The Elon-Trump Feud Is Oligarchy in Action [View all]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-06-elon-musk-donald-trump-feud/



I had been wondering if Elon Musk and Donald Trump would have a falling out. Two ultra-wealthy, ultra-corrupt, terminally online, megalomaniacal narcissists do not tend to make reliable partners. Augustus and Agrippa they are not. Yet until this week they seemed to at least maintain a cordial front.

At the time of writing Thursday evening, the sequence of events went something like this. On Tuesday, Musk posted on Twitter/X that Trump’s enormous reconciliation bill was “massive, outrageous, pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination” that would jack up the budget deficit. On Thursday, Musk pressed the attack, complaining about the “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” and whining that he had bought the government fair and square. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he posted. “Such ingratitude.”

Trump responded on Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote. “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!” he added.

Elon immediately escalated, posting that SpaceX would immediately begin decommissioning its Dragon rocket program, which is currently the only U.S.-based way to transfer astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station, (though he later walked that back), asserted that Trump “is in the Epstein files” and that “is the real reason they have not been made public,” suggested he would start a new political party, called for Trump to be impeached and replaced with J.D. Vance, and predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession.

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