Elon Musk is many things: billionaire, natalist, aspiring gamer. He runs gigantic companies and dreams of colonizing Mars. But above all, Elon Musk is a poster. And as his storied relationship with President Donald Trump dissolves in real-time, by god, he is posting through it.
The resulting timeline—a chaotic, catty, incendiary voyage into the grievances of the world’s richest man with the president of the United States—should be enshrined as a historical artifact, a front-row seat to the apparent end of an extraordinarily consequential partnership.
Tensions between Musk and Trump had been steadily building, but they spilled into the open on Thursday. After Musk took repeated shots at the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and the trillions of dollars it will add to the deficit, Trump accused Musk of caring only about the removal of an electric vehicle credit that helps Tesla, and suggested their relationship had frayed.
Then came Musk’s many, many posts on X. Between 12:19 pm ET and 3:20 pm ET Musk fired off 49 posts, reposts, or replies. That’s an average of one new missive every 3.5 minutes, over a three-hour stretch.
It started simply enough. “Whatever,” Musk posted to X at 12:19 pm ET. “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. In the entire history of civilization, there has never been legislation that both [sic] big and beautiful. Everyone knows this! Either you get a big and ugly bill or a slim and beautiful bill. Slim and beautiful is the way.”
Less than half an hour later, after a few more innocuous posts and in response to a video of Trump saying he would have won Pennsylvania regardless of Musk’s help, Musk went nuclear. “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.
From there, Musk played the hits: A bad pun (“Kill Bill”). Multiple “crying laughing” emojis. A worthless quiz. Sympathetic retweets. The last few hours have been a sprint through Musk’s posting playbook, well-honed through years of being X’s owner and one of its most committed users.
Trump posted too: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote on Truth Social during Musk’s meltdown. “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV 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!”
Musk responded by accusing Trump of being in the Epstein Files. (As of this writing, he’s still following that thread.) He also claimed that “@SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” which would deprive NASA of its preferred shuttle to the International Space Station.
“I don’t mind Elon turning against me,” wrote Trump on Truth Social, “but he should have done so months ago. This is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”
The very public spat between the world’s richest man and its most powerful leader shows no sign of slowing. The consequences of the falling out could also be astronomical: Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and has proven that he’s happy to deploy it to achieve his own political and personal ends.Trump has power to choke off many of Musk’s companies from lucrative government contracts.
It’s an unprecedented moment that seems likely to lead to unpredictable places. But whatever twists it takes, there’s at least some assurance that they’ll happen out in the open.
