Two weeks after Amtrak mocked billionaire Elon Musk's call to privatize the heavily subsidized for-profit rail service, its CEO Stephen Gardner announced he was resigning so that Amtrak "continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration."

The sudden announcement Wednesday was reportedly at the request of President Trump, with an unnamed White House official telling Reuters that Gardner had been asked to step down, but Amtrak declined to confirm that.

It also suggests Amtrak's anti-privatization "white paper," whose Web address carries the same March 5 date as Musk's comments at the Morgan Stanley conference, didn't go over well with its controlling shareholder, the U.S. government, where Musk's influence is outsized.

"I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized," including Amtrak, Musk said. He said domestic high-speed rail "will leave you with a very bad impression of America," where the fastest train, Amtrak's Acela on the Northeast Corridor, tops out at 150 miles per hour but averages half that across its whole route.

Acela's upgrade to faster Avelia Liberty trains is currently four years behind schedule due to "safety and design disputes," The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Amtrak's white paper, which doesn't mention Musk, puts "privatize" in scare quotes. "It is not clear what problem Amtrak privatization proposals are intended to solve," the paper asserts, portraying Amtrak as an unqualified success despite its "limited federal funding."

"Amtrak set all-time records in ridership and revenue in FY24" and its Northeast Corridor ridership was 12% higher in that fiscal year than FY 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Proponents of privatization assert that it would produce better service at a lower cost and reduce or even eliminate the need for public funding," the white paper says. "Great Britain’s recent renationalization of its rail service after three disastrous decades of privatization, and past unsuccessful efforts to privatize various Amtrak operations, show otherwise."

It portrayed privatization as anathema to President Trump's America First policy, claiming that companies interested in running its service "are subsidiaries of government-owned railroads in China and Europe."