When the world’s most powerful man fell out with the world’s richest man, it was always going to be loud and ugly. Giles Whittell watched with a large bowl of popcorn
When Germany’s new chancellor flew to Washington last week he was concerned he might be ambushed in the White House as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa had been before him.
He needn’t have worried. On Thursday, for 13 minutes, Donald Trump and Chancellor Friedrich Merz talked about trade and world affairs in the Oval Office. Then Trump was asked about Elon Musk, and it was as if nothing else mattered. The big bust-up was out in the open on the most famous stage in politics.
Two days earlier (four after leaving Washington with a black eye), Musk had blown up online on the subject of Trump’s $4.16tn budget bill. He called it an outrageous, pork-filled abomination of which Congress should be ashamed. At the time Trump hadn’t risen to the bait; now he did.
“I’m very disappointed in Elon,” he said of the man who once said he loved Trump as much as a heterosexual man could. “I’ve helped Elon a lot.”
Wherever he was, Musk was watching. He’d known all along what was in the budget bill, Trump said. He had only become upset when he found it didn’t include billions in federal credits for electric cars like those Tesla sells.
What followed was a wild 80-minute artillery exchange between the world’s two most powerful billionaires, each firing from his own messaging platform, and a long night of wondering what it all might mean for Musk, Trump, the US and the world.
‘An outrageous, pork-filled abomination of which Congress should be ashamed’
Musk on Trump’s budget bill
Republican grandees implored the pair to “hug” and make up. Vice-President JD Vance, his loyalties apparently torn between the two, was silent for eight hours. Musk’s father, traced to a Delhi airport lounge, urged his son to “make sure this fizzles out”. That feels unlikely.
By Friday morning people close to Musk said he wasn’t taking calls – but Trump was. ABC News’s Jonathan Karl called the president’s personal cellphone at 6.45am. Trump picked up, and said he wasn’t interested in talking to, or about, “the man who has lost his mind”.
From the moment the big bromance started, the break-up was foreseen. But not like this. Why so fast and with so much venom? The best explanation to emerge so far involves not cars but space.
Minutes before a ceremony on 30 May at which Musk was presented with a gold key to the White House for his three months of slash-and-burn work atop the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump was handed a dossier on Musk’s preferred candidate as Nasa’s new administrator. The dossier showed that the candidate, Jared Isaacman, had donated to Democrats. For Trump, this was disqualifying. Immediately after the ceremony a row ensued, according to multiple sources interviewed by the New York Times and the Atlantic. Two days later, Trump withdrew Isaacman’s nomination.
Musk, who wants to go to Mars in his giant Starship rocket but with funding from the US government, was said to be stunned. Having an ally in charge of the US space agency was the single most desirable payback for the $250m he had spent helping Trump win back the White House, and he had been denied.
Jared Isaacman, backed by Musk to be Nasa boss, but rejected by Donald Trump.
The row over the budget was confected by comparison – but it escalated even so. The tweet that lit the fuse came from Musk’s phone while Trump and Merz were still exchanging pleasantries in Washington.
12.46pm east coast time: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Must wrote on X. An hour later he posted a poll asking his 220 million followers if it was time to start a new political party “that actually represents the 80% in the middle”. 80% of those who responded said it was.
Fully engaged once he had said goodbye to his guest, Trump hit back on Truth Social.
2.37pm: “I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy electric Cars that nobody else wanted… and he just went CRAZY!” In the same post Trump mused that a quick way to save taxpayer dollars would be to scrap the federal contracts and subsidies that have benefited SpaceX and Tesla to the tune of about $36bn.
By this time Ashley St Clair, the estranged mother of Musk’s 14th child, had offered Trump “break-up advice” on X. Musk’s response to Trump’s threat was to note that he could decommission the SpaceX rockets on which Nasa currently depends to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, stranding them there. Then he dropped what he called his big bomb.
3.10pm: “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
The claim was offered without evidence but in fact files have been made public that confirm Trump knew and spent time with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile sex trafficker. For anyone in doubt, US networks rebroadcast footage of the pair dancing together at a party in 1992.
Kanye ‘Ye’ West tweeted: ‘Broooos please noooooo, we love you both so much’.
At around 4pm, Musk retweeted a suggestion that Trump be impeached with the word “yes”. Trump is said to have remarked to White House staffers that his former consigliere was struggling with addictive substances and behaving like a child.
Man-child is, of course, a label often pinned to Trump. By some accounts on this occasion the president was the grownup in the room. But the spectacle of such a real-time, unfiltered, lawyers-be-damned online brawl is entirely without precedent in US presidential history.
“Broooos please noooooo, we love you both so much,” Kanye West (now Ye) tweeted four hours into the exchange. Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, demanded that Musk be deported. Dmitry Novikov, deputy chair of the Russian state Duma’s international affairs committee, offered him asylum in Moscow. Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, said he would mediate in return for Starlink shares.
The only former ally of the current Russian president to take him on in public, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died soon afterwards when his aircraft was hit by a missile. Musk is not in immediate danger, but friends fear for his health because of his admitted ketamine use, and Trump may yet turn the investigative powers of the US justice department against him.
Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister whom Musk once called a “small man”, posted on X: “See, big man, politics is harder than you thought.”
Photographs by AFP/Getty, Washington Post/Getty, Matthias Nareyek/Getty
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