Let’s pause for a moment to talk about the dogs (and DOGEs) that are no longer barking. When I last wrote about the terminal throes of Elon Musk‘s service with the Trump administration, I was already taking victory laps long before the final doom of my ancient prophecy came true. Boy, did I ever see this one coming:

The title of that piece is “How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End,” and I stipulate this because my editors insisted on the “Probably,” not I. While I haven’t been proven right about the part where Donald Trump publicly rebukes Musk and Team MAGA begins treating him like a Judas goat of the movement (yet), the rest of the story has played out almost exactly as I anticipated — for it could have gone no other way.

A day after I wrote that, all hell broke loose. Trump mentioned at a press conference that he was “very disappointed,” and that Elon was feeling sore about the loss of EV subsidies that would have benefited Tesla. Musk responded by floating the idea of a third party to challenge Trump, the Democrats, and any future Big Beautiful Bills. Trump then, in turn, accused Elon of being weird and clingy, saying he was “wearing thin.” Trump twisted the knife by suggesting that a great way to save money would be to cancel Tesla subsidies altogether.

Musk then responded by . . . well, by strongly insinuating Trump was an ephebophile, at which point the world nearly ended. He announced that the real reason the Epstein Files were being suppressed by the FBI and the DOJ was that Donald Trump’s name was in them. Things got crazier from there, now from all sides – there was a lot of chaos there in the back and forth, things escalated quickly, and somebody might have killed someone with a trident. (There was so much drama that NR’s Brittany Bernstein had to construct a timeline of events to help readers keep up with the volleys and salvos.)

Now look, I’m never going to pretend to be one of those people who hate to say “I told you so.” Frankly, that’s the best part of my job, and oftentimes the only tolerable one in a world where American politics is seemingly collapsing into itself like a replay of the ending of Cabin in the Woods. So watching the Musk-Trump relationship blow up to nuclear levels online, almost immediately after predicting it would, was a moment of grim joy for me, almost paralytically so — everybody else was freaking out about it, what more was there for me to add? (It was instead time to gloat.)

But that’s also why it’s sometimes worth waiting. Because what was once set to be the most explosive political rupture in recent American memory is now on the backburner again – perhaps you didn’t notice, as Los Angeles descends into riots. When Donald Trump announced late last week in a Q&A session that he intended to “have a long conversation” with Musk in the aftermath of his Twitter outbursts, for once it seems clear that he was speaking deeply seriously. Our own Audrey Fahlberg reports that both Vice-President JD Vance and Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles reached out to Musk over the weekend, asking him to tone down his rhetoric.

The conversations seem to have had an effect. This morning, Elon Musk meekly tweeted out the following statement: “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.” Indeed, it’s hard to go much further than accusing the president of the United States of direct involvement in one of the most notorious conspiracy theories of our times. I can’t help but read Elon’s statement in the voice of Emily Litella saying “never mind” after a long Weekend Update rant. There’s “backing down from public criticism” and then there’s “unringing the Epstein bell,” and Elon is obviously now trying to do the latter. (His spiciest tweets have all now been deleted.)

There is much that could be said about this, but unfortunately, the vast majority of it is speculative and thus unfit for extended discussion. (I would advise Musk not to refill his ketamine prescription.) But Donald Trump’s noted silence after his initial outburst, and his willingness to let this drop – “I thought it was very nice that he did that,” Trump said in reaction to news of Musk’s public apology – tells me something interesting about him: A war with Elon Musk is a war that Donald Trump either did not want or could not afford. Make no mistake — if the relations between the two ever truly turned toxic to the point of flat-out social-media warfare, Musk would lose. Donald Trump is the president. People voted for him. Elon Musk is merely a very rich man with a media megaphone. (Surely Donald Trump has informed him of this, if Musk’s friends have been unwilling.)

But Trump could easily have continued to drop nuclear bombs on Musk via Truth Social, or the Oval Office, or federal policymaking for that matter, if he had really wanted to. Clearly, he has instead determined that peace is the better option. Why? Perhaps because the game isn’t worth the candle — even if everybody understands that Trump controls the MAGA movement, it’s a terrible idea to fracture part of your electoral coalition, particularly its most socially influential portion. Perhaps because Trump is magnanimous enough to recognize a graceful victory when he sees it. Maybe he just likes Elon and thinks the guy ought to sober up and take a break from politics. I don’t know, and I wouldn’t dare to guess. For now, all that I can say is that a tentative truce has been called in what threatened to become Trump’s own MAGA-wide civil war.