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Live Updates: Trump Threatens to Cut Elon Musk’s Government Contracts as Feud Escalates
The open acrimony between the two men comes after the billionaire denounced President Trump’s signature domestic policy bill as an “abomination.”
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Musk quickly responded on X.
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Musk then posted a poll on X.
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Trump responded on Truth Social.
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Trump threatened to cut DOGE on Truth Social.
Truth Social
Pinned
Tyler Pager and
Here’s the latest.
President Trump on Thursday threatened to cut the billions of dollars in federal contracts and tax subsidies for Elon Musk’s companies, escalating a feud that unfurled on social media in remarkably public and rapid fashion.
Their unlikely alliance dissolved into open acrimony, with the two men hurling personal attacks at each other over matters both significant and petty.
What started as simply a fight over Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill sharply escalated into who deserved more credit for Mr. Trump’s election victory and why Mr. Musk did not cover up a black eye with makeup and whether the government should cut its contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies and provide it with subsidies.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
While meeting with Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor, in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump broke days of uncharacteristic silence and unloaded on Mr. Musk, who until last week was a top presidential adviser.
“I’m very disappointed in Elon,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve helped Elon a lot.”
As the president criticized Mr. Musk, the billionaire responded in real time on X, the social media platform he owns.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Mr. Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude,” he added, taking credit for Mr. Trump’s election in a way that he never has before.
By Thursday afternoon, Mr. Musk was floating leaving the Republican Party to form a new entity. Mr. Trump, for his part, was accusing him of “Trump derangement syndrome.”
Here’s what else to know:
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A shattered alliance: The public break comes after a remarkable partnership between the two men. Mr. Musk deployed over $250 million to back Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. After Mr. Trump won, he gave Mr. Musk free rein to slash the federal work force. Just last week, Mr. Trump gave Mr. Musk a personal send-off in the Oval Office, praising him as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced,” while Mr. Musk promised to remain a “friend and adviser to the president.” Read more ›
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Musk’s leverage: Elon Musk created a poll on X that asked his followers if there should be a “new political party” that represents “the 80 percent in the middle.” He has often portrayed himself as a centrist, despite his engagement with right-wing leaders around the world. Although he promised $100 million to groups controlled by the Trump political operation, he has not delivered it, and could funnel his considerable wealth into this idea as his next political project.
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Online chaos: Now unshackled from loyalty to the Trump party line, Mr. Musk has returned to fomenting chaos on X. Mr. Musk panned the president’s signature domestic policy bill as a “disgusting abomination” and telling House members who voted for it: “You know you did wrong.” Mr. Musk has often criticized legislation, agencies and others that are against the interests of himself and his companies, which include the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.
Kate Conger, Michael Gold and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.
White House reporter
Stephen K. Bannon, who has been one of the most vocal critics of Musk for months, said he is advising the president to cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations into the world’s richest man.
“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,” he said in a phone interview with me.
Bannon said the Trump administration should also investigate Musk’s drug use, as reported by The Times, and his effort to get a classified briefing on China from the Pentagon, which was also reported by The Times. Bannon said Musk’s security clearance should be suspended during these investigations.
White House reporter
Kanye West, the performer and Trump supporter who has a history of antisemitic and other controversial comments, is now encouraging Trump and Musk to end their quarrel.
“Broooos please noooooo,” he wrote on X, Musk’s platform, with an emoji of two individuals hugging one another. “We love you both so much.”
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Speaker Mike Johnson responded to Elon Musk’s claim that he has changed since becoming speaker in an uncharacteristically fiery social media post.
“The Mike Johnson of 2023 is the SAME Mike Johnson who has always been a lifelong fiscal hawk — who now serves as speaker and is implementing a multi-stage plan to get our country back to fiscal responsibility and extraordinary economic growth,” he wrote.
The spiraling feud triggered a plunge in Tesla’s shares.
Tesla investors were rattled on Thursday by escalating tension between Elon Musk and President Trump, and the company’s stock plunged, wiping billions off the company’s market value.
Shares of Tesla fell 15 percent in afternoon trading after Mr. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, ramped up his public criticism of the House Republican domestic policy bill, calling it an “abomination.” The move is set to wipe out more than $100 billion from Tesla’s roughly $1 trillion valuation.
A dispute over the policy bill spiraled in a matter of hours into a broader rupture in Mr. Musk’s relationship with the president, raising concern among investors about how the tensions might harm Mr. Musk’s businesses.
The spending bill would end a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government that has helped lower the cost of buying electric vehicles. Mr. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Musk was upset about the electric vehicle tax credit repeal — a claim that Mr. Musk swiftly rejected.
The repeal would hurt Tesla, which is the largest seller of electric vehicles in the United States. It could amount to a $1.2 billion hit to Tesla’s annual profit, according to JPMorgan analysts. And ending the credits would come against a backdrop of falling Tesla sales as a result of consumer backlash to Mr. Musk’s role in the Trump administration, as well as the brand’s lack of new, more affordable models.
But repealing tax credits might not hit Tesla as hard as other automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor, both of which have invested heavily in factories and supply chains with the hope of eventually producing millions of electric vehicles a year. Tesla, unlike many of its competitors, might manage to lower prices to prop up demand if the credits end.
House Democrats are jumping on Elon Musk’s allegation that President Trump’s name is in the supposedly secret documents the federal government has on powerful men who were in the orbit of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They immediately called for the release of the Epstein files. “I called for the full release of the Epstein Files a month ago because of my suspicion that Attorney General Pam Bondi was concealing the files to protect Donald Trump,” Representative Dan Goldman, Democrat of New York, wrote on X. “Now my suspicion has been confirmed.”
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White House reporter
Trump threatens to cancel Musk contracts as feud escalates.
President Trump threatened to cut billions of dollars in federal contracts and tax subsidies for Elon Musk’s companies on Thursday, the latest escalation in the growing feud between the two men.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Last year, Mr. Musk’s companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts with 17 federal agencies. Most of the contracts were for SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s space technology company. Tesla, his electric vehicle company, also has contracts with the federal government.
But the relationship between the two men very publicly dissolved Thursday. Mr. Musk until last week was a top presidential adviser and has since turned into a critic of one of Mr. Trump’s priorities. Mr. Musk has called the president’s signature legislation currently moving through Congress a “disgusting abomination.”
The two lashed out at each other from the social media platforms that they each own on Thursday.
“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!” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Mr. Musk responded on X, the social media platform he owns, “Such an obvious lie. So sad.”
In recent days, as he withdrew from the government, Elon Musk stayed in good spirits, telling friends that he wanted to stay active on some DOGE priorities, including blocking funding for programs that he thought promoted illegal immigration, according to a person familiar with the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity to relay private conversations.
White House reporter
If President Trump follows through on his threat to end government contracts with Elon Musk’s companies, it would have massive implications for both Musk and space exploration. Last year, Musk’s companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts with 17 federal agencies, according to this story by our colleagues. Most of those contracts are for SpaceX, Musk’s space technology company.
After the president threatened to cancel contracts with Elon Musk’s companies, shares in publicly traded competitors to Musk’s space exploration company SpaceX rose in value. AST Spacemobile rose as much as 5.8 percent while EchoStar rose more than 15 percent.
The degree to which the alleged Trump-Musk friendship has been laid bare as a relationship of convenience came very fast today. It was just a few weeks ago that Musk giggled and told a story about sleeping over at the White House residence and eating a tub of caramel ice cream.
Elon Musk has his own connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the now-deceased financier’s associates. Musk was photographed at a party in 2014 with Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Epstein’s longtime associates and a former girlfriend who was convicted in 2021 on charges that she aided Epstein in his sex-trafficking activities. That image has now been widely circulated online. In 2018, Epstein told a New York Times reporter that he had been advising Musk, though Musk denied that at the time.
Tesla’s stock price slide has continued. The company is now down more than 16 percent, on course to be the company’s worst fall since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.
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Elon Musk continues his war of words with President Trump on X by claiming that the president “is in the Epstein files,” a reference to government documents on the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. “That is the real reason they have not been made public,” Musk writes. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the release of the “first phase” of declassified Epstein documents, though much of the information had already been publicly known.
Elon Musk is now setting his sights on Speaker Mike Johnson, essentially calling him a hypocrite for voting for a package that would add to the debt, at a time when the House is expected to adopt a package that would codify spending and budget cuts put forward by the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.
Johnson and many fiscal conservatives in the House have voiced support of approving these cuts, which were already enacted by the Trump administration through executive orders. But the cuts are chiefly identified with Musk, which may make for an awkward debate as the billionaire feuds with Trump, who exerts considerable influence on rank-and-file members.
When exactly President Trump and Elon Musk would break up has been a parlor game for months — even in their own inner circles. Some of Musk’s associates believed this buddy routine would not last for forever. But even so, the breakdown that we saw today was swifter than any of them imagined.
Musk appeared to have unfollowed two prominent right-wing figures on X, according to an account that tracks the behavior of high-profile tech executives. One of those figures is Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Charlie Kirk, the popular podcaster and conservative influencer.
The timing of Musk’s unfollowing, which could not be independently verified, appeared to have occurred as Miller was on Kirk’s live show to praise the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — a major point of contention between Musk and Trump. Musk spent much of the morning on X reframing Trump’s legislation as the “big ugly spending bill.”
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The person who let Elon Musk have fairly free run at the government despite Musk’s existing federal contracts was President Trump. But Trump is now using those contracts as a weapon against Musk.
Musk appears to be frustrated at Trump’s withdrawal of Jared Isaacman as the next NASA administrator. On Thursday, Trump said in a news conference that he had revoked the nomination because Isaacman was “a Democrat.” In response, Musk reshared a Trump post on X from December in which the president had praised Isaacman as “ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era.”
Ryan Mac and
Musk’s and Trump’s relationship recently started to unravel.
Six days ago, Elon Musk and President Trump were in the Oval Office singing each other’s praises.
Not anymore.
On Thursday, the rapid unscheduled disassembly of their relationship played out in a news conference and on social media, after Mr. Musk’s departure as a special government employee last Friday. At the time, the tech billionaire said he hoped to continue as “a friend and adviser to the president.”
Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Musk’s whirlwind bromance publicly started when the world’s richest man endorsed Mr. Trump for president in July. Mr. Musk then campaigned for Mr. Trump.
Since the election, Mr. Musk has largely appeared inseparable from the president’s side, helping to shape the federal government, make policy decisions and meet with other world leaders as the “first buddy.”
But more recently, there have been signs of disagreement. In an earlier public break with the administration, Mr. Musk slammed the president’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, as a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a series of posts on X, his social media site, in April.
Mr. Musk started publicly criticizing Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill last week, saying in a CBS News interview that he was disappointed in the legislation’s size and impact on the deficit.
Things have unraveled from there. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said he would withdraw the nomination of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and close ally to Mr. Musk, to be the next NASA administrator. Mr. Isaacman has been an avid customer of Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his removal was viewed by some as a repudiation of Mr. Musk’s influence.
On Tuesday, Mr. Musk fired back on X, criticizing a sweeping Republican domestic policy bill that Mr. Trump had backed, as a “disgusting abomination.” The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive argued that a bill, which is known officially as the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, could be either big or beautiful — but not both.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Mr. Musk posted. He added that the bill would “increase the already gigantic budget deficit” and counter the work he had done to slash government spending through the Department of Government Efficiency.
The billionaire also suggested that he might help challenge members of Congress who supported the bill in the 2026 midterm elections. “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” he wrote.
Mr. Musk continued his warpath against the legislation on Wednesday, posting on X he would end the bill.
“Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok!” he wrote. “KILL the BILL.”
Mr. Trump gave his first public response to Mr. Musk’s posts during a news conference on Thursday, noting that the was “very disappointed” with the billionaire. The president also suggested that he would have won the election without Mr. Musk’s help.
Mr. Musk shot back on X, saying “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”
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For almost a year now, Musk has at times been amazed by the amount of influence he had with Trump. One early, telling anecdote: In April 2024, Musk was shocked that a few minutes after he texted Trump to stop denigrating early voting, Trump did exactly that. Now, that influence appears headed for the wood-chipper.
Tesla’s share price has steadily fallen over 10 percent today, erasing much of its rise from May in a matter of hours. The move is set to wipe out more than $100 billion from Tesla’s roughly $1 trillion valuation.
Senators have been cautious when asked to respond to the very public mudslinging between Elon Musk and President Trump, two public figures known for using their massive platforms to pressure lawmakers to adopt their political positions. Musk, one of the world’s richest people, has previously threatened to fund primary challengers for Republicans who did not back his favored agenda — which at the time was Trump’s. But Republican voters are still very much in Trump’s thrall, and his endorsement carries significant weight with the party’s base.
White House reporter
Trump is also threatening to cut Musk’s government contracts.
“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 on Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
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As lawmakers weigh how to react to the feud between President Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire issued a warning on X suggesting he could cause problems in their future political careers. “Some food for thought as they ponder this question: Trump has 3.5 years left as president, but I will be around for 40+ years,” Musk wrote.
White House reporter
President Trump is now responding to Elon Musk on Truth Social. The president said he asked Musk, who was “wearing thin,” 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!” Trump wrote.
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The fracturing relationship between Musk and Trump is tricky for Silicon Valley.
The fracturing relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk presents a tricky moment for the so-called Tech Right, a small but vocal group of elite Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have in recent years embraced both the president and the world’s richest man.
That is especially true for members of the “All-In” podcast, a popular show started by three entrepreneurs and venture capitalists — David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calacanis. They have gained notoriety in the largely liberal tech industry for their alignment with right-wing politics.
Mr. Sacks also has ties to the Trump administration. In 2024, he was appointed Cryptocurrency and Artificial Intelligence czar.
Most of the group, however, is tied closely to Mr. Musk. Mr. Sacks and Mr. Calacanis advised the tech billionaire during his acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, in 2022, and regularly hosts him on their podcast.
The men generally agree on political issues. They oppose progressive causes and want to tamp down regulation in key areas like A.I. and crypto.
In recent weeks, some of the Tech Right have criticized Mr. Trump’s decisions in public. When the president enacted steep tariffs that threatened to upset the supply chains of some Silicon Valley startups, founders posted on X, questioning the decisions.
Many entrepreneurs also turned to another trusted ally to weigh in on the matter: Mr. Musk.
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