Elon Musk breaks rank with Donald Trump at Davos; promotes what the US President has openly criticised

Elon Musk and the US President Donald Trump are back to being friends. The two most powerful Americans greeted each other at the memorial for Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Trump shook hands with and chatted to Elon Musk for the first time at a public event after their spectacular public falling out in April of the same year. The pair sat in the stands of a stadium in Glendale, Arizona, where tens of thousands had gathered to pay tribute to Kirk, who was shot dead on 10 September at a Utah university campus. Since then Elon Musk has almost on and off shared posts of Donald Trump as well as those closely associated with him. In January this year, Musk posted on X, formerly Twitter, “Had a lovely dinner last night with POTUS and FLOTUS.” He also included a photo of the trio together at their table. “2026 is going to be amazing!”.

It was slightly different at this year's World Economic Forum's (WEF) at Davos, Switzerland, where Elon Musk made his debut this year. After years of describing the WEF's annual meeting as 'elitist, unaccountable and disconnected from ordinary people', the world's richest man was interviewed by WEF interim co-chair Larry Fink. During the interview, Elon Musk promoted a technology that Donald Trump has been openly critical of. Breaking ranks with Trump on renewable energy, Musk said that America could produce enough solar power to meet all of its electricity needs, including booming demand from the proliferation of Big Tech's power-hungry data centers. What makes this important is that Trump has been openly critical of clean energy sources while encouraging oil majors to drill more for oil and gas.

Elon Musk on Solar Energy and America's 'disconnect'

Incidentally, this is not the first time that Elon Musk has spoken about Solar Energy. He has been a strong proponent of the same and has talked about its importance in solving energy crisis on a number of occasions. "You could take a small corner of Utah, Nevada or New Mexico - a very small percentage of the area of the US - to generate all of the electricity that the US uses," he added. "Unfortunately, the tariff barriers for solar are extremely high and that makes the economics of deploying solar artificially high," Musk said. He added that SpaceX and Tesla teams are both separately working to build to 100GW of manufactured solar power in the US. That will probably take us about 3 years."

Trump's freeze on approvals for major onshore wind and solar projects has left thousands of megawatts of capacity in limbo at a critical time for the US as it rushes to secure enough power to meet soaring AI-driven requirements.