As a beaming Melania Trump walked up to the podium inside a packed Madison Square Garden, the world's most powerful man gave her a warm embrace and a kiss on the cheek.

Not her husband - he was yet to take the stage. Instead, it was Elon Musk, her husband's newly found and hyper-enthusiastic endorser who made Melania smile.

'It is my honor to introduce the First Lady, Melania Trump,' he had declared at that October 2024 rally, moments before.

And 20,000 MAGA devotees looked on approvingly as the powerful pair embraced.

Today, however, we know what Melania really thinks.

A new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reveals that, for all her polished public decorum, the First Lady was in private no fan of Musk.

Shortly after Donald Trump's inauguration, when Musk was working on the now defunct Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, Musk asked to stay overnight at the White House. Melania, the authors claim, said no.

'Musk had asked if he might sleep in the White House residence, and Trump said yes,' they write. 'The First Lady initially objected, but Musk would end up spending several nights in the Lincoln Bedroom. Other nights he stayed with friends, though he also told associates he had taken to using a sleeping bag on the floor of his office in the Eisenhower Building.'

And a White House source told the Daily Mail that the refusal of Musk's request was not unusual for the intensely private First Lady.

'Melania doesn't like visitors who stay for undesignated lengths of time,' the source said.

A second source, familiar with the First Family, added: 'Melania is a very private person. She does not want anyone staying at the White House who is not a member of the family.'

The Daily Mail has contacted the First Lady's office for comment.

It is not, by all accounts, unusual for her to speak her mind behind closed doors.

'Underestimate her at your own peril,' wrote Kate Bennett in 2019, the only journalist in the White House press corps to cover solely the First Lady. Ronald Kessler, author of 21 books about the White House and government institutions, agreed, writing in his 2018 book about the Trump White House: 'She is a much stronger person than many people give her credit for.'

Indeed, fast forward five months from that initial unwelcome request to June 2025, and Melania's intuition seemed prescient.

Her husband, 80, and Musk, who turns 55 this weekend, had a spectacular and excruciatingly public end to their bromance.

Musk said that Trump was 'in the Epstein files' and threatened to block NASA from taking astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. He called for the president's impeachment; accused Trump of telling 'an obvious lie' about electric vehicles; warned the president he was driving the country into a recession; and said Trump was 'ungrateful' for the $300 million Musk had spent to help him win re-election.

The evocation of the specter of Epstein was, we are told, particularly poignant for Melania, who has gone to great lengths to denounce the late pedophile - even in April this year delivering a surprising statement from the White House confirming she was 'not an Epstein victim', not his friend, and had no knowledge of his abuse.

Trump, in response to Musk's tweet-storm, said Musk 'went crazy' and mused about cutting his companies' subsidies. 'He's got a problem. The poor guy's got a problem,' Trump told CNN amid the explosive row.

Billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman weighed in, urging the pair to 'make peace for the benefit of our great country,' while Kanye West tweeted: 'Broooos please noooooo! We love you both so much.'

Melania, it turned out, saw it coming and was right to be wary of the world's richest man - known as much for his eccentricities as his business acumen.

Fiercely protective of her husband and striving to maintain calm, order and privacy, it's not hard to see why she would object to Musk moving into the bedroom just four doors down.

The First Lady, according to Haberman and Swan, sleeps in the serene master bedroom in the West Wing of the White House.

Her husband sleeps next door, in a room strewn with empty potato chip bags and ice cream cartons, with two televisions on the walls of the bedroom and one inside the carpeted bathroom.

Next to the president's room lies the Yellow Oval Office and the Treaty Room and then the Lincoln Bedroom, which Musk moved in to.

For the First Lady, it was uncomfortably close.

Having grown up under state surveillance in the former Yugoslavia, Melania is, according to those who know her best, cautious and private by nature. So she remained haunted by the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022.

Two years on from that raid, she admitted in a Fox News interview that the search for classified documents - which saw agents rifle through her most personal belongings - was enraging and an 'invasion of privacy.'

'Yeah, it made me angry,' she told Ainsley Earhardt. 'Yes. Invasion of privacy.

'And the way it was done… I was really surprised. I saw unpleasant stuff that nobody wants to see it. And you get angry because, you know, nobody should be putting up with that kind of stuff. Some person - I don't even know who or how many people - they went through my stuff.'

Melania herself, as ever, has been too discreet to ever criticize Musk personally - or, indeed, even mention him.

But there have been signs.

While Melania and Musk have chatted informally about technology and artificial intelligence, sources tell the Daily Mail that the First Lady spends more time conferring with other Silicon Valley specialists about her AI and tech initiatives.

In September 2025 the President and the First Lady hosted 33 tech titans for dinner at the White House - among them OpenAI's Sam Altman, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Earlier that day, many of those leaders joined Melania Trump for a White House Task Force meeting on AI education.

Musk, however, was not present for either event - although he later claimed he was invited but was unable to attend. 

In March 2026, when Melania hosted an AI enhanced humanoid robot, she did not welcome Musk’s Tesla designed Optimus robot, but instead a machine from Figure AI, a startup robotics company based in Sunnyvale, California.

‘The future of AI is personified – it will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility,’ she said, celebrating the major technological achievement.

Figure AI is backed by NVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI, all rivals to Musk’s efforts in artificial intelligence and robots.

Her decision to welcome a rival was widely seen in the tech community as a snub to Musk, although he never commented on it.

Musk, equally, has refrained from referencing the president's wife.

During the transition period, when Musk took up residency at Mar-a-Lago, sources close to her told People that she was unperturbed by his permanent presence. She was even, the source said, glad that Musk kept her husband entertained. Mar-a-Lago, it seemed, was big enough for the both of them.

'Melania is glad to have a babysitter for Donald, and she will find some kind of project to team up with him herself if he stays around,' the source told the magazine. 'Melania has her own life and isn't bothered by political dealings her husband has with others. But so far, she has no issues with Musk.'

All rather diplomatic and underwhelming. No such 'project' on which to engage with Musk ever emerged. The same cannot be said for those issues.

Musk took up residence in Banyan Cottage, a two-bedroom suite separate from the main building, which normally costs $2,000 a night. He spent his days strategizing with Trump, sitting in on phone calls with world leaders and weighing in on White House staffing questions. The pair played golf together and Musk celebrated the New Year with the Trumps at their usual gala dinner.

A second source added: 'Melania does her own thing and is not bothered one way or the other by Musk hanging around. For the most part, she is not involved with subjects her husband is discussing with Musk or anyone else hanging around him. Right now, Trump has a lot of people wanting things from him. She is all too aware of that.'

Melania's lack of interest in Musk was, with the benefit of hindsight, rather withering.

After the inauguration, as she got to know Musk better, she grew to like him less, Haberman and Swan suggest. Perhaps the confines of the White House, as opposed to the Mar-a-Lago expanse, proved too close for comfort.

Both the South Africa-born Musk and Slovenia-born Melania were frequently targeted on social media, as a foil to Trump's harsh immigration policies. But beyond their birthplaces outside the US, the pair had little in common.

And the January 2025 episode, it seems, was yet one more example of Melania showing her metal.

'She makes good choices,' said Marina Masowietsky, a modeling agent who first met Melania when she was 22, and spoke to Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan for her book The Art of Her Deal. 'She is quiet and looks around. Then she makes a move.'

In January this year, Musk was pictured dining at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and Melania, the hatchet evidently buried.

'Had a lovely dinner last night with @POTUS and @FLOTUS,' he wrote on X. '2026 is going to be amazing!'

Melania had her back to the camera in the photo, hiding her expression - although she was certainly, in public, keeping her thoughts to herself.

'He will do what he wants to do on the end,' she told Anderson Cooper of her husband, back in 2015. 'As I will do what I want to do.'