Anger at Musk Erupts in Cabinet Room Clash With Key Trump Aides

President Signaling Limits on Billionaire

Author

Matt Davis
March 08, 2025

Hey, friends. For those of you who are new here, I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each morning at 9 a.m. if you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later).

The explosion on the left is from the ongoing war in Syria. It is not the “explosive meeting” the Times emailed everyone about yesterday afternoon.

I’m not quite sure how the New York Times newsroom links with its email team, but yesterday afternoon I got a breathless email linking to today’s front page story by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, telling me there had been an “explosive” meeting between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s cabinet. That’s the headline on the web version of the story today, too. But the paper’s headline writers take a more somber view, suggesting that “anger" broke out during a “cabinet room clash” on Wednesday night. Which feels a little less eager to oversell a scoop. Still.

[Rubs hands together, gleefully].

Let’s read the newspaper together, shall we?

Elon Musk unleashed a “litany of attacks” on Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a hastily convened cabinet meeting on Thursday, according to “five people with knowledge of the events” interviewed by the Times.

“Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.”

I love it when the newspaper’s reporters get a little excited about having a story nobody else got. It’s true that Marco Rubio has been looking miserable in public lately. Here he is watching his boss upbraid the President of Ukraine in the Oval Office a week ago, for example.

Of course, it sounds like we’re describing a child whose toy got stolen by another child, here, not U.S.AID, which helped kids avoid dying of AIDS in Africa.

Still, basically, the Times is reporting on a couple of douchebags being douchebags in a meeting in front of other douchebags. This is hardly an “I am Spartacus” moment of resistance to the world’s richest man.

Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas showing solidarity in the face of oppression.

Musk, apparently, told Rubio he had fired “nobody,” then “scornfully adding that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.” Ya’burrrrrnnnnnt.

“Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.”

Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.

Scorn. Sarcasm. Tennis!

“After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a ‘great job.’ Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.”

Can you imagine appealing to Donald Trump to arbitrate a disagreement? Oh, wait. Ukraine can. This is from a separate story by Erica Green also reported Friday.

President Trump said on Friday that he was “strongly considering” imposing sanctions and tariffs on Russia until a cease-fire and permanent peace deal was reached in its war with Ukraine, even as he defended Russia’s stepped-up attacks on Ukraine after the United States paused aid and intelligence sharing.

Asked in the Oval Office on Friday whether he believed Mr. Putin was taking advantage of the situation, which resulted from a tense Oval Office meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last month, Mr. Trump defended Mr. Putin’s actions, saying “he’s doing what anybody else would do.”

Last week Trump was yelling at Zelensky at the White House. This week he’s considering imposing sanctions on Russia to speed up the peace process. It’s starting to feel a lot like the man could be out of his depth, don’t you think?

Back to the “explosive” meeting between the douchebags. The Times reports that is was a “potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.”

At the meeting, Trump said that he still supported Mr. Musk’s initiative to cut government workers. “But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach. From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.”

“It is unclear what the long-term impact of the meeting will be. Mr. Trump remains Mr. Trump’s biggest political financial supporter…But if nothing else, the session laid bare the tensions within Mr. Trump’s team, and news of the sharp clashes spread quickly through senior ranks of cabinet agencies after it was over.”

It wasn’t just Mr. Rubio who spoke up. Sean Duffy, who is in charge of the Federal Aviation Administration as transport secretary, spoke up.

“Mr. Duffy sai the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?”

Mr. Musk told Mr. Duffy that his assertion was a “lie.”

Apparently the exchange ended “with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be ‘geniuses’, he said.”

Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Doug Collins, said “the government should not wield a blunt instrument and cleave everyone off from the VA. They needed to be strategic about it. Mr. Trump agreed with Mr. Collins, saying they ought to retain the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.”

Veterans are a “powerful constituency and a core part of the Trump base,” incidentally. And is it me or does Trump’s tendency to talk in childish terms sometimes cross over into sounding like he doesn’t understand nuance?

If only the world could “hire geniuses” to run the government, and “keep the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.”

At elections, for example.

“Mr. Musk, who later claimed on X that the cabinet meeting was ‘very productive,’ seemed far less enthused inside the room. He aggressively defended himself, reminding the cabinet secretaries that he had built multiple billion-dollar companies from the ground up and knew something about hiring good people.”

He sounds, to me, like Cyril Sneer from “The Raccoons.”

Which is a great cartoon to watch on a Saturday morning if you’re sick of reading the newspaper.

Thanks for reading along with me. I appreciate you, and your efforts to spread media literacy around the world. You can do me a favor by sharing this email with your friends and family and just generally, by keeping the faith that we live in a democracy where objective truth is more important than misinformation and lies. I’m off to whack a squash ball around with a private equity fund manager 15 years younger than me.

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and child.