During a meeting of the agreed cabinet on Thursday at the White House, Elon Musk faced the senior cabinet officials, particularly the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, because of the way Rubio has so far approached his management of the department that supervises, they said multiple sources with knowledge of the meeting to ABC News.
The majority of the members of the cabinet around the table were observers, and did not weigh the dispute between musk and Rubio, which was first informed by the New York Times.
Musk accused Rubio of not saying goodbye to anyone in his department, and Rubio said that was not true, since the agency had more than 1,000 employees who took purchases, the sources told ABC News.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio is shown in the Oval Office of the White House, on February 24, 2025, in Washington, DC | Elon Musk arrives at President Donald Trump’s speech at a joint session of Congress in the Chamber of the Capitol Chamber in Washington, DC, March 4, 2025.
Somodevilla/Getty images | Saul Loeb/AFP through Getty Images
Trump observed the round trip before intervening and telling Rubio that he was doing a good job, according to the sources.
ABC News previously reported that during this meeting, Trump reminded his cabinet that they are in charge of the agencies they lead, not Musk.
The State Department did not return the messages immediately to ABC News to comment.
President Donald Trump speaks at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on March 7, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
The episode represents a rupture point in the tense relationship that Musk has had with the Trump cabinet.
Multiple members of the Trump Cabinet have privately expressed frustration for weeks during the way Musk has approached the cuts to the federal government and the directives that he and his Dux team have given to all government employees.
Trump was asked about the alleged clash on Friday during an unrelated event in the Hose White and said: “There is no shock.” He added that Rubio and Musk “get along fantastically well” and “both are doing a fantastic job.”
