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Donald Trump has attacked Elon Musk, accusing his billionaire backer of being “hostile” to his administration as a row between two of the world’s most powerful men erupted into an all-out, public feud.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, the US president said he was “very disappointed” in Musk for criticising his signature tax bill, and suggested he was trying to defend his business interests.
“He’s not the first . . . people leave my administration and some of them actually become hostile,” Trump said of Musk’s broadsides in recent days. “They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour’s gone, the whole world is different, and they become hostile.”
He added: “I’m very disappointed in Elon. I helped Elon a lot.”
Trump’s comments bring into public a deepening row with Musk that has seen the billionaire — who opposes the White House’s trade war as well as the president’s tax bill — and some of his allies abruptly leave the administration.
Musk, who in April retreated from politics because of the “blowback” against his businesses, suggested he regretted backing Trump with more than $250mn during last year’s election, after the president claimed he would have won without the billionaire’s cash.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he posted on his social media site X soon after the Oval Office tirade. “Such ingratitude.”
Shares in Tesla fell by more than 6 per cent following Trump’s remarks.
Musk, who had hitherto refrained from attacking Trump directly, also suggested on Thursday that the president was abandoning his principles on federal spending.
The billionaire, who is upset that the tax bill now before the Senate, would increase the US deficit by trillions of dollars, highlighted old posts by Trump in which he was critical of Republicans for raising the debt ceiling.
The billionaire also hit back at Trump’s suggestion that he had opposed the “big beautiful bill” because it axed tax credits for electric vehicles and clean energy, which have long benefited Tesla in the US.
“Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk posted.
The fracture in the relationship between the former “first buddy” and the president has now spread through Washington. Last week, Trump pulled the nomination of billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman, a close ally Musk, to lead Nasa, ostensibly over contributions he had made to Democratic candidates in the past.
Isaacman, who was on track to receive bipartisan support from the Senate, disputed the White House’s justification for the decision.
“I don’t think the timing was much of a coincidence,” Isaacman told the All-In podcast on Wednesday. “There [were] some people that had some axes to grind, I guess, and I was a good, visible target.”
Musk had already announced that he was stepping back from his involvement in the Trump administration, where he had led the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). Musk boasted that Doge would cut trillions of dollars from federal spending, although the savings so far have been much more modest.
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Steve Davis, one of Musk’s lieutenants at SpaceX who led Doge on a day-to-day basis, had also now left the administration, according to a government official.
More senior figures close to the billionaire were set to abandon the initiative in the coming days, the official said.
Musk himself has suggested that the tax bill would wipe out any savings made by Doge, which claims to have identified roughly $180bn in cuts to date. On Wednesday, the congressional fiscal watchdog said the legislation would add $2.4tn to the US debt by 2034.
On Thursday Musk rebuffed Trump’s suggestion that he had known what was in the bill and only turned on it once he had departed Washington. “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!”
