Trump says relationship with Musk is over
US President Donald Trump has said his relationship with Elon Musk is over."I would assume so, yeah", Trump told NBC News on Saturday, when asked if he thought the pair's close relationship had ended. He replied "No" when asked if he wished to mend the damaged ties.The comments were Trump's most extensive remarks since the epic fallout between him and Musk unravelled on social media.It came after the tech billionaire - who donated millions to Trump's election campaign and became a White House aide - publicly criticised one of the president's key domestic policies, his tax and spending bill.
A majority of Republicans have fallen in line behind the president, with Vice-President JD Vance saying that Musk may never be welcomed back into the fold because he had "gone so nuclear". Vance told podcaster Theo Von in an interview released on Saturday that it was a "big mistake" for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO to attack the president.For weeks, Musk had been criticising Trump's signature legislation - dubbed the Big Beautiful Bill - as it made its way through Congress. He argued that, if passed, the bill would add trillions of dollars to the national deficit and "undermine" the work he did as the head of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, and its efforts to cut government spending.Shortly after leaving Doge after 129 days in the job, Musk took to his social media site X to call the bill a "disgusting abomination" - but did not criticise Trump directly. On Thursday, however, Trump told reporters he was "disappointed" with Musk's behaviour.Musk responded with a flurry of posts on X, saying that Trump would have lost the election without him and accusing Trump of being implicated in files of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail awaiting sex trafficking charges. He has since deleted the post and Epstein's lawyer has come out denying the accusations.Trump responded on his social media platform Truth Social, saying that Musk had gone "crazy". In one post, he threatened to cut Musk's contracts with the federal government. In his interview with NBC News on Saturday, Trump said Musk had been "disrespectful to the office of the president". "I think it's a very bad thing, because he's very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the president," Trump said.Musk, the world's richest man, who donated roughly $250m to Trump's presidential campaign, suggested during the social media feud that he might back some of Trump's opponents during next year's midterm elections, throwing his support behind challengers to the lawmakers who supported Trump's tax bill. When asked about the prospect of Musk backing Democratic candidates that run against Republicans, Trump said he would face "serious consequences".
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