Washington: US President Donald Trump planned to sell the red Tesla car he said he bought in March, according to local media reports.
Trump originally purchased the car to demonstrate his support for Elon Musk amid a backlash over his role in the administration, reports Xinhua news agency, quoting The New York Times.
“Administration officials said Mr Trump showed little interest in engaging with Mr Musk, even after the billionaire signalled he would be open to de-escalating the fight” they currently have, the report added.
Late Thursday, Musk backed off a threat to “immediately” decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which transports NASA astronauts and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
A short time later, when Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund billionaire, posted on social media that the two men “should make peace for the benefit of our great country,” Musk responded, “You’re not wrong.”
“For Musk, a prolonged feud with Trump could be hugely expensive,” noted the report. His companies, including SpaceX, have benefited from billions of dollars in government contracts and were positioned to receive billions more.
On Thursday, Trump threatened to end those contracts.
The feud is risky for Trump as well, it added. Musk, the world’s richest person, who spent about 275 million US dollars to help elect Trump in 2024, had promised to give 100 million dollars to groups controlled by the president’s team before the 2026 midterms.
Those funds have yet to be delivered and are now very much in doubt.
This also comes against the backdrop of Elon Musk’s threat, which he later retracted, to cut off NASA’s use of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft would be a huge blow to NASA, depriving the space agency of the only American vehicle capable of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station and dramatically changing how NASA would access the $100 billion orbiting laboratory, The Washington Post has reported.
The threat, posted on X, came during an escalating fight between the wealthiest man in the world and President Donald Trump, after Trump had threatened to cancel all of Musk’s company’s federal contracts.
“Given SpaceX’s importance to multiple federal programs, severing those relationships could leave NASA as well as the Pentagon and intelligence agencies in a lurch,” noted the report.
Several hours after making the threat, Musk relented, saying in response to a post on X that he should cool off and reconsider: “Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon.”
(IANS)
