\n<\/p>\n
As Donald Trump hosted leaders from the biggest US tech companies at a lavish White House state dining room dinner on Thursday night, there was one notable absence. Elon Musk, once inseparable from Trump and a constant, contentious presence in the White House, was not in attendance.<\/p>\n
The dinner, which included Meta\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft\u2019s Bill Gates, Apple\u2019s Tim Cook and OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman, was exactly the type of event where Musk would have sat at Trump\u2019s right hand only a few months ago. Instead, the Tesla CEO stated on his social media platform X that he had been invited but could not make it. He said he planned to send a representative and spent the day on X posting a familiar stream of attacks on immigration and trans people.<\/p>\n
The White House did not respond for comment on why Musk would not be at the dinner.<\/p>\n
The event, which was to have been held on the newly paved-over Rose Garden, until a forecast of thunderstorms forced the event indoors, began with televised words of praise for the president from several of the assembled tech leaders, and a brief series of questions from reporters.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s absence, even if voluntary, is a stark turnaround from when Trump repeatedly joked following the election that \u201cElon won\u2019t go home, I can\u2019t get rid of him\u201d. The vacant seat highlights a divide that has emerged between the two men since their very public falling out earlier this year, one that has seen Musk\u2019s influence over the government wane despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars to re-elect Trump during the 2024 election.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s omission from the list of attendees also echoes one of the seminal moments of his political evolution, another White House event. In 2022, then president Joe Biden failed to invite the Tesla CEO to a summit on electric vehicles over concerns it would draw backlash from autoworkers\u2019 unions. Musk, who had not yet publicly aligned himself with the Republican party, lashed out at the White House for the snub and declared that he would not vote for Biden. The move proved enormously costly for Democrats.<\/p>\n
The incident clearly stuck with Musk, who like Trump has shown a tendency to harbor long-term grudges. Even on the day of Trump\u2019s dinner, he reserved his ire for Biden rather than the current president, retweeting a clip of himself from 2023 addressing Biden\u2019s snub with the post \u201cI try not to start fights, but I do finish them\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the ensuing years, Musk has taken a hard turn to the political right. He has turned X into a bastion of far-right influencers, whom he frequently retweets to his more than 200 million followers. He has promoted false theories about Democrats conspiring to get immigrants to illegally vote en masse and embraced far-right political parties around the world. He also became Trump\u2019s most vocal and deep-pocketed supporter, contributing nearly $300m to the re-election campaign and Republican causes.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s support for Trump placed him in a position of immense power after the president\u2019s inauguration as the tech mogul established and led the so-called \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d and its sweeping dismantling of federal agencies. It also turned him into a prominent guest at political dinners and events, only a year after the British government did not invite him to a major tech summit as he made inflammatory anti-immigrant posts that claimed a \u201ccivil war\u201d would take place in the UK.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Since Musk and Trump\u2019s relationship imploded in May over policy differences \u2013 Musk railed against Trump\u2019s signature One Big Beautiful Bill \u2013 which then snowballed into Musk accusing Trump of being in the files pertaining to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the xAI CEO has all but vanished from high-profile government events. Although Trump still praises Musk as a \u201cgenius\u201d, he told reporters on Wednesday night that Musk has \u201cgot some problems\u201d and the two have not been seen together since their public spat.<\/p>\n As Musk has feuded with Trump and ceded his place in the White House, however, rival tech moguls have grown closer with the administration and filled some of the vacuum. Earlier this month, Trump hosted Cook, the Apple CEO, at the White House, who in turn gifted the president a 24-karat-gold souvenir. Meanwhile, Trump aides have discussed cutting Musk\u2019s government contracts, according to the Wall Street Journal, only to find upon review that doing so would endanger too many key operations.<\/p>\n If Musk had attended Thursday\u2019s dinner, it would have created an awkward arrangement as he is suing two of the companies whose leaders were in attendance: Apple and OpenAI, helmed by his former collaborator and now nemesis Altman. As with Trump, Musk has also attacked Gates for his ties to Epstein after the Microsoft founder accused him of \u201ckilling children\u201d through Doge\u2019s cuts to foreign aid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Donald Trump hosted leaders from the biggest US tech companies at a lavish White House state dining room dinner on Thursday night, there was one notable absence. Elon Musk, once inseparable from Trump and a constant, contentious presence in the White House, was not in attendance. The dinner, which included Meta\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4456,91,10488,671,807,1371,812,81,2168],"class_list":{"0":"post-19278","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-dinner","9":"tag-elon","10":"tag-hosts","11":"tag-house","12":"tag-leaders","13":"tag-musk","14":"tag-tech","15":"tag-trump","16":"tag-white"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}