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Elon Musk Is Still Not Your Friend
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, left, and President Donald Trump
This article is part of HuffPost’s biweekly politics newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
After months of political bliss, it seems as if the president and the world’s richest man are ready to call it quits. Donald Trump and Elon Musk traded barbs on their respective social media websites on Thursday and into Friday, as social media users happily looked on.
It was only a matter of time before Trump and Musk, who are not known for making and keeping allies, had a spectacular falling out. The inciting incident turned out to be Musk’s criticisms of the Trump-backed “Big Beautiful Bill,” the House’s spending bill that slashes the safety net in order to provide $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts to the rich.
At first, Musk’s comments were mild, saying the bill doesn’t reduce the deficit and “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.” But he went fully nuclear on Thursday. Musk, who already claimed he won the election for Trump, posted to X to accuse the president of being in the “Epstein files,” or a list of people with suspicious associations with the financier, who died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. (Trump and Epstein socialised in the 1980s and 1990s, but Trump has denied ever being on his private plane or island, where some of the alleged sex crimes took place.) Trump, in turn, suggested on Truth Social he would cut Musk’s government contracts, while the president’s allies even started talking about deporting Musk.
At this point, it seems clear that the once-budding bromance is toast.
Many people reacted with schadenfreude to the world’s weirdest celebrity breakup. But it also had a few Democrats seeming ready to slide into Musk’s DMs.
“We should ultimately be trying to convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with,” Representative Ro Khanna (Democrat, California) told Politico on Thursday. “A commitment to science funding, a commitment to clean technology, a commitment to seeing........
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