President Donald Trump shut down reporters after being asked to address alleged clashes between Elon Musk and State Secretary Marco Rubio.
“You’re not supposed to be asking that question,” Trump told an NBC reporter during an Oval Office press conference on Friday afternoon.
It came after a tense Cabinet meeting saw Musk and Rubio butt heads, according to reports, which claim Musk told the cabinet official he was “good on TV” and had fired “nobody.”
The New York Times report claimed Rubio had been “privately furious” with Musk for weeks after DOGE made changes to the United States Agency for International Development, which is under Rubio’s control.
Denying the report, Trump said: “No clash I was there. You are not supposed to be asking that question because we are talking about the World Cup.”
“Elon gets along great with Marco and they are both doing a fantastic job,” the President added.
More than a month after Trump took office, there’s still confusion about Musk’s authority. In public statements and legal filings, administration officials have insisted that Musk does not actually run DOGE and has no direct authority over budgets.
But Trump has contradicted both statements. He said Tuesday that DOGE is “headed by Elon Musk” in a prime-time speech to a joint session of Congress, and he said Thursday that “Elon will do the cutting” if agency leaders don’t reduce their spending.
Their approach has energized people like David Sacks, a venture capitalist serving as a Trump adviser on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, who praised the administration as moving “faster than any startup that I’ve been part of.”
Musk serves as a presidential adviser, not a Senate-confirmed official.
