Read the full transcript of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s joint interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Feb 19, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Lawsuit and Musk’s Support
SEAN HANNITY: I’ve got to start with this. So, he’s working for free with Doge. He’s kind of put a lot of his life on hold. And you sued Twitter a number of years ago. You just made him pay you $10 million?
DONALD TRUMP: That’s right. That’s right. Well, I sued from long before he had it. And I mean, they really did a number on me, you know. And I sued and they had to pay, they paid $10 million settlement.
SEAN HANNITY: You’re okay with that?
ELON MUSK: I mean, I left it up to the lawyers and, you know, the team running Twitter. So, I said, you guys do what you think is the right, it makes sense.
DONALD TRUMP: I think it’s fine. I think it’s a very low. I was looking to get much more money than that.
SEAN HANNITY: So, you gave him a discount when the law…
DONALD TRUMP: Oh, he got a big discount. I don’t think he even knows about it.
SEAN HANNITY: He’s become one of your, if you really believe the media, he’s become one of your best friends. He’s working for free for you.
ELON MUSK: Well, I love the president. I just want to be clear about that.
SEAN HANNITY: You don’t care about that?
ELON MUSK: I know. I love the president.
SEAN HANNITY: You love the president.
ELON MUSK: I think, I think President Trump is a good man. And he’s, you know…
DONALD TRUMP: That’s the way he said that, you know, it’s something nice about him.
ELON MUSK: It really is. You know, because, I mean, the president has been so unfairly attacked in the media. It’s truly outrageous. And I spent, at this point, spent a lot of time with the president. And not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or, or ´wrong. Not once.
SEAN HANNITY: You know, I’ve never seen anybody take as much as he’s taken.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
SEAN HANNITY: And we’ve discussed this, and I’m like, how do you deal with it?
DONALD TRUMP: Can I have a choice?
SEAN HANNITY: Well, you would say that to me. I’m like, what do I, what am I going to do? Worry about it?
The Assassination Attempts and Endorsement
SEAN HANNITY: And, you know, and then culminating in two assassination attempts, which resulted in your endorsement.
ELON MUSK: Well, I was going to do it anyway, but that was… That was it. A precipitating event, yeah.
DONALD TRUMP: That’s been… Yeah. The day of the assassination. I didn’t know that.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. I just, I sped it up, but I was going to do it anyway.
Elon Musk’s Background
SEAN HANNITY: Mr. President, with your indulgence, I’m convinced that people only know a little bit about Elon. I don’t think they know everything about Elon, because as I studied and prepared for this interview, I learned a lot about you that I didn’t know. I think people will think about Tesla, Democrats are demonizing you and trying to make the country hate you. I just want people to understand you a little bit better. And the person that you’ve gotten to know and have now put a lot of trust in. And, you know, just let’s go over a little bit of your bio, starting with PayPal and how you became involved in Tesla and SpaceX and Neuralink and all these…
ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, you know, I think the way you think of me is like, I’m a technologist and I try to make technologies that improve the world and make life better. You got your shirt. Yeah. And that’s why I like my t-shirt says tech support, because I’m here to provide the president with technology support.
Musk’s Role in Implementing Executive Orders
ELON MUSK: And now that may seem like, well, is that a silly thing? But actually, it’s a very important thing, because the president will make these executive orders, which are very sensible and good for the country, but then they don’t get implemented. You know, so if you take, for example, all the funding for the migrant hotels, the president issued an executive order. Hey, we need to stop taking taxpayer money and paying for luxury hotels for illegal immigrants, which makes no sense.
Obviously, people do not want their tax dollars going to fund high-end hotels for illegals. And yet they were still doing that even as late as last week. And so, you know, we went in there and we’re like, this is a violation of the presidential executive order. It needs to stop.
So what we’re doing here is one of the biggest functions of the Doge team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out. And this is, I just want to point out, this is a very important thing, because the president is the elected representative of the people. So he’s representing the will of the people. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.
Media Perception and Attempts to Create Division
SEAN HANNITY: You’re both aware, you have to be keenly aware, that the media and the punditry class, you know, I think you’ve proven they have no power anymore, because they threw everything they had at you and they didn’t win. And that was, you know, the New York Times, Washington Post, three networks, every late night comedy show, two cable channels. They just, they threw everything, warfare, weaponization. And now I see, they want you two to start, they want a divorce. They want you two to start hating each other. And they try, oh, President Elon Musk, for example. You do know that they’re doing that to you.
They tried it, then they stopped. They have many different things of hatred. Actually, Elon called me, he said, you know, they’re trying to drive us apart. I said, absolutely. No, they said, we have breaking news. Donald Trump has ceded control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will be attending a cabinet meeting tonight at 8 o’clock. And I say, it’s just so obvious. They’re so bad at it. I used to think they were good at it. They’re actually bad at it. Because if they were good at it, I’d never be president. Because I think nobody in history has ever gotten more bad publicity than me. I could do the greatest things. I get 98% bad publicity. I could do outside of you and a few of your very good friends. It’s like the craziest thing.
But you know what I have learned, Elon? The people are smart. They get it.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, they do. They get it.
DONALD TRUMP: They really see what’s happening.
ELON MUSK: Yes.
The Relationship Between Trump and Musk
SEAN HANNITY: And at the end of this interview, what I would like is, I want people to know the relationship and know more about you. What is the relationship, Mr. President?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I respect him. I’ve always respected him. I never knew that he was right on certain things. And I’m usually pretty good at this stuff. He did Starlink. He did things that were so advanced and nobody knew what the hell they were. I can tell you in North Carolina, they had no communication. They were wiped out. Those people were, you know, they had rivers in between land that never saw water. All of a sudden, there was a river and a vicious like rapids. People were dying all over. They had no communication. They said, you know, Elon Musk? They didn’t really know. I know him. I said, yeah. He said, could you get Starlink? It’s like the first time I ever heard of it. I said, what’s Starlink, a communication system? That’s unbelievable. I have it.
Yeah. And he said, I called him and I said, listen, they really need it. And he got like thousands of units of this communication and it saved a lot of lives. He got it immediately. And you can’t get it. I mean, you have to wait a long time to get it. But he got it to him immediately. And I said, that’s pretty amazing. And I didn’t even know he had it. We watched the rocket ship. So we watched Tesla.
I think, you know, something that had an effect on me was when I saw the rocket ship come back and get grabbed like you grab a beautiful little baby. You grab your baby. It just hugged the rocket. I’ve never seen it. And he said, you know, you can’t really have a rocket program if you’re going to dump a billion dollars into the ocean every time you fly. You have to save it. And he saved it. First time that I’ve ever seen that done.
Now, nobody else can do it. If you look at the U.S., Russia or China, they can’t do it and they won’t be able to do it for a long time. He has the technology. So you learn. I wanted somebody really smart to work with me in terms of the country, a very important aspect, because, I mean, he doesn’t talk about he’s actually a very good businessman. And when he talks about the executive orders, and this is probably true for all presidents. You write an executive order and you think it’s done. You send it out. It doesn’t get done. It doesn’t get implemented. They don’t Maybe they’re from the last administration and they are.
In some cases, you try and get them out as fast as you can. But I could. As soon as he said that, I said, you know, that’s interesting. You write a beautiful executive and you sign it and you assume it’s going to be done. But it’s not. What he does is he takes it. And with his hundred geniuses, he’s got some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him. They dress in just T-shirts. You wouldn’t know they have one hundred and eighty.
SEAN HANNITY: So he’s your tech support.
DONALD TRUMP: No, no, he is. But he’s much more than that.
ELON MUSK: I’m tech support though.
DONALD TRUMP: He gets it done. He’s a leader. He really is. He gets it done. You get a lot of tech people and you have people that are good with tech. But he gets it done. You know, I said in real estate, you had guys that would draw beautiful renderings of a building and they draw the rendering. It would be great. He said, great.
Implementing Executive Orders
When are you starting? But they were never able to get it built. They couldn’t get the finances. They couldn’t get the approvals. It would never get done. And then you have other guys who are able to get it done. You know, they could just get it done. I was in real estate. Same thing in this. He gets it done.
So when he said that, he said, you know, when you sign these executive orders, a lot of them don’t get done and maybe the most important ones. And he would take that executive order that I’d sign and he would have those people go to whatever agency it was. When are you doing it? Get it done. Get it done. And some guy that maybe didn’t want to do it. All of a sudden he’s signing. He just doesn’t want to be bothered.
SEAN HANNITY: Do a lot of those executive orders have to be codified into law? Do you need the Republican Congress to follow?
DONALD TRUMP: A lot of them will be. Look, in the meantime, we have four years. The beauty is we have four years. That’s why I like doing it right at the beginning, because an executive order is great. I mean, the one problem is both good and bad, because when they did all these executive orders, they canceled most of them. They were terrible. I mean, we’re going to go radical left communists. OK, it was crazy. Their executive orders were so bad. If they ever got him codified, you’d never be able to break him.
So the damage that Biden has done to this country and it’s not even Biden, it’s the people that circled him in the Oval Office. OK, but the damage they did to this country in terms of, let’s say, open borders, you know, there’s so many things, but open borders where millions of people poured into our country and hundreds of thousands of those people are criminals. They’re murderers. They’re drug dealers. They’re gang members. They’re people from prisons from all over the world.
And we have a great guy, Tom Homan. And he is doing so incredibly. You saw the numbers. They’re down like ninety-six percent. Ninety-five percent. He is a phenomenal guy. And Kristi Noem is doing an unbelievable job. And he wanted her. He said she’s so tough. And I said, I don’t think of her as that way. You know, she’s very nice. He said, no, she’s so tough. And she is. I see with the horses. He’s riding the horse. Let’s go. She’s great. But the team we have is is really unbelievable.
But those executive orders, I sign them and now they get passed on to him and his group and other people. And they’re all getting done. We’re getting them done.
Elon Musk’s Background and Achievements
SEAN HANNITY: Let me let me go back a little bit to your background, because it’s sure it’s beyond impressive. You were the chief engineer, for example. You were an early believer in Tesla. You became the CEO and and then the chief engineer, which was phenomenal. Space X, same thing, which is unbelievable. I mean, you were the first company, private company to send astronauts successfully into space. First private company to send astronauts into orbit.
ELON MUSK: Yeah —
SEAN HANNITY: that’s that’s pretty deep.
DONALD TRUMP: He’s going to go into orbit. OK.
DONALD TRUMP: Yeah. No, he’s going to go to Mars. He’s darling. At some point.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, they said that was actually like, do you want to die on Mars? And I say, well, yes, but not on impact.
SEAN HANNITY: Starlink is in 100 countries. This is going to be hard. I feel like I’m interviewing two brothers here. You go ahead. Star Shield, which could be used for national defense.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, it is already being used for national defense.
SEAN HANNITY: Then you have a what is it called? Optimus, a part of Tesla.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. Robotic arm.
SEAN HANNITY: Then you have an A.I. arm. And then you have something that really fascinated me. And it’s called Neuralink.
ELON MUSK: Yes.
SEAN HANNITY: You might help the blind to see the people with spinal cord injuries that they — that they can recover where in the past. How close is that? Becoming a success.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. Neuralink. We’ve had implanted Neuralink in three patients so far who are quadriplegics and allows them to directly control their phone and computer just using their mind, just by thinking. It’s like so we call this product telepathy. So you control your computer and for just by thinking as possible to actually control the computer and phone faster than someone who has working hands. Then the next step would be to add a second Neuralink implant past the point where these neurons damaged so that somebody can walk again and so they can have full body functionality restored.
Political Discussions
DONALD TRUMP: And you like Bobby, right?
ELON MUSK: I like Bobby actually. Yeah, I think I supported Bobby Kennedy. I think he you know, he’s unfairly blind as someone who is anti-science. But I think he isn’t. He just wants to question the science, which is the essence of the science. The scientific method fundamentally is about always questioning the science.
SEAN HANNITY: Well, they didn’t tell us the truth about COVID. That’s for sure.
ELON MUSK: Yes.
SEAN HANNITY: And we learned a lot with the Twitter files. And that just then raises a question. You’re the richest man in the world. You may not like that part. You’re pretty competitive.
DONALD TRUMP: You know, I wanted to find somebody smarter than him. I searched all over. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. I couldn’t really try it harder. I couldn’t find anyone smarter. So we had it for the country. But this is the thing settled and we settled on this.
SEAN HANNITY: This is where we are as a society. And I hate to do this to you, but I’m going to do it anyway. You’re doing all of these things. Nobody at Doge gets paid a penny, correct?
ELON MUSK: Well, actually, some people are federal employees. They’re helping. But it’s fair to say that the software engineers at Doge could be earning millions of dollars a year instead of earning a small fraction of that as federal employees. OK, so they’re very committed people.
Astronaut Rescue Mission
SEAN HANNITY: So you’re committed to helping the blind see people with spinal cord injuries recover. Yes. You’re committed to getting to Mars. You’re committed to rescue. You’re going to help rescue next month two astronauts that I think were abandoned. They dispute that in an interview.
ELON MUSK: When you get those requests or instruction — we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed kind of to a ridiculous degree.
DONALD TRUMP: They got left in space.
SEAN HANNITY: They’ve been there. They were supposed to be there eight days. They’re there almost 300. Biden.
ELON MUSK: Yes, they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.
SEAN HANNITY: OK, it’s not good. Now, if I had the weight of the pressure of doing that successfully on my shoulders, I think I’d be, you know. But you when we spoke before we did this interview, you were very confident. You think this will be a successful mission?
ELON MUSK: Well, we don’t want to be complacent. But we have brought astronauts back from the space station many times before and always with success. So as long as we’re not complacent, when are they when are you going to launch? I think it’s about four weeks to bring them back. About four weeks. Yeah. We’re being extremely cautious.
DONALD TRUMP: You now have to go ahead.
ELON MUSK: Yes. Well, thanks to you.
DONALD TRUMP: They didn’t have to go ahead with Biden. He was going to leave him in space. I think he was going to leave him in space.
ELON MUSK: Well, it’s like growing up lost in space.
DONALD TRUMP: He didn’t want the publicity. Can you believe it? Unbelievable.
Musk’s Humanitarian Efforts
SEAN HANNITY: And so, yeah, I want to echo something that the president said and then ask an overarching question. So people get hit with Hurricane Helene. They have no communication with the outside world. You come to the rescue. You donated that.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
SEAN HANNITY: You donated to the people.
DONALD TRUMP: He saved a lot of lives in North Carolina. He saved a lot of lives.
SEAN HANNITY: And California after the wildfires.
DONALD TRUMP: California. But I mean, in North Carolina, where they were really in trouble, they had no communication. People were dying. They were dying of starvation. He saved a lot of lives in North Carolina. OK.
SEAN HANNITY: Now you’re going to rescue astronauts. And now, again, you do all of this. I would think liberals would love the fact that you have the biggest electric vehicle company in the world.
Political Polarization
ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, I used to be adored by the left. Not anymore. I mean, I really did. I mean, it’s this whole sort of like church. They call it like Trump Derangement syndrome. And I don’t you know, you don’t realize how real this is until like it’s you can’t reason with people.
So like I was at a friend’s birthday party in LA, just a birthday dinner. And it was like a nice quiet dinner and everything was everyone was behaving normally. And I have to mention this is before the election, like a month or two before. I have to mention the president’s name. And it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained like methamphetamine and rabies. OK. And I’m like, what is wrong with guys like you can’t have a normal conversation. And it’s like it’s like they become completely irrational.
SEAN HANNITY: He has no idea if you’re friends with him.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
SEAN HANNITY: You pay a price. You know, it’s like I walk into a restaurant in New York and it’s like half the room that’s daggers and they want to.
ELON MUSK: It’s insane. I mean, there was like I’d like some some invitation because. So I got invited to like basically a big sort of damn damn event like that was. But I did receive the invitation like the beginning of last year. And then I still attended even after I had endorsed president Trump. And I didn’t realize how profoundly that would affect, you know, how I was received. I mean, I walk into the room and I’m getting just the dirty looks from from everyone. Like if looks could kill, I would have been dead several times over.
SEAN HANNITY: But that was not. Before Trump, that never happened, right?
