The Trump-Musk breakup, briefly explained

Vox

4 days ago

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025, in Washington, DC.This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Is the Trump-Musk partnership over? It's complicated — but after today, it's looking more like yes.
What just happened? President Donald Trump has pinned his legislative hopes on one 'big, beautiful bill,' which passed the House last month. Today, Elon Musk took aim at the bill as 'massive, outrageous, pork-filled…a disgusting abomination' that would 'massively increase' the budget deficit.
Does it matter what Musk thinks? Maybe not as much as it once did. This is a transitional moment for Musk, who is on his way out after the official end of his time as a government employee last week. Trump, in a farewell press conference, downplayed the departure, saying, 'Elon's really not leaving. He's going to be back and forth.'
In private, Trump has reportedly expressed some skepticism about Musk, asking whether efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency were 'all bullshit.' Despite that, reporting has so far suggested that the Trump-Musk relationship remains generally amicable — but Musk's new broadside against Trump's bill may be a sign of things fraying.
What did Musk actually accomplish? In some ways, relatively little — as my colleague Andrew Prokop has reported, Musk and DOGE failed to get anywhere close to cuts at the promised scale. At the same time, however, Musk had done a horrifying amount of damage — his decimation of US foreign aid alone may already have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, by some estimates, and will continue to cause even more.
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What will Musk do now? Allegedly, return to focusing on his long list of companies, Tesla and SpaceX chief among them, and spend less time on politics. Musk also said in May that he would do 'a lot less' political spending going forward. At the very least, his comments Tuesday suggest he's not all the way done with politics, though it remains to be seen how influential he can be.
And with that, it's time to log off…