Elon Musk has revealed he had a “lovely dinner” with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump on Saturday evening, just hours after the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
“Had a lovely dinner last night with POTUS and FLOTUS,” Musk posted the following evening, including a photo of the trio together at their table. “2026 is going to be amazing!”
The event was held hours after Trump gave the go-ahead for the U.S. military to launch surprise missile strikes on Caracas in the early hours of Saturday morning that led to the capture of Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, who have since been taken to New York to answer drug and weapons charges.
The president subsequently held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida – flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, and White House adviser Stephen Miller – in which he explained the U.S. would “run” Venezuela until a stable new government could take over.
The social engagement with Musk that followed comes after the latter signalled a return to politics on New Year’s Day.
“America is toast if the radical left wins,“ he wrote in another X post. “They will open the floodgates to illegal immigration and fraud. Won’t be America anymore.”
Those comments were in response to another user’s post reporting that he would be “going all-in funding Republicans to help President Trump take back full control in the November midterms.”
The two billionaires now appear to be firmly reconciled after their spectacular falling out last summer.
The Tesla and SpaceX boss had been a passionate supporter of Trump during the 2024 presidential race and donated almost $290 million towards his campaign.
After the president’s victory over Kamala Harris, Musk was appointed to oversee the newly-founded Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with cutting excess federal expenditure, which led to a public backlash against his companies, notably Tesla, whose cars were boycotted and dealerships vandalised.
The world’s richest man left the administration in late May and quickly began feuding with the president on social media over aspects of his One Big, Beautiful Bill, which led to a vicious exchange of personal insults in early June across their competing platforms.
Musk alleged, among other things, that Trump was withholding the Jeffrey Epstein files because he appeared in them, while the president threatened to have the South African-born U.S. citizen deported.
The pair were subsequently seen together at a memorial event for the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Arizona in September and at a White House dinner held to honor Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in November.
Vice President JD Vance played a vital role in bringing the duo back together, according to The Washington Post, recognizing that Musk and his resources could be vital to their shared future goals and talking him down from starting a new political party of his own.
Musk recently guested on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of the aforementioned Trump adviser, and admitted that, if he had the chance to do it all again, he would have rejected the opportunity to manage DOGE and instead focused on his existing businesses.
“Instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built, worked on my companies, essentially,” he said. “And they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”
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