Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is softening his tone on Trump campaign financier turned adviser Elon Musk just days after he vowed to push the Tesla and SpaceX CEO out of the incoming president’s orbit over Musk’s support for a controversial technology worker visa program.
Bannon, who was campaign chair for the last few months of Trump’s 2016 presidential run and served as a top White House aide for Trump’s first seven months in office, has been engaged in a war of words against Musk in recent weeks stemming from the South African immigrant’s vow to support continuing the H-1B visa program.
The program, which provides for non-immigrant visas that allow essential technology workers to enter the United States to work for American employers, became a source of tension after Trump announced that an Indian immigrant and technology executive, Sriram Krishnan, would serve as a top White House adviser on artificial intelligence.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera over the weekend, Bannon vowed to “get Elon Musk kicked out by the time he’s inaugurated” and said Musk would not have a coveted “blue pass” that would allow him free access to the White House’s most coveted office space in the West Wing.
Now, at a live event hosted Politico to mark Trump’s impending first 100 days in office, Bannon has walked back the comments.
Asked about the contretemps by correspondent Dasha Burns, Bannon conceded that Musk earned a “seat at the table” by financing a large part of Trump’s victorious campaign operation and praised the tech entrepreneur for having “backed … the populist MAGA play” during the last election.
“Look, when you write $250 million worth of check … when you’re that involved, when you have actually backed a ground game, you’re going to have a seat at the table. I’ve always argued it can’t be at the head of the table, and that table shouldn’t be the Cabinet Room in the West Wing,” he said.
Musk, who has reportedly been camped out in a $2,000 per night space at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach — just steps from the president-elect’s personal residence — has emerged as a key member of Trump’s brain trust, having donated roughly a quarter of a billion dollars towards making him the first president to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland accomplished the same feat more than a century ago.
He is reportedly set to have access to an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just across the street from the White House, as part of his work on what he and Trump have called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE.
Bannon, who served a brief prison term last year after being convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 select committee, has remained a key outside adviser to Trump but is not expected to join his staff once more.
His conflict with Musk exposed a potential fissure in the Trump coalition between the tech executives who backed him in his 2024 run versus the anti-immigration populists who have formed a key part of his base since the beginning of Trump’s political career.
But Bannon said Trump’s new coalition is large enough for both camps while describing it as “the beginning, I think, of a 1932 FDR type realignment in American politics.”
“Clearly you’re going to have members of that coalition that don’t agree on everything … and there’s going to be clashes,” he said, adding that Trump is “good about … people arguing ideas” and letting “the best ideas win.”
