trust anybody. So no trust. I want it very strong, we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but nobody getting killed,” he rambled.

“I told [Netanyahu] this would be very inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution. Now, that could change at any moment. It could change with a phone call. But right now, I think [Iran wants] to make a deal, and if we can make a deal, [that would] save a lot of lives.”

This disagreement is the latest in a small but notable series of events in which the Trump administration has circumvented Netanyahu in a way the Biden administration did not. In March, the Trump administration sent its hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, to negotiate directly with Hamas to free Edan Alexander without Netanyahu’s consent.

When faced with criticism, Boehler stated that the Hamas officials were “pretty nice guys” who “didn’t have horns growing out of their head” and were “actually guys like us.” His response led to uproar among the Israeli center right.

Trump also skipped over Israel on his recent Middle East trip, suggesting that Netanyahu does not have the same sway with Trump as he did with the Biden administration.

“There’s a cadre in the administration who doesn’t particularly care for Israel; they have no special attachment to Israel. They view them as a partner but not one we should be going out of our way to be doing favors for,” a former Trump administration official told Politico, during Trump’s Middle East trip. “Netanyahu is one of those people who pushes and pushes, and that can rub Trump the wrong way.”