REPORT: USAID spawns fight between Marco Rubio and Elon Musk

Marco Rubio reportedly blew up at Elon Musk at a closed-door Cabinet meeting after the DOGE head accused the secretary of state of failing to slash his staff.

Musk, the world’s richest man, told the secretary of state, who was seated next to Donald Trump at the meeting on Thursday, that he had fired “nobody,” The New York Times reported. He sarcastically added that the one person Rubio had perhaps fired was an employee of Musk’s DOGE.

Rubio, the Times reported, has been privately livid at Musk since he tore apart an agency supposedly under the secretary’s control: the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk has effectively eliminated in his bid to take a chainsaw to federal spending.

The top foreign affairs official fired back that Musk was wrong. Rubio pointed to the more than 1,500 State Department staff that had taken the early retirement offer. Didn’t that count? he asked.

Matching Musk’s own sarcasm, Rubio reportedly asked whether the DOGE head wanted to rehire those employees so that he could fire them again and take credit.

Later in the fiery exchange, Musk remarked that Rubio was “good on TV,” the implication being that he wasn’t good at much else, according to the Times.
The president silently watched the back-and-forth, sitting back with his arms crossed. It dragged on for an uncomfortably long time.

Finally, Trump stepped in to play peacemaker. He said that Rubio was doing “a great job.” Everyone needed to work together, he added.

Before turning his attention to Rubio in the meeting, Musk, an unelected tech billionaire hand-picked by Trump, had taken shots at other top members of the president’s Cabinet.

Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy got into their own quarrel over how the latter was managing the Federal Aviation Administration, the Times reported.

For the full read, visit The New York Times or The Daily Beast.