Days after the very public breakup of President Trump and his former adviser Elon Musk, the latter appears to be doing damage control.

“I regret some of my posts about President [Trump] last week,” Musk posted on X, his social media platform, just after 3 a.m. ET on Wednesday. “They went too far.”

Trump has been active on social media early Wednesday, but has not responded publicly to Musk’s apology.

However, in a previously recorded podcast interview with the New York Post that aired on Wednesday morning, Trump said he had “no hard feelings” towards Musk.

“I don’t blame him for anything but I was a little disappointed,” Trump said, adding that he had not “thought too much about him in the last little while.”

When asked if he could forgive Musk, Trump said “I guess I could,” but that “my sole function now is getting this country back to a level higher than it’s ever been.”

The president told NBC News on Saturday that he has no desire to repair his relationship with Musk, saying he assumed it was over.

“I’m too busy doing other things,” Trump said, adding, “I have no intention of speaking to him.”

Trump was critical of Musk in that interview, saying the tech billionaire had been “disrespectful to the office of the president.”

But Trump also appeared to soften some of his stances. He said he hadn’t given any more thought to his earlier threat of canceling Musk’s companies’ federal contracts or investigating Musk’s immigration status, as Trump ally Steve Bannon had publicly suggested.

Meanwhile, Musk quietly deleted some of his more inflammatory tweets from the previous week, including posts endorsing a call for Trump’s impeachment, linking Trump to the files of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and saying Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession this year.

Trump said on Monday that he had no plans to discontinue Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system that was installed at the White House despite security concerns — though may move his Tesla, which he bought in March, off-site. And he told reporters he would not have a problem if Musk called.

“We had a good relationship, and I just wish him well — very well, actually,” Trump said. A clip of the exchange was posted to X, where Musk responded with a heart emoji.

The alliance that was 

The two had enjoyed a close relationship since 2024, when the tech billionaire poured almost $300 million into backing Trump’s reelection campaign.

Musk went on to join the new administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), becoming the public face of its controversial efforts to reshape the federal government even as government lawyers downplayed his role in court filings.

Musk’s whirlwind 130 days as a special government employee were marked by legal setbacks, clashes with Cabinet members and scant evidence to support DOGE’s claims of significant savings. His own business empire took a financial hit, with Tesla’s first-quarter profits plunging 71% compared to the same period in 2024.

Musk announced his departure from the government in late May, citing the end of his “scheduled time” in the position. At a final Oval Office press conference on May 30, Musk stood next to Trump as the president praised him as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced.”

But things soured quickly in the days that followed, fueled by Musk’s public criticisms of the president’s sweeping domestic policy bill, known as the “big, beautiful bill.” Musk wasted no time railing against what he called the “disgusting abomination,” saying it would increase the federal budget deficit and undermine DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts.

Trump and Musk’s war of words 

Social media sniping ensued.

Musk said Trump would have lost the election without his support, while Trump wrote that the “easiest way to save money” in the budget would be to terminate Musk’s federal subsidies and contracts, referring to Musk’s companies including Tesla and SpaceX.

Then Musk claimed without evidence that Trump’s Justice Department has not released the full Jeffrey Epstein files because Trump is in them — an allegation that Trump denied and called “old news” in a Saturday interview with NBC News.

While the White House did not directly comment on those allegations, press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement denouncing the “unfortunate episode from Elon” and accusing him of opposing Trump’s bill because “it does not include the policies he wanted.” Trump has suggested Musk was disappointed because the bill proposes cutting subsidies for electric vehicles.

In his NBC News interview on Saturday, Trump suggested the feud with Musk had helped unite the Republican Party and made lawmakers see the benefits of his bill. It narrowly passed the House in May and remains under scrutiny in the Senate, where GOP leaders hope to pass it by July 4.

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Meta plans to invest about $15bn in data-labelling start-up Scale AI and hire the group’s co-founder and top researchers, in one of the biggest deals of its kind as the Big Tech company seeks to catch up with rivals.

The deal, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, would give Meta a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI and value the start-up at roughly $28bn, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It would mark the second consecutive year that Scale AI has doubled its valuation.

The investment in Scale AI and attempt to poach its top talent was part of Meta’s plan to build a “superintelligence” lab that would outperform OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which are also developing models they claim will exceed human intelligence, according to one of the people.

Scale AI declined to comment, and Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

The launch of Meta’s latest large language model, Llama 4, underwhelmed critics after it underperformed on independent reasoning and coding benchmarks.

Meanwhile, competitors such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic have each unveiled a new generation of powerful “reasoning” models, which solve problems by breaking them down step by step. Meta is also facing pressure from open source competitors such as China’s DeepSeek that have built powerful models for a fraction of the cost.

Meta, with a market capitalisation of nearly $2tn, has invested heavily in generative artificial intelligence. But progress has been halting and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has reorganised the efforts multiple times. Meta announced in April the departure of Joelle Pineau, vice-president of AI research.

Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old paper billionaire who co-founded Scale AI in 2016, is set to join Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, the details of which were first reported by The New York Times. Details of Meta’s investment were first reported by Bloomberg and The Information.

Scale AI’s core business involves manually labelling the data that is used to train advanced AI models to ensure it is accurate.

Wang has forged relationships with Silicon Valley’s biggest investors and technologists, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and has positioned Scale AI to serve companies developing autonomous vehicles and more recently those building generative AI models.

But his talents lie in promoting the company rather than managing its staff or furthering AI research, according to multiple people who have worked with him.

Jason Droege, who joined Scale AI from Uber Eats less than a year ago, was expected to step up from chief strategy officer to chief executive, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The fate of Scale AI’s remaining employees is less clear. Wang recently spoke about his desire to take the start-up public, but the potential deal with Meta casts uncertainty over that goal.

Scale AI had been attempting to broaden its revenue sources following investor concerns about its concentrated services, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. The group has increasingly focused on building custom applications for enterprises and bidding for government contracts.

Last year, Microsoft paid $650mn to hire Inflection boss Mustafa Suleyman and his top lieutenants, and to license the start-up’s technology. Google also paid $2.7bn for a similar arrangement with Character AI.

The bespoke structures used by the Big Tech groups were partly designed to avoid probes from regulators, according to people with knowledge of the deals. But Google and Microsoft have nonetheless faced scrutiny from antitrust enforcers.

Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy