There were many tensions in the relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Some had been clearly visible; others were well concealed.
Their relationship was widely considered the most consequential in current US politics.
The proximate cause of its end was the bill that will probably be Donald Trump’s most consequential piece of legislation.
The One Big Beautiful Bill has caused one big beautiful bust-up.
The United States has a budget problem, and a big one. Simply put, the US government spends more than it takes in taxes and uses borrowings to cover the gap. The borrowings have mounted up over the decades and now stand just north of $36 trillion.
Elon Musk was touted (mostly by himself) as the man who was going to fix it.
During the election campaign last year it was Mr Musk who first raised the idea of a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) in a podcast he did with Mr Trump in the middle of August.
Mr Musk said he would be willing to serve in the administration, leading DOGE. Because he was – and remains – very worried about the Federal debt and is convinced of the urgent need to reduce it.
The DOGE plan was to use the techniques of Silicon Valley start-ups on the fusty world of government accounting and slash and burn its way quickly to big savings that would help to close out the tax and spend gap.
Cutting the deficit was the strategic goal, and Mr Trump campaigned on the idea.
As long as lenders – foreign and domestic – are happy to lend money to the US government for an interest rate it can afford, and the economy is growing fast enough, borrowing to make up a shortfall for a few years shouldn’t be a problem.
And the US market for government bonds is the world’s deepest and most liquid, so lenders don’t look for high interest rates because they can get their money out any time they want, and make a reasonable return lending to Uncle Sam.
Right up until the moment they don’t – and then $36 trillion becomes a very big problem.
We have seen this up close and personal in Ireland during the financial crisis. And although the US is a long way from Ireland’s financial woes, when interest rates start to rise, the famous ‘yield’ on government bonds goes up, and governments get worried.
This is exactly what happened in the US recently over the president’s tariff policy.
Such was the disruption to trade and commerce, investors rethought their strategy and demanded higher interest rates for lending money to the government.
The so called “bond market vigilantes” didn’t like the Trump tariffs, and put pressure on the government in ways ordinary voters cannot.
They did for former UK prime minister Liz Truss three years ago, and wreaked havoc among the PIIGS 15 years ago (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain – all doing a lot better than the Euro area average these days, thank you for asking).
So Mr Trump already has the vigilantes on his back over trade.
But he promised the voters tariffs, and said the money raised from them would help balance the government books.
Mr Trump slammed Mr Biden for his deficit spending.
That deficit spending stood at 6.5% of GDP last year.
The Maastricht Treaty limit in Europe is 3%, and an “excessive deficit” ruling requires governments to set up a plan to get the deficit back in range, ideally balanced over a number of years.
In the US they have a debt limit, an effort by Congress to rein in the constant deficit spending.
Every so often – these days with increasing frequency – the Congress has to raise the debt limit, so the government can borrow more to fund day-to-day activities.
If not, the government starts to shut down.
This has actually happened in the past.
There have been three last minute raises in the debt limit in the past year, as the anti-borrowing members of Congress engaged in brinkmanship to try and bring a runaway budget under control.
Enter the man with a chainsaw and baseball cap. I watched from the back of the hall in a convention centre hotel in National Harbour, Maryland, as Mr Musk took to the stage at the C-PAC annual DC gathering of Conservative political activists.
The chainsaw was a gift from Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who presented it to him on stage.
During that August podcast with Mr Trump, Mr Musk cited Mr Milei as an example the US should follow, as did Mr Trump himself.
“The new head of a place called Argentina, he’s a big MAGA fan: he ran on MAGA and he took it to extremes, and I hear he’s doing really a terrific job…he really cut and I’m hearing they are starting to do really well,” Mr Trump said.
Mr Musk concurred, saying Mr Milei was cutting government spending, simplifying regulations and doing things “that make sense”.
He said Argentina was a lesson for the US in what can go bad – a country that used to be very wealthy but which had gone way off course by poor policy choices.
Mr Musk tried earnestly to tell Mr Trump his belief that government over-spending causes inflation.
“If the government spends far more than it brings in, that increases the money supply, and if the money supply increases faster than the rate of goods and services – that’s inflation”, he told a clearly bored Donald Trump, who started talking about how he had rebuilt the US military in his first term in office, before getting the message at the third time of asking.
“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayers’ money is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” said Elon Musk.
“I’d love it,” said Donald Trump, finally. “You’re the greatest cutter,” he said, laying on the praise for Mr Musk’s record in business.
“You walk into a company, they want to go on strike, you say that’s OK – you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone. So you are the greatest.”
It was the beginning of the bromance, as Mr Musk invested his hopes in the candidate, and Mr Trump strapped on the booster rocket of Elon’s fame and prestige.
That, and the hundreds of millions of dollars Mr Musk threw at the Trump election campaign, including paying voters to register to vote, with the chance of winning a million-dollar jackpot in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
And there was the undeniable star power of Mr Musk himself – tech zillionaire, car maker, rocketship maker, owner of a social media platform, paymaster to Neuralink (a genuinely useful company) and Starlink, the satellite internet company.
Truly Elon Musk was and remains a rockstar of the digital age.
He brought new, hard to reach voters into the Trump rallies and their more important TV audiences, adding even more energy to the already high-wattage Donald Trump himself brought to bear.
He was particularly important in cementing the coalition of ‘tech and crypto bros’, and the ‘manosphere’ of podcasters that brought a significant lump of younger male voters over to Mr Trump.
In a tight election, it made a difference – possibly the difference.
He had the mission, he had the means, he had a sort of a mandate from the voters, and most of all he had permission from Mr Trump – permission to try and cut government spending, abolish departments, fire civil servants and engage in all the fast, simple, direct action many of the MAGA faithful wanted to see and if it inflicted pain on the hated Washington DC and its Deep State denizens, even better.
So Mr Musk moved fast and broke things and predictably ran into trouble with the actual cabinet members – the ones who actually are in charge of government departments, the ones who actually had to appear before Congress and do hearings to see if they were suitable for the job and would adhere to the constitution and all that.
Read more: Trump not interested in talking to Musk, says official
The first report of a screaming match at a cabinet gathering was not long in coming. More followed as February progressed.
Still the cult of Elon Musk grew in the outside world, even as the reality of DOGE was slowly revealed as it attempted to smash the granite edifice of the federal government and its two and a half centuries of political deal-making and legal fortifications.
A revolution was afoot in Washington, I wrote in early February, in a piece casting Mr Musk as the Robespierre of this revolt.
It was a not so subtle nod to the widely held view in DC that Mr Musk would not last long in government, that his way of cutting just wasn’t sustainable.
Nor would it result in enough savings. It would just annoy people.
And so it did, not just cabinet secretaries, but more importantly, Donald Trump himself.
“Elon was wearing thin,” he posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday.
“I asked him to leave, I took away his EV (electric vehicle) 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!”
He followed it up with another post, touching on the big conflict of interest that always dogged Mr Musk’s government work: “The easiest way to save in our budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised Biden didn’t do it.”
In his meeting with the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who skillfully said almost nothing, apart from a well aimed dart on Ukraine, Mr Trump rose to a reporter’s bait and spoke out against Mr Musk over his attack on the One Big Beautiful Bill: “I’m very disappointed, because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people.
“He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it. All of a sudden he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the EV mandate, because that’s billions and billions of dollars, and it really is unfair.
“We want to have cars of all types, electric. We want to have electric, but we want to have a gasoline combustion. We want to have hybrids. We want to be able to sell everything.
“And when that was cut, and Congress wanted to cut it, he became a little bit different, and I can understand that, but he knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody, and he never had a problem until right after he left.
“And if you saw the statements he made about me, which I’m sure you can get very easily, it’s very fresh on tape, he said the most beautiful things about me, and he hasn’t said bad about me personally, but I’m sure that’ll be next. But I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot.”
Asked by a reporter in the Oval Office if Mr Musk had raised his concerns about the tax and spend bill privately, and if Mr Trump’s own comments were just sour grapes, the President replied: “No, he worked hard and he did a good job, and I’ll be honest, I think he misses the place. I think he got out there and all of a sudden he wasn’t in this beautiful Oval Office, and he’s got nice offices too – but there’s something about this, it’s just a special place.
“World War I, it started and it ended here, and World War II and so many other things. Everything big comes right from this, this beautiful space. It’s now much more beautiful than it was six months ago. A lot of good things are happening in this room.
“And I’ll tell you, he’s not the first: people leave my administration, and they love us. And then at some point they miss it so badly, and some of them embrace it, and some of them actually become hostile. I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it, but we have it with others too.
“They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour is gone. The whole world is different, and they become hostile. I don’t know what it is. Someday you’ll write a book about it, and you’ll let us know.”
Mr Musk’s responses to his monstering on live TV – about 80 posts on his X social media platform in which he exhibited the full range of political skills of the average moody 16-year-old – veered from threatening to immediately decommission SpaceX’s fleet of Dragon spaceships, used by NASA to ferry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station, to claiming that the reason the Trump administration has not fulfilled its promise to publish the Epstein files is that Donald Trump features in them.
It is a matter of public record – i.e. newspaper articles, videos, photographs – that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein knew each other and attended social events together, including parties at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.
These were mostly in the 1980s and 90s, when Mr Trump would attend the opening of an envelope if it would get him a mention in the New York Post.
They are not the smoking gun Mr Musk thinks they are. They are barely the smoke.
The row that had been coming for months was now on full public display.
The gloves were off, and what used to be called a Twitter fight was under way, the richest man in the world and the president of the United States behaving in an undignified manner for the entertainment of the masses.
Rarely has the popcorn emoji on mobile phones been so thoroughly overused.
But Donald Trump is the winner here. Elon Musk is simply the latest meal for the apex predator of American politics.
Like the nature films where the young buck tries to take on the old alpha and is seen off, so Elon Musk is away with his tail between his legs.
His excursion into the swamp of DC politics ended in pain, humiliation and considerable financial loss.
The share price of Tesla, Mr Musk’s main source of wealth, is down 30% since the start of the year, as enough consumers reacted with a boycott of the electric carmakers products that it caused a crisis at the company that required his full-time attention to fix.
And his full-time keeping quiet on the national political stage.
His personal loss of fortune since joining the Trump administration was estimated at $27bn. The Irish banking crisis cost €31bn.
Once Tesla reported its first quarter results, the clock was ticking very fast for Elon Musk’s tenure in the US government.
That’s when it became generally known that he was on a 130-day contract that would finish at the end of May.
Then he was said to be in wind-down mode, withdrawing from government having established the core DOGE team (featuring a precocious 19-year-old known as “Big Balls”).
Both sides tried to handle the departure with grace and formality.
But then once he had his US equivalent of a P45 in his hand, Mr Musk launched a blistering attack on Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), calling it “disgusting” and “pork-filled” earlier this week.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. 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,” Mr Musk wrote on X on Tuesday night.
Was the whole DOGE thing just a distraction, something to create the kind of instability that Donald Trump thrives in so that he could get his real priorities through the system – a system he knew far more about than Musk?
Was Musk just used by Trump?
Will Musk seek revenge by funding primary challengers to vulnerable Republicans in next year’s mid-term elections?
California Democrat Ro Khanna said the party should embrace Elon Musk.
Mr Musk himself is now musing on starting a third party “that actually represents the 80% of Americans in the middle”.
Will any of this come to pass?
Who knows.
All that is sure is that the OBBB is still facing the fundamental arithmetic problem we started off with.
The bill as it stands would make the tax cuts that Trump introduced in 2017 permanent. They are currently due to expire next year.
Donald Trump likes to call them the biggest tax cut ever: if they do expire, Americans will accordingly face the biggest tax hike ever. Obviously no sitting politicians wants that on their record.
So Mr Trump must have those tax cuts made permanent. And that will cost money. Which this bill does not prove for.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill as approved by the House of Representatives and now before the Senate contains $3.7bn in tax cuts. Offsetting this is $1.3 trillion in proposed spending cuts. That leaves a $2.4 trillion dollar hole in the accounts, to be filled by more borrowing.
Mr Trump disputes the CBO figures, saying they do not take sufficient account of the economic growth he says will come from extending the tax cuts and the investment flowing from his ‘America First’ trade and tariff policy. There will also be some additional revenue from tariffs, he argues – but nowhere near enough to close the gap. But $2.4 trillion is a lot of hope value.
Mr Musk said at the outset he hoped to cut a trillion off government spending through DOGE.
The current estimates say DOGE has at best achieved about a fifth of that, probably less.
And now Elon is gone.
Maybe “Big Balls” and his chums can do it – but again there is a lot of hope value in the proposition.
Meanwhile the bond market vigilantes are poised, and the balanced budget fundamentalists in the Senate are talking up a last stand. There are two of them – Rand Paul and Ron Johnson.
Donald Trump could lose these two and still carry the day in the Senate, where the Republicans have a 53-47 majority. Four other Republican senators talk a good game on the Federal debt, but are swayable, and will probably be swayed by Mr Trump – especially now he has dispatched the richest man in the world with brutality and cunning.
In this he was aided by Steve Bannon, the godfather of MAGA, who despises Elon Musk and the entire Silicon Valley set, regarding them as tech plutocrats intent on robbing Americans of their money and their liberty – especially the latter.
He has also called for an investigation into Mr Musk’s immigration status, dubbing him an illegal immigrant from Africa. And he urged Mr Trump to seize control of Starlink.
MAGA probably won’t miss Mr Musk. But don’t rule out a reconciliation, especially if it suits Mr Trump.
Plenty of Trump supporters have been calling for a healing of the rift. Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev jokingly offered Russian mediation to end the hostilities between Mr Trump and Mr Musk – for a fee.
In the meantime, all of Donald Trump’s domestic energy will be focused on getting the OBBB across the line in the Senate.
He wants it ready to sign by 4 July, of course.
