A rift between Donald Trump and Elon Musk over the Republican’s tax and spending bill on Thursday suddenly blew up to a flurry of Big, Beautiful, Brutal tweets on social media platforms they own.
Days after Musk stepped down as head of the Trump administrations Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and then open criticized the Republican Party’s One Big Beautiful Bill, a feud between the tech boss and the U.S. President erupted into open warfare using their respective online megaphones.
“I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago,” President Trump at one point told his own diehard supporters on Truth Social. Not long after, Trump in another tweet claimed Musk had been “wearing thin, I asked him to leave,” before adding “he just went CRAZY.”
Meanwhile, Musk from his own digital perch on X unleashed a barrage of posts to his 220 million followers that soon had his public feud with Trump seeming to spiral into a mutual knock-down fight.
One X tweet claimed with no evidence Trump’s name was in government files about the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and that’s why they had not been released. “Have a nice day, DJT!,” the Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink CEO added.
Their digital threats and insults showed no signs of letting up as the day wore on. Musk claimed Trump would have lost the 2024 U.S. Presidential election without his campaign finance contributions. “Such ingratitude,” he wrote on X.
The tech titan donated around $300 million to Trump’s campaign and Republican candidates last year. Trump countered that cutting government spending as Musk called for could include a move to “terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.”
That potentially mortal threat to Tesla and other Musk businesses that depend heavily on government contracts had the tech boss threatening to decommission his SpaceX Dragon spacecraft built via Department of Defense contracts for potential use by NASA in space.
As their posts continued, Musk on X said Trump should be impeached and replaced by Vice-President JD Vance. By late afternoon on Thursday, Trump took the unusual step of skipping questions with the assembled media when holding an event with the Fraternal Order of Police in the White House.
Since launching Truth Social and its parent company Trump Media and Technology Group, the social media platform have become the U.S. President’s primary social media platform.
And in March, Musk used xAI, his artificial intelligence company, to acquire X in an all-stock transaction that valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45 billion, his original take-private price, minus $12 billion in debt). That’s $1 billion more than the take-private price of $44 billion paid by Musk and fellow investors in the platform formerly called Twitter in 2022.
