Trump and Musk feud escalates
WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – Just a week after Elon Musk left the White House, he and President Donald Trump have turned on each other.
'I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot,' President Trump said in the Oval Office Thursday.
What started as a disagreement over the Republicans' tax bill quickly spiraled.
'Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we will anymore,' President Trump said.
Musk has now made dozens of posts on X, first opposing the budget reconciliation bill, then saying the president would have lost the election without him, and later writing, 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!'
President Trump has previously denied any connection to Epstein. He posted on social media last year, 'I was never on Epstein's Plane, or at his 'stupid' Island. Strong Laws ought to be developed against A.I. It will be a big and very dangerous problem in the future!'
Prior to that post the president hit back on Truth Social saying Musk 'went crazy' and 'the easiest way to save money in our budget… is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies.'
'You know, Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate, and you know, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles,' President Trump said.
The president says the bill's removal of clean energy tax credits, including those supporting electric vehicles and therefore Musk's company Tesla, sparked the fight.
'I know that disturbed him,' President Trump said.
Musk responded on X, 'Whatever. Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill…but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill.'
While the president and Musk go back and forth, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) says Musk 'misperceives' the bill and says it's still on track to pass.
'There is no correlation between the size of the bill and how beautiful it is. He says it can't be big and beautiful. It certainly can be both,' Johnson said.
The bill is now in the hands of the Senate, where a few Republicans are siding with Musk.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Stock Market Today: Indexes Show Slow Start; IPO Name Jumps After Surprise Earnings Release (Live Coverage)
The Dow Jones wavered on the stock market today amid more China trade talks. Tesla stock rallied while new issue eToro sold off.


Politico
an hour ago
- Politico
Musk and Trump's Social-Media Fight Reveals How Power Works Today
The fact that Elon Musk kicked off this week's emo bloodbath with the words 'I'm sorry, but' has got to be the realest-housewives part of it. 'I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore,' Musk posted to X on Tuesday. Bless his heart — he sounded really contrite. Then he consulted a 'Downton Abbey' phrasebook and found 'disgusting abomination' to poshly trash Donald Trump's 'big beautiful bill.' He kept huffing his own X fumes through Wednesday until, on Thursday at 2:30 p.m., Trump all-capped him on Truth Social: 'CRAZY!' Off to the races. Everyone has their favorite part of Thursday's cage match. I was instantly startled by the non-pettiness: Musk gunning for Trump's impeachment, Trump gunning for Musk's financial ruin. All amid a cacophonous peanut gallery that included Ye, MAGA billionaire Bill Ackman and Musk ex Ashley St. Clair. But the Trump-Musk feud is not just a clash of two madmen; it is a clash between the two fiercest social-media influencers of all time. Trump and Musk are human memes, forged on Twitter and its spinoffs, X and Truth Social. Their rise, their public personas, their marriage of convenience and their falling out took place in short-form posts and the freestyle cultivation of likes and engagement. Their feud is in many ways a story of our times: It reveals how online power struggles work now — with rivals leveraging online fanbases, battling for authority across platforms and aiming for the ultimate flex: starving the opponent of any attention at all. Long before most, both Trump and Musk understood that traditional PR handlers would sterilize their personas, blunt the trolling potential of their best material and interfere with their relationships with fans. Trump built his political identity on Twitter, beating his chest and savaging his foes with a rawness that used to make his every utterance on Twitter unmissable. Musk built his celebrity through it, too, with runic tweets, like 'laws are on one side, poets on the other.' In late 2021, he was so proud of his philosopher-king status that he considered going pro: 'thinking of quitting my jobs & becoming an influencer full-time wdyt,' he tweeted, to 371,000 likes. The Musk-Trump bond, but also the tension in it, has also been defined by these platforms. It heated up in the fall of 2022, when Trump was in exile from Twitter and out of the White House. Metabolizing pandemic redpills, Musk was still half-heartedly striking a neoliberal pose, only recently having supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But he was also slagging Twitter for having banished groypers, conspiracy-mongers and especially Trump, its star, for insurrectioning. That's when Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He claims now he knew he was vastly overpaying — and in February he said X is worth 'like, eight cents' — but the expense was for a noble cause: to restore freedom of speech and welcome @realDonaldTrump back to the green pastures of his social-media homeland. In November of that year, Musk polled X, and a slight majority said Trump should be reinstated. 'The people have spoken,' Musk posted. 'Vox Populi, Vox Dei.' The voice of people is the voice of God. Right. But then, if we're just talking about the course of human events, something extremely cruel happened, a monumental act of Trumpian ingratitude. After his account was reinstated, Trump didn't come back. For nine long months, @realDonaldTrump met Musk's devastatingly expensive largesse with stony silence. Trump, of course, had built his own dopey Twitter dupe, Truth Social, and he probably liked no longer being someone else's tenant, vulnerable to eviction. He also probably liked looking down at the world's richest man from his own social-media castle. When asked when he'd go home to Musk-owned, Trump-friendly Twitter, Trump said, coldly, 'I don't see any reason for it.' Trump was betting that he had made Twitter powerful, not the other way around. If Musk had hoped to spend his days evading the fun police with Trump on Twitter, he might have been hurt that Trump didn't even bother to visit Musk's platform, which he renamed X in July 2023, until he had a mugshot to post in August of that year, after his indictment for a scheme to overturn election results in Georgia. The next summer, on July 13, 2024, Musk endorsed Trump, and soon started whooping and jumping and dancing like 2005 Tom Cruise. He tilted hard right for his hero, and he mostly did it on X, amplifying Dark MAGA posts, from Covid denial to QAnon praise. Tesla's stock tanked. Musk muted his environmentalist leanings. He lost his close friends, including Sam Harris and Philip Low. A month after the endorsement, Trump graced X with his presence with a campaign video. It was only the second time he'd posted to X since Musk rolled out the red carpet for him. In the last months of his campaign, while Musk's money and adulation surged his way, Trump finally managed to show Musk the occasional courtesy of using the platform Musk had bought, furnished and upholstered in part for him. Flash forward to last week. On Monday, June 2, three days before the Trump-Musk affair came utterly undone, @realDonaldTrump posted to X for what looks like the last time: a manly boast video about his steel tariffs. It was scored with what sounded like pounding Christian rock. These tariffs, which Trump increased to fully 50 percent last week, will raise the cost of imported car components, including at Tesla, and further imperil Musk's fortune. For Trump to crow about this insult to Tesla in Musk's own house when they were still acting like pals and Musk was mostly keeping mum about the 'big beautiful bill' (which if it passes will also injure Tesla) — this seems like the unkindest cut of the whole match made in hell. The end of last week's social-media spat reveals that the heavyweight champ of social-media influence is still Trump. At the news that Musk's net worth fell by $34 billion during the spat, while Tesla's market value sank by $153 billion, Musk waved a white flag. He deleted or retracted his incendiary X posts — the innuendo about Trump and the Epstein files and the threat to decommission a spacecraft. Trump, for his part, took back nothing. He now says he rejects a make-up call. He's selling the pretty red Tesla Musk presented to him. And most importantly, he's back to ghosting X. No posts there since Monday. By Friday he was on Truth Social praising Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent, one of Musk's most aggressive rivals for Trump's favor and the one whose April shouting match with Musk came to blows, according to Steve Bannon. On Sunday, Musk gave perhaps the clearest sign that he is tapping out: He screenshotted a Truth Social post by Trump in which the president called Gavin Newsom 'Governor Gavin Newscum' — and posted it admiringly to X. No commentary, no irony, no comeback. Just a tribute. In the posting wars, this is what bending the knee looks like: one man obsequiously signal-boosting the other, on the platform he couldn't lure him back to.


The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
Trump vs. Musk: Should we laugh or weep?
When you know a couple getting divorced, you might face a dilemma as to whose side to take. Such is not the case in the bitter public breakup between President Trump and Elon Musk. It is easy to say, 'A plague on both your houses.' The verbal fisticuffs between the world's wealthiest and the most powerful social media moguls is amusing but delivers nothing of substance to the American people. The brickbats flew when Musk called Trump's 'big beautiful' tax bill a 'disgusting abomination,' urging Congress to 'KILL the BILL.' Then Musk rhetorically polled his flock on X as to whether it was time to found a new political party representing the 80 percent of Americans 'in the middle.' Trump responded on his Truth Social that 'Elon was 'wearing thin'. I asked him to leave… and he just went CRAZY!' Trump in fact didn't fire Musk — Musk termed out, reaching the maximum number of days he could serve as a 'special government employee.' Trump's response was measured: 'I don't mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago. This is one of the greatest bills ever presented to Congress.' The budget bill would, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, grow the debt by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. Despite Trump's exaggerations, he cannot extend tax cuts and impose inflationary tariffs without causing slower growth and higher interest rates (in the process increasing the cost of debt service). There is also the clear and present danger that the escalating debt will trigger a cataclysmic financial crisis. And his beautiful bill leaves almost 11 million Americans without health insurance over the next decade. Musk endorsed a tweet suggesting that Trump should be impeached and replaced by Vice President JD Vance, then attacked Trump's most beloved issue: 'The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.' The nonpartisan Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development essentially agrees that the tariffs are inflationary and will throttle growth. Musk also dropped a stink bomb: 'Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public,' referring to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in a federal prison while facing charges of sex trafficking. The derisive comments represented a stunning turnabout. Less than a week before, Trump gave Musk a key to the White House as an expression of gratitude for his work with the White House's Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. What brought it all on? Trump said Musk was 'upset' that the pending legislation would roll back subsidies for electric vehicles. Musk denied he was even aware of it. While the game may be afoot between the men in the arena, there is more to this lovers' quarrel. The rift involves political risks for both sides. Trump aides promptly reached out to Musk in an effort to deescalate the conflict. There are now signs of an uneasy truce, even though Trump says he has no desire to mend the rift. Musk's posts about Epstein and possible impeachment were deleted, but who knows whether the cease-fire will hold. Before we start dancing and singing, 'Ding Dong, the witch is dead,' it is important to remember that certain salient features of the Trump-Musk regime remain. DOGE post-Musk is still with us, and it has not saved money while doing lasting damage. Nor has it created efficiency — it has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The Trump-Musk budget (which Musk has now repudiated) cuts research funding to the bone — steps that would make the country less healthy and leave the field to China. For the past 80 years, the federal government has supported scientific research as a national engine of innovation. Support of basic research by the National Institute of Health has accomplished spectacular advances and makes critical contributions to the economy. For fiscal 2025, the total NIH budget is $48 billion, which may not even be fully awarded; the Trump budget for 2026 proposes to chop it by 44 percent to $27 billion. Meanwhile, China has nearly caught up to us in biotechnology and already conducts more clinical trials than the U.S. and Europe combined. Trump has terminated NIH grants before their scheduled end dates, with an inexplicably heavy bias against infectious disease and vaccine research — not to mention his war on our universities, with total termination at Harvard and freezes at Columbia, Brown and Northwestern. The Trump-Musk divorce is a reminder of indefensible policies, not a harbinger of good news. We will still witness (subject to eventual court rulings) Trump's revenge on law firms he doesn't like, arbitrary firings of civil servants and agency officials, and reciprocal tariffs based on specious claims of 'national emergency.' The poster child of the Trump-Musk legacy is the shuttering of USAID, a soft power success for 80 years that won hearts and minds for America globally. Pete Hegseth is still running amok in the Department of Defense, compromising national security with insecure communications of classified material and dismissing seasoned officers because of race, gender or alleged political disloyalty. Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security is still illegally deporting individuals without notice, hearing or hard evidence of undesirability. And Pam Bondi's Justice Department will continue to arrest judges, recommend pardons for the criminal faithful and dismiss strong cases against corrupt politicians. Much of what Trump has done is obviously illegal, but we will have to see if the courts stand up to him or water down their rulings to avoid a constitutional crisis. But legalities aside, is any of this sound policy? The Trump-Musk spat may be amusing, but, as Lord Byron wrote, 'And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep.' James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York's Southern District. He is also the host of the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin.