Closing summary
President Trump’s signature ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ has precipitated an epic fallout between the US president and one of his once closest allies, tech billionaire Elon Musk.
The vindictive blowup played out publicly on social media, with both men using their respective platforms, X and Truth Social, to exchange criticisms.
Here is a summary of how the rift unfolded.
Donald Trump kicked things off during an Oval Office meeting with German chancellor Friedrich Merz. Asked about Elon Musk’s criticism of his “Big, Beautiful Bill”, the US president told reporters: “Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will any more.”
Trump also told reporters he was “very disappointed in Elon”, telling them: “He knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody, and he never had a problem until right after he left. … He said the most beautiful things about me, and he hasn’t said bad about me personally, but I’m sure that’ll be next, but I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot.”
Musk denied Trump’s statement on X, beginning a flurry of posts that stepped up his feud with the president. Musk wrote: “False, 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 claim that without him Trump would have “lost the election” before bemoaning what he called “such ingratitude”.
The president followed up by threatening to terminate Musk’s government subsidies and contracts, prompting a return threat from the Space X boss to decommission the Dragon spacecraft (which brought home astronauts stuck on the ISS for months), potentially throwing US space programmes into turmoil. Hours later Musk rescinded the threat.
Musk also suggested Trump should be impeached and that JD Vance should replace Trump, warning that Trump’s global tariffs would “cause a recession in the second half of this year” and claimed Trump was in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The White House described the Epstein assertions as an “unfortunate episode”, in a statement to CNN.
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally and Elon Musk critic, suggested there were grounds to deport the tech billionaire, who has US citizenship. Bannon told the New York Times: “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.”
The spectacular blowout between Trump and Musk sent Tesla shares into free fall. They dropped by about 14.2% on Thursday at market close, wiping roughly $152bn off the value of the compan7. The decline in Tesla’s share price on Thursday knocked about $8.73bn off Musk’s total net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The reported $152bn drop also decreased the value of the company to roughly $900bn.
Musk says SpaceX will not decommission Dragon spacecraft
Billionaire Elon Musk said on Thursday that his rocket company SpaceX will not decommission its Dragon spacecraft, just hours after stating that the company would begin decommissioning amid his escalating feud with US President Donald Trump.
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