Trump rejects taunts that Elon Musk is real power behind US president-elect

United States President Donald Trump has pushed back on the notion that he has “ceded the presidency” to billionaire Elon Musk, who has taken an outsized role in the president-elect’s transition into the White House.

Trump made the comments during a speech in Arizona on Sunday, days after the Tesla and SpaceX owner intervened alongside the president-elect to scuttle a budget bill negotiated in Congress.

The incident was the latest in which Musk has taken an atypically large role in the incoming Trump administration, prompting criticism from Democrats and from within Trump’s own Republican party.

Directly addressing those criticisms for the first time, Trump praised Musk, before adding: “And no, he’s not taking the presidency.”

Trump further called the suggestion that he has “ceded the presidency to Elon Musk” another “hoax” pushed by his political opponents.

In a later quip, Trump noted that there is no risk of Musk officially taking over as president because he would be constitutionally barred from doing so.

“You know why he can’t be [president]?” Trump asked the crowd in Arizona. “He wasn’t born in this country.”

The South African-born Musk – the world’s richest person according to Forbes Magazine – became one of Trump’s biggest supporters in the run-up to the election, endorsing the president-elect in July following an assassination attempt and pumping an estimated $200m into a Political Action Committee (PAC) supporting Trump.

He has since been tapped by Trump to lead a proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with taking a slash-and-burn approach to federal government spending.

The so-called “department” has been billed as an independent advisory panel, not an official government agency, and its purview remains undefined.

Budget deal intervention

Trump’s comments come a day after outgoing US President Joe Biden signed into law a funding bill that averts a government shutdown.

The previous bill negotiated by members of both parties in Congress was torpedoed days earlier when Trump came out in opposition.

The president-elect’s main contention was that the bill did not raise the debt ceiling – a political fight Trump hoped to avoid before taking office in January. The debt ceiling is the US’s borrowing limit, a cap imposed by Congress on how much money the government can borrow to cover the gap between its revenue and spending.

Musk had also come out in opposition to the deal, which he criticised in a flood of tweets on the X social media platform that he also owns. He pledged to financially support primary challenges to lawmakers who supported the original legislation.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson later told US media that he spoke by phone to both Trump and Musk as a new bill was renegotiated.

The final bill – which funds the US government at the current rate through March 14 – gutted several provisions opposed by Trump and Musk. However, the final version did not raise the debt ceiling amid opposition from a cadre of Republican lawmakers.

Speaking to CNN, Republican lawmaker Rich McCormick said Musk’s intervention showed “he has influence and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him.”

Other Republicans have been more accepting, with Representative Tony Gonzales saying in an interview on CBS that it “feels like Elon Musk is our prime minister”.

Speaking on CNN, Senator Bill Hagerty praised Musk’s role in negotiating the bill, while pushing back on the notion that the billionaire was driving Trump’s decisions.

‘Extremely alarming’

Beyond the budget deal, Musk’s regular presence alongside Trump before he takes office on January 20 has for weeks caused disquiet among Democrats.

The billionaire was on the call when Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following his election victory. He has also been present for recent meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in New York.

The criticism has been prompted by social media memes showing Trump kowtowing to Musk in various settings.

Following last week’s budget negotiations, several Democrats accused Musk of intervening to serve his own interests.

They pointed to his support for removing a provision in the original bill that could have limited the operations of his businesses in China.

“It is extremely alarming that House Republican leadership, at the urging of an unelected billionaire, scrapped a bipartisan, bicameral negotiated funding deal that included this critical provision to protect American jobs and critical capabilities,” Representative Rosa DeLauro wrote in a letter to congressional leaders on Friday.