Last month, President Donald Trump anointed Elon Musk as an ally once again by patting him on the belly at a White House dinner for Saudi crown prince Muhammed bin Salman. The warm gesture symbolized a thawing of the relationship between the two most powerful people in America, and a new report from The Washington Post—which is anonymously sourced—says the reconciliation was the culmination of months of concerted effort from Vice President J.D. Vance with the help of AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, who had introduced Musk and Vance in the first place many years ago.

The Post’s report, to be clear, does not say J.D. Vance and David Sacks watched the reconciliation scene from The Parent Trap over and over and cried, and it would be irresponsible to speculate that they did:

According to the Washington Post story, our vice president expended significant energy all through summer and fall trying to prevent Elon Musk from realizing his political party. The story’s sources also claim that Musk had been one of the people who had lobbied for Trump to nominate him as vice president.

You’ll recall that Trump and Musk peeled apart slowly, with Musk referring to Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” as “a disgusting abomination,” on June 3, and then posting and deleting a statement about Trump being in the Epstein files four days later. Then he claimed to have founded the America Party around the same time as that Epstein post. One pretty useful analysis at the time suggested that Musk was threading a tricky needle, being mad about the bill cutting the EV tax credits that benefited him as CEO of Tesla, while also acting as America’s chief budget slasher. It stands to reason that the cognitive dissonance could have broken his brain, but one can only guess exactly why things went off the rails.

By the way, in December, Musk changed his approach on the national debt, saying the only things that can fix it are robots and AI. David Sacks said something very similar on his podcast back in May.

In the Post story—which, again, is sourced from anonymous insiders—Vance tried appealing to Musk directly, then launched mini appeals to close Musk allies. While he was doing that, he reportedly took action on a major demand from Musk: restoring Jared Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of a payment processing company closely affiliated with SpaceX, as nominee to lead NASA. Trump had pulled Isaacman’s nomination amid his Musk feud, and the timing had made it look like this was done out of spite. During his Musk reconciliation project, Vance apparently spoke with the Senate Commerce Committee to make sure the nominating process would be smooth.

Vance started to “back channel” with Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, the report says. Sacks’s campaign with Musk apparently involved him telling Musk their public fight was a bad thing for the country.

Vance was “doggedly working the phones” during this process, in the words of Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Natalie Allison, and Faiz Siddiqui.

The pressure worked, and Musk has scrapped the America Party, according to The Post. The November belly pat indicates that the two are willing to be seen in public together again. However, one Post source added rather ominously that Musk “enjoys kind of that kingmaker role,” and that part of that role is, “making sure everybody in the world knows you’re the king.”

So maybe we should expect another rupture soon.

The Washington Post did not hear back from Elon Musk when it reached out for comment. Vance and Sacks declined. A White House spokesperson told them “President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated government, and the Administration is committed to delivering on this pledge for the American people.”