Billionaire Elon Musk predicts that President Donald Trump‘s administration will be followed by two terms of a JD Vance presidency.
Musk placed the bet during a video appearance at a reunion of his DOGE cost-cutting team last month, saying the U.S. is at the beginning of a “great 12-year span,” Politico reported Tuesday. Musk reportedly told attendees that he opted to join the event virtually because news of it was public, and he rated himself among the top assassination targets in the country, behind only Trump and Vance.
Attendees at the event had their phones placed in pouches for the duration, and they only got them back when boarding buses leaving the venue. 
Musk’s relationship with Trump has been rocky after the pair fell out over the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” earlier this year. Nevertheless, the spat appears to be behind them.
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Trump said Tuesday he still likes Musk “a lot” when asked whether Musk was “back in [his] circle of friends.”
“Well, I really don’t know. I mean, I like Elon a lot,” he said during Tuesday’s cabinet meeting. He praised Musk’s endorsement during the 2024 campaign before noting their disagreement over electric-vehicle policy.
Musk was a fixture in the White House in the early days of the second Trump administration, as he took on the role as the Department of Government Efficiency’s de facto leader. He served as a special government employee with the Trump administration to help lead DOGE, frequently attending Cabinet meetings and joining Trump during public events. Musk’s tenure with DOGE wrapped up at the end of May.
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Musk had also championed Trump during the 2024 election cycle, criss-crossing battleground states that ultimately all voted for the Republican candidate over former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump repeatedly celebrated Musk for his efforts at DOGE to remove potential federal overspending, fraud and mismanagement – an effort assailed by government employees and Democrats who protested both the Trump administration and Musk repeatedly earlier this year.
The cozy friendship fell to pieces in June, however, when Musk began publicly ridiculing the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which was a massive piece of legislation Trump signed into law in July that advances his agenda on taxes, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt.
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Musk railed against the legislation, which Trump had been rallying Republican lawmakers to pass since the beginning of his second term, posting on X that it would be the “BIGGEST DEBT ceiling increase in HISTORY,” and also claiming in a personal attack on Trump that “@RealDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files.”
Trump previously told the media that his relationship with Musk changed when he began discussing plans to eliminate the electric vehicle mandate, which would affect Musk’s signature company, Tesla. Trump signed a trio of congressional resolutions in June ending California’s restrictive rules for diesel engines and mandates on electric vehicle sales, celebrating that his signature “will kill the California mandates forever.”
The pair abruptly parted ways in June, with Musk weeks later offering some support to Trump’s presidential actions on social media, such as praising a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in July.
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Musk most recently attended a Trump event on Nov. 18 at the White House for a dinner with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, alongside dozens of other high-profile business leaders.
Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report.
