Trump on Elon Musk: 'He knew about the bill, very disappointed in Elon'

Thank you, Mr President. The criticism that I've seen and I'm sure you've seen regarding Elon Musk and your big beautiful bill. What's your reaction to that?

Do you think it in any way hurts passage in the Senate, which of course is your seeking? Well, look, you know, I've always liked Elon and it's always very surprised. You saw the words he had for me.

The words and he hasn't said anything about me that's bad. I'd rather have him criticize me than the bill because the bill is incredible. It's the biggest cut in the history of our country.

We've never cut. Uh it's about 1. 6 trillion in cuts.

It's the biggest tax cut tax you would say. Uh people people's taxes will go way down. But it's the biggest tax cut in history.

It's uh we have we are doing things in that bill that are unbelievable. And uh when you look at what we're doing for small businesses, for people, for middle inome people, all of the things that we're doing, nobody's ever seen anything like it. And you know, Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate and you know, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles and uh you know, they're having a hard time the electric vehicles and they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy and you know I I Elon knew this from the beginning.

He knew it for a long time ago. That's been in there. That's been uh I would say JD that hasn't changed.

That's been right from the beginning. Mr I think Mr Secretary hasn't changed at all. right from the beginning.

But I know that disturbed him. Uh he wanted and rightfully, you know, he recommended somebody from uh that he I guess knew very well. I'm sure he respected him, but to run NASA and I didn't think it was appropriate.

And he happened to be a Democrat, like totally Democrat. And I say, you know, look, we won. We get certain privileges and one of the privileges we don't have to appoint a Democrat.

NASA is very important. We have great people. Uh General Kaine is going to be picking somebody with our uh we'll be we'll be checking them out and seeing but uh he wanted that person a certain person and we said no.

And you I can understand why he's upset. Remember he was here for a long time. You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the oval desk and uh even with the black eye.

I said, "You want a little makeup? We'll get you a little makeup. " But he said, "No, I don't think so.

" Which is interesting and very nice. He wants to be who he is. So, you could make that statement, too, I guess.

Look, Elon and I had a great relationship. Uh, I don't know if we will anymore. I was surprised because you were here.

Everybody in this room practically was here as we had a wonderful send off. He said wonderful things about me. You couldn't have nicer.

Said the best things. He's worn the hat. Trump was right about everything.

And I am right about the great big beautiful bill. We call it a great big beautiful bill because that's what it is. And uh again, biggest tax cuts in history, biggest economic development moves anywhere.

We've never done anything like it. Uh business is spurred. And I don't know if you've seen the numbers, but the numbers came out.

Even the CBO, which is run by Democrats, said that we're going to be uh doing, you know, I'd like you to discuss it. The 2. 8 8 billion a trillion that CBO this is some a group of people that are Democrats they're very hostile to us they just came out with phenomenal numbers what it does you want to mention that's yes sir so what what we've seen is we keep hearing from the CBO that there's going to be a large deficit from the bill which we disagree with but using the CBO scoring uh they came out and scored the tariff revenue we think it'll be the minimum of 2.

8 8 trillion over the 10-year window, which actually puts the bill in surplus if you include the tariff revenue, which they won't do. It gives you a tremendous surplus, but we're not allowed to use that. For some reason, they say scoring.

Nobody knows what scoring means. Maybe a couple of people, but nobody. Somebody sits in the background, they say, "Well, we're not going to allow that.

" They're not allowing other things that we have that are tremendously profitable for our country. But if you saw the other day CNBC, they came out with uh numbers and the people on the show, very good people. I've watched them for a long time.

They couldn't believe the numbers how good they are. The numbers were incredible. And that was personal income and also very low inflation.

We have very low inflation. We're down to 2% now and maybe even lower than that. And when I took it over, it was a mess.

Remember, we had the worst inflation probably in the history of our country. They say 48 years, but let's say that's I think it's worse than that. So, we had the worst inflation in the history of our country under the Biden administration.

Now, we're down to a beautiful number, 2%. You'd actually like to keep it there. Better than zero is 2%.

It's gone down maybe to one. And 1% is like perfect. That's perfect.

You don't want to have zero for certain reasons that are that nobody is very interested to listen to. But we have almost perfect inflation. Grocery prices are down.

Everything remember eggs. Eggs. We weren't going to buy another egg for the next 20 years.

They were so expensive, right? Remember, you guys all hit me about eggs. Eggs have come down 400%.

Everybody has eggs now. They're having eggs for breakfast again. But if you look at gasoline, very important, I think always the most important because it's the energy is a big the biggest factor.

That's what happened. He screwed up our energy policy and everything went up because energy went up. But now energy is way down and uh they have states where you at $1.

98 a gallon for gasoline. So the costs have way have come way down. And one of the things I ran on was that I ran on the border.

We have the best border in the history of our country. 99. 99%.

It was uh last week three people came in. Two of them for medical reasons. We let them in because one of them had a heart attack.

I think it was a nice thing to do and one of them had something else. So we've never had I had very good numbers for four years, but we we really topped it. And I want to thank Christie and Tom Holman.

They've done a fantastic job. But nobody mentions that anymore. Remember a few months ago the border was a total disaster.

People were coming in by the hundreds of thousands of people a day, a week, a month. I mean, we had a month, two million people came in in one month. The border was being overrun and a lot of bad people, criminals, murderers, drug dealers.

We had some of the worst people in the world coming in from all over the world. It's totally closed. And you know what?

People are coming into our country, but they're coming in legally. So, we've done a great job. Elon knew that.

Elon endorsed me very strongly. He actually went up in campaign for me. I think I would have won.

Susie would say I would have won Pennsylvania easily anyway, even if the governor ran, the real governor, not the governor from Minnesota, who's a I mean, he's a sick puppy. That guy, that poor guy. I feel sorry for him.

But, uh, they they made a bad choice with him. But if you pick Shapiro or anybody else, I spoke to him recently about his, you know, his uh house being set on fire, which was terrible. But if they picked him, I would have won Pennsylvania.

I won it by a lot. Uh but I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here. Better than you people.

He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it. All of a sudden, he had a problem.

and he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate because that's billions and billions of dollars. And it really is unfair. We want to have cars of all types, electric, we want to have electric, but we want to have gasoline, uh, combustion, we want to have different, we want to have hybrids, we want to have all, we want to be able to sell everything.

And when that was cut and Congress wanted to cut it, uh, he became a little bit different and I can understand that. But he knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody and he never had a problem until right after he left.

And if you saw the statements he made about me, which I'm sure you can get very easily, it's very fresh on tape. Uh he said the most beautiful things about me. And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next.

But I'm I'm very disappointed in Elon.