President Donald Trump and his biggest political supporter Elon Musk are breaking up in the most public and 21st century way — via their own social networks. And while many predicted the Trump-Musk pair-up would eventually sour, it’s still worth asking and trying to answer, “How did we get here?”
Until recently, Musk has been a key figure in Trump’s inner circle. The connection has affected broad swaths of the government, notably through the Department of Government Efficiency, an organization created by an executive order and advised by Musk.
Musk, once a fixture at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in the White House, has now turned against the president. The source of his discontent: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a 1,038-page piece of legislation that was passed May 22 by the House of Representatives. It now heads to the Senate, the next step in the bill’s path toward becoming a law.
Days later, Trump withdrew his nomination of Jared Isaacman, Musk’s pick to head NASA — a move widely viewed as evidence of their faltering relationship. But even through the end of the month, Trump and Musk publicly played nice.
The mood shifted — in a public, scorched-earth kind of way — this week.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote on X on Tuesday. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
The bill is presented as an effort to cut taxes and invest in American businesses. However, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that while the bill will cut taxes by $3.7 trillion, it will increase the national debt by $2.4 trillion over 10 years and raise the country’s debt ceiling by $4 trillion. This impact on the country’s existing debt crisis has two Republican senators, Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI), breaking from their party’s stance to oppose the bill in its current state.
The bill’s impacts are vast; among numerous other effects, it removes taxes from Social Security income, tips, and overtime pay. The bill also makes massive cuts to federal healthcare programs like Medicaid and SNAP. The CBO estimates that, by making massive cuts to federal healthcare programs, almost 11 million more people will lack health insurance by 2034.
The bill would also make the effects of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from his first term permanent, though economists have found that these cuts had more benefit for the richest Americans than the poorest. Additional tax cuts in Trump’s new bill are also expected to benefit wealthy families more than those in need.
Musk isn’t wrong when he says some representatives who voted for the bill are already regretting it. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) admitted that she had not read the thousand-page bill in its entirety and regrets endorsing it because it would prevent individual states regulating AI for the next decade.
The dispute between Trump and Musk escalated further Thursday, when the president was asked about the Tesla and SpaceX leader’s rejection of the bill.
Trump claims that Musk was deeply familiar with his plans for the bill but recoiled when he learned it would negatively impact his business.
“He only developed a problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the EV mandate,” Trump said, referring to policies that incentivize the production and sale of electric vehicles, like the ones Tesla makes. “That’s billions and billions of dollars.”
Musk went on to claim that Trump only won the election because of his help.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk said on X.
The two entrepreneurs have continued to make jabs at each other on their respective social media platforms — and it’s escalating.
“Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
In another post, Trump added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Musk posted a screenshot of Trump’s post and added that he would decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft as a result of the president’s statement.
Musk has continued on with a barrage of posts on X against the president, who he spent $288 million to help elect. Musk then accused Trump of being in the Epstein Files, referring to the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of children. Trump has not responded to the allegation.
Musk also declared that the Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the latter half of this year, and he posted an agreement with another user’s post saying that Trump should be impeached.
While the public fight has launched frantic levels of posting on X, popcorn emojis, and memes declaring that “the girls are fighting,” the fallout between the world’s richest person and a sitting U.S. president promises to have broader implications for the tech industry.
Following Musk’s lead, other tech billionaires like Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook donated to Trump’s inauguration fund. Trump’s policies have already had negative repercussions for some of these companies’ businesses through enforcing heavy tariffs on international imports.
