Founding Megadeth bassist David Ellefson says the door to a farewell-tour reunion has never fully closed on his end — but he’s candid that the band is a different animal depending on whether he and Dave Mustaine are standing on stage together.
Appearing July 8 on SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk“, Ellefson was again asked whether he’d be up for joining Megadeth‘s eventual final run alongside other former members. He traced the idea back through the years of on-and-off reunion talk (via Blabbermouth):
“I never closed that door to that thing… When Dave [Mustaine, Megadeth leader] put the group back together, when he said he wanted to work again in 2004, I said the same thing. ‘Cause there was this talk of, ‘Should we do the Rust In Peace reunion?’, and that didn’t happen, of course. And then that was even revisited again in 2015 right before — 2014, I guess — which, when that didn’t happen, then we basically rebuilt the group and put out the Dystopia album.”
From there, he laid out the distinction that gives the story its headline. To Ellefson, the band simply isn’t the same entity when he’s not in it.
“But I said to Dave in 2004, which was the first time trying to put it back together as a band, which really kind of turned out to be more of a solo [project]… When I’m not in Megadeth, I always look at it like it’s Dave‘s solo band. That’s just how I look at it. And not that it’s good, bad or otherwise; it’s just different. To me, it just is a different feel than the Megadeth of Ellefson and Mustaine together,” he continued.
He went on to recall pitching a much bigger idea years ago — a reunion built around the band’s full history, drawing in several eras of the lineup at once:
“So, for me, I said even then, I said, ‘Why don’t we bring Jeff Young, Chris Poland, other surviving members, Nick Menza, even Marty [Friedman]? Why don’t we make it be something bigger?’ And what hit me on it is at that time ASIA and YES were doing that — to huge success. They were kind of bringing both bands together touring, because it was a very different world. Young bands like Lamb of God and Killswitch Engage, these guys were kind of owning the landscape. And thrash metal was, I guess you could say, was making a comeback, so to speak, in the 2000s.”
Ellefson likened the appeal to how Kiss fans gravitate toward specific eras of that band, the ’70s lineup, the ’80s lineup and so on, each with its own devoted following, arguing every Megadeth roster and album has fans who’d want their version represented.
“But I think now for sure, before you put something down of that size, especially with that legacy that had all these different members who were so key, and every lineup and every album of that lineup had its own fans. And we know this as Kiss fans. So there’s ’70s Kiss, there’s ’80s Kiss, there’s different versions. And they each get different fanbases that come into that. And so for me, yeah, if I were calling the shots, absolutely. But then again that’s me and I get along with everybody. So who knows how that’ll play out?” he said.
That last line points to the elephant in the room. Mustaine has repeatedly signaled that a wide-ranging reunion of past members isn’t in the cards.
In a December appearance on the same show, he said: “Well, I can’t really do that, because of the behavior of one of the bandmembers in the past. I just can’t — I can’t. Because, first off, it would be unfair to the other bandmembers if I didn’t play with them as well.”
“But the thing about what we did with Marty in Japan [in early 2023], that was a no-brainer,” he continued. “That was brilliant. And I love Marty. We had our separation, and he went his way and we went our way. But it was a very, very intense relationship I had with Marty, because that was the first relationship I had with a guitar player. My relationship with [former Megadeth guitarist] Chris [Poland] was really great, but it wasn’t as good as it was with Marty. My relationship with [former Megadeth guitarist] Jeff [Young] was good, but it wasn’t as good as it was with Marty. And I probably wouldn’t have a problem playing with any of the members of those two lineups, except the fact that [former Megadeth drummer] Gar‘s [Samuelson] deceased, and [I’m] just not gonna do anything that is gonna, in any way, seem unfair to the other bandmembers.”
The back-and-forth lands at a milestone moment for the group. Megadeth released their self-titled final studio album on January 23, 2026, the band’s first with guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari and their first since 2009’s Endgame to feature bassist James LoMenzo. The record made history for the thrash icons, debuting at No. 1 on the U.S. chart with 73,000 equivalent album units in its first week (69,000 of them pure sales), giving Megadeth their first-ever chart-topping release stateside. Meanwhile, Ellefson has moved on with veteran act Metal Church, whose album Dead To Rights arrived in April.
