Elon Musk berated a pair of Donald Trump's cabinet members in a tense White House meeting that ended with the president assuring the public that his next phase for cutting the federal workforce would be more methodically carried out.
The meeting Thursday was hastily scheduled the night before and suggests Trump has heard the growing complaints about Musk's hasty and seemingly careless cuts, and the New York Times reported details from inside the Cabinet Room.
"Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he has three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results speak for themselves," wrote reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, although their sourcing from the meeting was not specified.
But the meeting quickly turned contentious, as Musk first clashed with transportation secretary Sean Duffy and then secretary of state Marco Rubio.
"Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff," Haberman and Swan wrote. "You have fired 'nobody,' Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from his Department of Government Efficiency."
The secretary of state had been furious at Musk since the DOGE team shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was supposed to be under Rubio's control, and he accused the tech mogul of not being truthful about layoffs at the State Department and laid out his own vision for reorganizing the agency.
"Mr. Musk was unimpressed," the pair reported. "He told Mr. Rubio he was 'good on TV,' with the clear subtext being that he wasn’t good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match."
The argument dragged on awkwardly for others in the room before Trump finally intervened to defend Rubio, saying he was doing a "great job" and was very busy, and he urged everyone to work together, but that confrontation came after another involving Duffy, who asked about potential fixes to Federal Aviation Administration equipment for tracking air traffic – and then commerce secretary Howard Lutnick stepped in to defend Musk.
"Mr. Duffy said the young staff of DOGE was trying to lay off air traffic controllers," Haberman and Swan wrote. "What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?"
"Mr. Musk told Mr. Duffy that his assertion was a 'lie,'" the reporters added. "Mr. Duffy insisted it was not; he had heard it from them directly. Mr. Musk, asking who had been fired, said: Give me their names. Tell me their names."
Duffy argued that he could provide any names because he'd stopped them from being fired, and Musk then changed the topic to individuals whom he said were hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs working in control towers, and after a back-and-forth on that topic Musk urged the transportation secretary to call later on his private phone.
"The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers," Haberman and Swan wrote. "These air traffic controllers need to be 'geniuses.'"