Just days after Donald Trump held an event to bid him a rosy farewell from the White House, Elon Musk has gone nuclear on the president’s ‘big beautiful bill’.
Musk blasted Trump’s signature budget bill on his X (formerly Twitter) platform on Tuesday afternoon, four days after Trump praised him in an Oval Office press conference.
‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,’ wrote Musk.
‘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.’
In another post, Trump’s former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote that the bill ‘will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt’.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act extends tax cuts he brought in 2017 during his first term, and allocates more funding for border security and the military. Those come at the expense of assistance programs like Medicaid and the food-purchasing help program SNAP.
The bill will add roughly $3.8trillion to the federal government’s $36.2trillion debt over a decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Musk replied to an X post stating that he was right, by writing, ‘Simple math.’
Trump did not immediately respond to Musk’s X post, but on Tuesday morning ripped Republican Senator Rand Paul for opposing the bill.
‘Rand Paul has very little understanding of the BBB, especially the tremendous GROWTH that is coming,’ wrote Trump on his Truth Social platform.
In a subsequent post, Trump wrote that ‘Rand votes NO on everything’ and that ‘his ideas are actually crazy (losers!).’
And on Monday evening, Trump wrote that there are ‘so many false statements’ about the bill and claimed that ‘there will be NO CUTS to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid’.
In reality, the bill proposes cutting federal spending on Medicaid by at least $600billion over a decade and decreasing enrollment by about 10.3million Americans, according to a preliminary estimate from the CBO.
It is not the first time that Musk, who has returned his focus to running his businesses including SpaceX and Tesla, has criticised Trump’s bill.
The tech billionaire took a swipe at the domestic policy bill just before his farewell presser.
‘I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,’ Musk told CBS News’ Sunday Morning.
Trump at the time avoided criticising Musk and instead said that tough politics in the House, which has passed it, resulted in a higher price tag for the bill than he would like.
‘I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it,’ the president said, adding that his administration will be negotiating it.
Trump at the event on Friday said, ‘Today it’s about a man named Elon and he’s one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced.’
He added that Musk ‘has worked tirelessly’ leading DOGE, which calculated more than $160billion in savings for fiscal year 2025 to 2026.
Both the president and Musk himself said that he was not leaving the White House entirely despite his time as a ‘special government employee’ coming to an end.
But it remains to be seen if Trump, who reportedly had recent disagreements with Musk, will welcome him with the same warmth moving forward.
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