First Lady Melania Trump reportedly objected when billionaire Elon Musk stayed overnight at the White House during his controversial stint leading the Department of Government Efficiency, but President Donald Trump overruled her concerns, according to a new book published Tuesday, June 23, 2026.
“Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, discloses that the tech mogul spent several nights in the Lincoln Bedroom after asking the president for permission to sleep at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The first lady’s objection became a point of contention between the couple, the book reveals.
Tensions over household arrangements extended beyond the overnight guest. The president and first lady maintain separate bedrooms, and Trump quietly rearranged her decorating choices while she was away, according to Haberman and Swan. The president has quietly moved items Melania had placed in shared spaces into the second-floor room he uses.
Musk’s Account of the Invitation
Musk, 54, told reporters in May 2025 that the arrangement began spontaneously aboard Air Force One. Trump asked where he planned to stay, and when Musk said he hadn’t decided, the president extended an invitation and gave him a tour of the historic Lincoln Bedroom. “I didn’t request it, to be sure,” Musk said, clarifying he had stayed at the White House “more than once” but none of it was his idea.
The richest man in the world didn’t always use the Lincoln Bedroom, according to the book. Sometimes he stayed with friends in the area, and at other times he told people he had used a sleeping bag to sleep on his Eisenhower Building office floor.
Late-Night Ice Cream Runs
Trump sometimes phoned Musk late at night with invitations to get ice cream from the White House kitchen, according to the book. Musk recalled consuming an entire container of caramel Häagen-Dazs and joked that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shouldn’t find out. “He’s actually a very good host,” Musk said.
Controversy During DOGE Tenure
The sleepovers occurred while Musk served as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, where he oversaw sweeping workforce reductions and reallocated funds already approved by Congress. His presence rankled officials beyond the first lady. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was critical of Musk, and senior cabinet members — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — confronted him in March 2025, angry that he had overstepped into their agencies.
According to the book, Musk came across as “unhinged.” One outside Trump adviser said moving fast and breaking things was acceptable, but doing so without agency buy-in was problematic. A second adviser questioned how many workers were terminated over a weekly reporting requirement before concluding the administration was ready to move on from that chapter.
Drug questions that shadowed Musk’s White House tenure resurfaced alongside the book. The New York Times had reported in May 2025 that Musk’s drug use “went well beyond occasional use” — that he told people he was taking so much ketamine it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use, and that he also took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms and traveled with a daily medication box holding roughly 20 pills, including some bearing the markings of the stimulant Adderall. The Times noted it was unclear whether he was using those drugs while working at the White House. Chief of staff Susie Wiles — quoted in a December 2025 Vanity Fair profile — described Musk as “an odd, odd duck” and called him “an avowed ketamine user.” Musk has denied the reporting, saying he does not use drugs.
Musk left DOGE at the end of May 2025. His four months in the role succeeded in closing certain agencies and reducing federal headcount, but his department’s broader efficiency goals fell short, and several of his signature policies were quietly abandoned after he departed.
From Public Feud to Reconciliation
The relationship between Trump and Musk did not survive the departure intact. Musk publicly criticized Trump and attacked him over the Epstein files. It was a sharp departure from late-night ice cream runs and Lincoln Bedroom tours.
The two appear to have mended fences with Musk joining Trump on his whirlwind trip to China. Their renewed closeness has drawn fresh attention to Musk’s financial interests: the initial public offering of his SpaceX company was expected to deliver significant gains to people in the Trump administration, and the IPO helped push Musk’s net worth into trillionaire territory — though SpaceX’s stock price has since retreated. Whether Musk has any future sleepovers planned remains an open question.
More Disputes Over White House Design
The Musk sleepover was far from Melania’s only friction point with her husband’s freewheeling approach to the residence. Haberman and Swan write that the first lady considered her first-term Rose Garden redesign — with its limestone border and white and pastel roses — one of her proudest achievements, and was “very unhappy” when the president moved to pave it over for a Mar-a-Lago-style patio; the two eventually compromised, replacing the grass with stone tiles while leaving the rosebushes intact. A larger dispute, mentioned in the book, concerned the ballroom: Melania repeatedly objected to its size and location and to living in a construction zone, but lost the fight when Trump ordered the October 2025 demolition of the East Wing — the traditional home of the first lady’s offices — to make way for the expansion. The book also recounts how a gold-framed mirror Melania had made the centerpiece of her Queens’ Bedroom redesign was relocated to a White House colonnade, where it became known as the “selfie” mirror.
According to the book, Trump has used super glue to make his own modifications to the Oval Office.