Elon Musk lashes out as he digests his ‘betrayal' at the hands of Donald Trump's circle

News.com.au

05-06-2025

Amid a flurry of furious tweets from Elon Musk, denouncing the current centrepiece of Donald Trump's agenda, came one with particularly telling language.
'In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,' Mr Musk posted, referring to the congressional elections of 2026.
Betrayed. There's a loaded word. One that says more about Mr Musk's sorely bruised ego, I suspect, than the American government's long-complacent tax and spending policies.
The man is neither talking nor acting like someone offended, on an intellectual level, by the betrayal of faceless voters he doesn't know. Rather he sounds like someone who feels he has been betrayed on a personal level.
And you know what? For good reason. As perverse as it feels to offer sympathy for a guy who's never had a jot of it to spare for anyone else, you must concede that Elon's sense of grievance here is understandable.
Trump gladly took hundreds of millions of dollars from Elon last year. Gave him a few shoutouts on stage. Threw him a token job in the government. Shoved him out the door after less than five months. And is now spitting on everything he was trying, however clumsily, to achieve in that job. You don't need to be a ten-year-old trapped in the ketamine-addled body of a 53-year-old tech billionaire to empathise with his frustration.
At issue here is a piece of legislation called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Yes, that is its real, formal name. And yes, adults with long and, in some cases, even quite serious careers in politics signed off on it. The Trump family's branding instincts remain as subtle as ever.
The moniker is at least two-thirds fitting though, because this thing is huge and near all-encompassing. The third element, beauty, remains in the eye of the beholder.
It runs to more than a thousand pages, some of which some members of Congress did actually bother to read before passing it through the House of Representatives. It still needs to survive the Republican-controlled Senate before it can be sent to Mr Trump's desk for a final signature which, presumably, shall not be affixed via autopen.
What of the contents? There are many. At the topline level: an extension of the sweeping tax cuts from Mr Trump's first term; big cuts to initiatives like Medicaid, the government program that funds health insurance for low-income Americans; and a humungous chunk of funding for immigration enforcement initiatives, like the border wall Mr Trump has been promising to build, quickly, since 2015.
Some of us are old enough to remember when Mexico was going to pay for the thing, which would negate the need for any US government funding. Ah well. Empty promises. Elon is not the only person becoming acquainted with them.
I digress. The problem with Mr Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, Mr Musk argues, is the effect on America's already drowning federal budget.
According to newly released costings from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office – the equivalent of our Parliamentary Budget Office in Australia – the legislation as written will add nearly $US2.5 trillion to the country's debt over the next decade.
Not million. Not billion. Trillion. It blows a gaping hole in the nation's budget, which already looked a bit like off Swiss cheese.
Another cost, which admittedly concerns Mr Musk far less, is an estimated 10.9 million people being left without health insurance. Not exactly something to celebrate in a country where common injuries and ailments often bankrupt entire families.
Now, as you would expect of a mature government, the White House and senior Republicans have offered a thoughtful response to the CBO's analysis: 'Nuh-uh.'
They claim the CBO is biased against them, you see, like every other institution in the country. Hence, the assertions we are hearing, from those Republicans that this bill actually won't add a single dollar to America's deficit. Not one! Not a dime.
The argument is that Mr Trump's extended tax cuts will spur a sudden, miraculous explosion of economic growth that wipes out any lost revenue. And that, when said growth is combined with the money raised by Mr Trump's on again, off again, on again, off again, on again (but at a lower rate), off again, on again tariffs, the budget will be fine.
In politispeak, we might call this position tenuous. In real world speak, we call it obvious, utter crap. The Trump administration is building its tax and spending plans atop a house of cards, atop another house of cards, atop a house of tissue paper, all of it underpinned by assumptions that insult the Trump officials' own intelligence, never mind ours.
Which means the Trump administration is, essentially, just continuing business as usual in Washington. Talk a humungous game about the importance of fiscal rectitude while out of office. Wag a finger at the profligate left. Then, once you've gained power yourself, run the nation's finances even more recklessly. It's a proud Republican tradition at this point.
Deficit spending on a social safety net? Grossly irresponsible. Ballooning the deficit to provide lower taxes for the wealthy? Something something good economic management.
No wonder someone like Elon Musk, the living embodiment of 'move fast and break things', is so frustrated.
The poor guy believed he was part of something revolutionary. When Mr Trump tapped him to head the Department of Government Efficiency, he thought he was there to actually achieve something. Putting aside the chaos and stupidity of DOGE's methods – firing people only to rehire them in a scramble, repeatedly revising its savings down after being caught using false numbers, etc – Mr Musk's commitment to the vision, the ultimate end goal of a more fiscally balanced federal government, was at least genuine.
Then he showed up for work in the White House, and swiftly learned none of the other acolytes hanging around the place cared about it.
On one level, he was preposterously naive. Donald Trump ranted about the federal deficit during his first run for president almost a decade ago, and repeatedly claimed he would fix it easily. He went on to run massive deficits throughout his first term. How on earth did Mr Musk come to believe that guy would actually commit to balancing the budget?
His own social media platform's juiced algorithm may have been a contributor.
But the rest of Washington must have shocked Mr Musk as well.
Consider: even the more principled members of the Republican caucus, the fiscal hawks, the libertarian small government types, are hardly standing athwart history shouting 'no' here.
'While I oppose increasing the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, I enthusiastically support making the tax cuts permanent and could vote for the Big not-yet-Beautiful Bill if the debt ceiling were voted on separately,' Senator Rand Paul, a quasi-libertarian, said today.
A position as substantive as one's stool after a night of booze and curry. He's opposed to swelling the debt too much at some point in the future. Think of the carte blanche you might give the Democrats, if the ceiling of potential debt is raised! But at the same time, he's just fine with the tax cuts that are forecast to supersize said debt by trillions right now.
Mr Paul probably would have been part of a Senate majority without any intervention, in last year's campaign, from Mr Musk.
But you can mount a plausible argument that none of the jokers currently running America's executive branch would have attained this level of power without Elon Musk's money, or his cultural influence, or his platform.
And what did he get for it? Barely four months inside the administration, running an ineffective quasi-department, whose work has been undone by a single bill. The implicit mockery of people who pretended to think he was a genius when it suited them, only to consciously uncouple at the first opportunity.
So much time was spent, in these early months of the Trump administration, worrying about Mr Musk using the White House to further his own business interests. Not without reason.
It turns out the Trump team was using him all along.