‘Wow!’ Maggie Haberman Stuns Host With News Musk Company ‘Cut A Check To Trump’ For $10 Mil

New York Times White House correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman stunned podcast host Michael Barbaro with a bit of news that was overshadowed by everything else President Donald Trump and DOGE czar Elon Musk did this week.

On Friday’s edition of NYT‘s The Daily podcast, Haberman joined Barbaro and colleagues David Sanger and Zolan Cano Young to discuss the week in Trump, including the bombshell Oval Office presser with Musk.

But Haberman stunned Barbaro by revealing that Musk agreed to settle a lawsuit with Trump by paying out $10 million:

MICHAEL BARBARO: I just want to close out this conversation about Elon Musk, because this idea, this motif of a co-presidency is so much in the air. I just want to get some clarity on this.

Maggie, is there a version of this where we should see Trump giving Elon Musk this kind of a platform as him actually exerting some power over Musk? I mean, if you watched the president set it up, he said, I’ve asked Elon Musk to come here to offer a few remarks.

And, you know, even though Trump was sitting there at the Resolute Desk not saying much during the entire time Musk was talking, he was sitting at the Resolute desk. That’s his desk. It was very clear he was the president.

Is there a way of flipping this around a little bit and seeing this as as him kind of bringing Musk to heel?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: 100%. I think the way you just described it is exactly–. It is Musk showing some level of of dutiful obligation to Donald Trump. There’s no question.

And to that point, I would just add a sort of remarkable point that emerged this week.

The Wall Street Journal first reported, and we confirmed it– X, which is owned by Musk, settled for multi million dollars — we don’t know the exact figure. It’s somewhere in the area of $10 million — a lawsuit that Trump had brought against the site when it was Twitter, owned by other people, when his account was banned after January 6th, 2021.

So essentially the site, I don’t know exactly how the finances of X work in terms of Musk’s ownership, etc., but this is his website and it has now paid Donald Trump a substantial amount of money. And Trump could have said, you know, let’s not do that while you’re working. I mean, it–.

MICHAEL BARBARO: Ah not a big deal!

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Right? That’s not what happened, evidently.

MICHAEL BARBARO: Wow! I didn’t know that over the past week, among all the remarkable things, Elon Musk essentially cut a check to Donald Trump for many millions of dollars.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: One of his companies did, Yes.

Watch above via NYT‘s The Daily podcast.