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US President Donald Trump has said his relationship with Elon Musk is over.
“I would assume so, yeah,” Trump told NBC News on Saturday, when asked if he thought the pair’s close relationship had ended. He replied, “No,” when asked if he wished to mend the damaged ties.
The comments were Trump’s latest since the epic fallout between him and Musk unravelled on social media.
It came after the tech billionaire, who donated millions to Trump’s election campaign and became a White House aide, publicly criticised the president’s tax and spending bill, a key domestic policy.
A majority of Republicans have fallen in line behind the president. Vice President JD Vance said that Musk had “gone so nuclear” and may never be welcomed back into the fold.
Vance told podcaster Theo Von that it was a “big mistake” for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO to attack the president.
For weeks, Musk had been criticising Trump’s signature legislation – dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill”—as” it made its way through Congress.
He said that, if passed, the bill would add trillions of dollars to the national deficit and “undermine” the work he did as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, and its efforts to cut government spending.
Shortly after leaving DOGE after 129 days in the job, Musk posted on his social media site X that the bill was a “disgusting abomination”—but did not criticise Trump directly.
On Thursday, however, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” with Musk’s behaviour.
In a series of posts on X, Musk retaliated, claiming that Trump would not have won the election without him and accusing him of being connected to the records of Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous financier who passed away while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
He has since deleted the post, and Epstein’s lawyer has come out denying the accusations.
Trump responded on his social media platform, Truth Social, saying that Musk had gone “crazy.” In one post, he threatened to cut Musk’s contracts with the federal government.
In his interview with NBC News on Saturday, Trump said Musk had been “disrespectful to the office of the president.”
“I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the president,” Trump said.
Musk, the world’s richest man, who donated roughly $250 million to Trump’s presidential campaign, suggested during the social media feud that he might back some of Trump’s opponents during next year’s midterm elections, throwing his support behind challengers to the lawmakers who supported Trump’s tax bill.
When asked about the prospect of Musk backing Democratic candidates who run against Republicans, Trump said he would face “serious consequences.”
