Donald Trump is getting personal in his war on Elon Musk, according to author Michael Wolff.
The president has been beefing about his former pal on phone calls with associates, claiming that he tipped off The New York Times about the billionaire’s alleged drug use, Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast on Wednesday.
The Times reported in May that the 53-year-old was using ketamine, as well as Adderall, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, during Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign—which he spent hundreds of millions to support. Musk denies that he was taking drugs.
“I was tracking some Trump phone calls on Monday night. And it’s sort of worth explaining here that over a long period of time, I’ve gotten to know and cultivated a lot of people who Trump regularly speaks to,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles.
“Trump speaks to them, and then they speak to other people,” he said, adding, “whoever he calls, he says the same thing to everybody. So you know exactly what is on his mind.”
Apparently, Musk was on his mind on Monday.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has reignited his feud with Trump this week, rage-posting against the behemoth spending bill that Trump is trying to push through Congress. By Tuesday, it had irked Trump enough to provoke a public threat, in which the president suggested Musk’s government subsidies could dry up and send him packing “back home to South Africa.”
“He’s like, calling people to say, ‘do you think Elon is crazy?’” Wolff said of Trump.
“In one of these phone calls—many of them—he was on about, you know, how many drugs he takes,” he continued. “‘He takes drugs all the time. You know that, don’t you? You know, The New York Times wrote about it. They said, he takes drugs.’”
According to Wolff, Trump said, “‘actually, we dropped a dime to The New York Times … on Elon’s drug taking.”
Wolff said he has no idea if someone in Trump’s team was actually the source of that story, but “he is just claiming credit for that now.”
The Times said its account of Musk’s behavior was based on interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him, as well as private messages reporters had obtained.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, has previously told the Daily Beast that Wolff is a “lying sack of s–t” who “fabricates stories.”
Earlier in the conversation, Wolff, author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and several other titles about the president, said Musk and Trump’s fallout has entered “blood score” territory.
Even if the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” fails in the House, “Elon is pi–ed” now, Wolff said, predicting that the richest man in the world might actually create a new political party if that transpires.
Musk has threatened to form an “America Party” if the “insane spending bill passes,” and said he would fund primary opponents to any lawmaker who “campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history.”
Trump wants the bill passed by July 4 and has been calling for GOP unity as House Republicans struggle to coalesce around the controversial legislation.
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