During a Thursday press conference in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump was asked to respond to Elon Musk’s scathing critique of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which recently passed the House and is now under Senate consideration. In a post on X earlier this week, Musk described the legislation as a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” and called it a “disgusting abomination.”
“I’m very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people. He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it,” Trump told reporters. “All of a sudden, he had a problem. And he only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the EV mandate.”
Musk quickly pounced on Trump’s remarks in a post on X, claiming, “This bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!”
He went on to assert that without his support, Trump would have lost the election — and that Democrats would now control both the House and the Senate.
That may or may not be true — it’s ultimately unknowable.
Trump took to Truth Social to say, “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!”
In a second post, the president wrote, “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!”
From there, the extraordinary war of words spiraled out of control. Musk told his 220 million followers that it was “Time to drop the really big bomb.” Trump, he claimed, “is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.”
He ended his message with, “Have a nice day, DJT!”
Ten minutes later, the tech billionaire posted, “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”
Whether Musk is telling the truth is anyone’s guess. But regardless, his remark clearly crossed a line — and it appears the bromance that blossomed between the two titans after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July is officially over.
How this public fallout will unfold remains to be seen. While some are already picking sides, Kanye West just wants the public bickering to end.
And Ashley St. Clair, who shares a child with Musk, called on Trump to let her know if he needed any breakup advice.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn or X.
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