Musk And Trump Break Up in Online Acrimony

Many of their opponents had been predicting that the alliance between US president Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with companies like Tesla, SpaceX and X under him, couldn’t hold because these were two alpha personalities unused to having equals around them. But the speed of the rupture was still astonishing.

While he was campaigning to be President, Musk had in the final legs infused hundreds of millions of dollars and also his own reputation. No one doubts that it made a huge contribution to Trump’s victory.   Once in power, Trump made Musk head a body called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut spending and costs. They were seen together all the time, from sports arenas to meetings with foreign leaders. And then Musk slowly started to fade into the background. DOGE had promised savings of trillions but soon ran into resistance from within the government. Musk last week announced that he was leaving to focus on his businesses and even then, Trump feted him in the Oval Office.

Within days however Musk was singing a different tune. Trump’s main election promise is an enormous tax cut. The bill that was introduced indicated that it would increase the deficit by more than US$ 2 trillion. Musk fired the first salvo by publicly opposing the bill and calling it an abomination. Trump, unusually for him, did not respond. Until at a press meet along with the German chancellor, he attributed Musk’s actions to not getting state support for electric vehicles, which is his primary business. He also implied Musk wasn’t really that crucial to his victory.

The gloves then went off on June 5 when Musk made a series of posts on X. It ranged from calling Trump a liar for saying that Musk was aware about the contents of the bill to being ungrateful because he wouldn’t have won without Musk. Trump responded in his social media platform Truth Social that he had sacked Musk. 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 also threatened Musk by writing that if costs had to be cut the easy way to save billions would be to terminate government subsidies and contracts to Musk’s companies.

Musk has upped the ante by running a poll on X asking whether a third political party is necessary. He also posted that Trump’s name was in the criminal files of Jeffrey Epstein, a fixer who was accused of trafficking minor girls to rich and influential people, and had later committed suicide in jail. This, media reports say, was the point of no return. It is still possible that there might be a temporary truce given that both know how much damage they can do each other but with so much acrimony let out in public, chances are this is the only the first battle in a long war.

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