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.

“The President’s lawsuit is an attempt to intimidate the press and drive a political narrative,” a spokesperson for the Pulitzer Board told The New Republic. “The Pulitzer Board takes seriously its mission to honor excellence in reporting, literature, history, and the arts, and we will continue our staunch defense of journalism and First Amendment rights.”

This story has been updated.

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.