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It wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk couldn’t even get an invitation to the White House.
The year was 2021, and President Joe Biden was announcing tighter pollution rules and promoting his electric vehicle policies.
Behind him on the lawn were gleaming examples — a Ford F-150 Lightning, a Chevrolet Bolt EV, a Jeep Wrangler — as well as the chief executives of the companies that made them. But the nation’s biggest electric vehicle producer was nowhere to be seen.
“Seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Musk tweeted before the event.
The Biden White House explained the snub by noting that the automakers that had been invited were the nation’s three largest employers of the United Automobile Workers, a powerful union, and it suggested that the administration would find other ways to partner with Tesla. (Union animus toward electric vehicles later became a problem for Biden.) But today, the moment is seen as a turning point in a feud between Musk and Biden that some Democrats say they have come to regret deeply.
“They left Elon out,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who is working to get his party to embrace electric vehicles, “and now he hates ’em.”
It was hard not to think about that episode yesterday when Musk and Trump lined up Teslas, including Cybertrucks, on the White House driveway and proceeded to rattle off their benefits like denizens of a suburban showroom.
“I love the product,” Trump said.
“Try it,” Musk said. “You’ll like it!”
Musk now has the White House attention and promotion that he wanted several years ago — and with it, a pile of potential benefits for some of his companies — but it’s come at a price. He donated some $300 million largely through his own super PAC to help Trump get elected. My colleagues Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman reported yesterday that he’s signaled a willingness to put another $100 million into groups controlled by Trump’s political operation.
