Elon Musk is First Buddy no longer.
The epic bromance between Musk and President Donald Trump, between the richest man on the planet and the most powerful one, has come to an end, not with a bang but with a tweet: Just days after Trump granted Musk a golden key in an Oval Office send-off from his role as head of DOGE and adviser to the White House, Musk unleashed on the president’s Big Beautiful Bill: “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” he wrote on his social media platform, X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
On Thursday, Musk amplified his attacks, directing them at the President, saying Trump would have lost the election without him. “Such ingratitude,” Musk said. President Trump retorted that he was "very disappointed with Elon."
It was a shocking reversal from the intimacy of just a few days ago—certainly from the jovial joint interviews of February, and many bought the outrage in Musk’s tweet as genuine disillusionment with the difficulty of the job DOGE assigned itself and the difficulty of cutting spending. “Elon Musk Leaves Job of Making Government More Efficient for Much Easier Job of Sending Humans to Mars,” summarized the satirists at TheBabylon Bee.
Certainly, cutting waste and fraud is a noble goal. But Musk’s efforts regularly came into conflict with Trump’s cabinet secretaries, resulting in shouting matches over firings, while the waste, fraud, and abuse he promised to ferret out never materialized to the extent promised. “You’re a fraud!” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shouted at Musk at one point, according to Axios’s Marc Caputo. “You promised $2 trillion in cuts. Then it was $1 trillion. Then $500 billion. Now it’s $150 million. You’re a fraud.”
Musk’s “disappointment” with the Big Beautiful Bill and the GOP’s enthusiasm for DOGE, it turns out, is a distraction from the real story, which is of a series of conflicts of interest that gets at the heart of the delicate tech bro-MAGA marriage. Indeed, Musk leaving the White House in a flame war shouldn’t be surprising, for Musk’s agenda has—from DOGE’s inception—been at odds with the MAGA platform. On immigration, foreign policy, and economic policy, Musk’s interests, which we have reason to believe he pursued behind the scenes, were always on a collision course with what President Trump viewed as the interests of the United States.
