Elon Musk and Donald Trump engage in a scorching feud over the "big, beautiful bill," causing Tesla shares to plummet 17% after Musk accuses Trump of an Epstein connection regarding withheld files. Following Trump's threat to cancel government contracts, Musk vows to decommission the Dragon spacecraft, prompting House Speaker Mike Johnson to intervene with mediation efforts despite acknowledging the political fallout for the midterms. This escalation mirrors Musk's past defiance against Disney CEO Bob Iger, signaling a volatile shift where personal attacks threaten major legislative achievements and corporate stability alike. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trump Musk Fallout00:06:41
This is big, guys, okay?
This is big.
You get two major personalities, big personalities, and they're pretty darn mad at each other right about now.
Major news to report at this hour.
The breakup is a big one.
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, clearly no more.
Well, at least for today.
Mike Johnson is behind the scenes trying to work things out between the two of them.
But I'll tell you, there's a lot of fallout happening in the meantime.
We've got Elon's company trading down quite badly after Donald Trump said, you know what?
All those contracts you had with the government.
We're getting rid of them.
He is responding, of course, to Elon's comments that he made on Twitter regarding that big, beautiful bill.
Elon hates the bill.
It doesn't have enough spending cuts in his view.
And so he had made this position very, very known.
Donald Trump being asked about it in the White House today.
But the big sort of wow here and the shocker, if you would, is what Elon decided to tweet in response, connecting Donald Trump. with the Epstein files.
Let's back up for a second, though.
Know that shares are getting whacked.
I mean, we're seeing them down, gosh, as much as 17% on the news here today.
So a very bad day for shares of Tesla as Donald Trump and Elon Musk go head to head.
Here is Trump just a short time ago in the White House responding to Elon's criticism of the bill.
But 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 gasoline, combustion.
We want to have different hybrids.
We want to have all, we want to be able to sell everything.
And when that was cut, and Congress wanted to cut it, it became a little bit different, and I can understand that.
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.
To that end, Mr. President, did he, I just want to clarify, did he raise any of these concerns with you privately before he raised them publicly?
And this is the guy.
Whoa.
Okay.
So that was a little earlier in the day before things got really, really nuclear.
And Donald Trump kind of trying to take the high road, but Elon heard that.
And then he started tweeting out a bit more.
And then it just started getting uglier and uglier and uglier.
And well, Donald Trump decided to put this out.
He said basically what you saw, just a little bit more strongly worded there.
Elon was wearing thin.
I asked him to leave.
I took away his EV mandate.
forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted, that he knew Vermont I was going to do.
And he just went crazy.
So crazy that he decided to publish this, in which he accuses the president of being connected to the Epstein files and suggests that that is the real reason why they are not being made public.
And then says, have a nice day, DJT.
Wow.
Okay.
So then he followed up as well, saying that basically he's going to decommission his Dragon spacecraft immediately in light of the president saying he's going to cancel his government contracts.
Okay.
So this is getting, as I said, a little bit ugly.
Just a little bit.
Just a little bit.
So much so that Mike Johnson is trying to come in.
He's trying to intervene.
He's coming to the rescue.
Let's listen to him.
He said moments ago.
That he is going to try to intervene.
He said, I'm off to call Elon.
I'm off to call him right now.
Watch.
Yeah, look, I'm not going to get into details for a personal conversation.
So I'm going.
No, I'm going to call Elon right now.
Could I ask you something?
Okay.
It was hard to hear when he said, I'm off to call Elon right now.
This is after he had said this earlier.
I consider Elon a friend.
He's obviously brilliant.
I just told you we credit him with all the big changes with Doge and everything else.
It's curious to me what happened this week.
And I just, I mean, Full disclosure, Elon and I had a great conversation about a half hour long talk on Monday this week, Monday morning.
And we talked about the big, beautiful bill because I think he was trying to make a joke a couple of days earlier it can't be big and beautiful.
And I started the conversation, oh, yes, it can, my friend.
It's very beautiful.
So we talked about all the record level of savings.
My friends, no government in the history of mankind has ever cut $1.6 trillion in a piece of legislation.
We're doing that here.
I mean, the extraordinary level of savings and the historic level of Tax cuts at the same time, and all these great policy prescriptions.
And I talked Elon through all that and explained to him what we're doing, and that this is just the beginning of a long process of making government more efficient and effective, of cutting wasteful spending, fraud, and abuse.
And you can't do it all in one bill.
It took Congress decades to get to this situation.
It's going to take us a little while to get out of it.
But we have a very specific plan to do that.
And Elon was encouraged by that conversation.
We had a great, it was a very friendly, very fruitful conversation together.
And he and I talked about the midterm elections.
And he said, I'm going to help.
We've got to make sure the The Republicans keep the House majority.
We can't have the President impeached, which is what the Democrats would do on day one, as we all well know.
And we've got to continue this.
The Trump administration needs four years to do all this reform, not two years.
The Biden administration, Biden Harris, made such a disaster of every metric of public policy, it's going to take us more than one bill to fix it all.
Elon and I left on a great note.
We were texting one another, you know, happy texts, you know, Monday.
And then yesterday, you know, 24 hours later, he does a 180 and he comes out and opposed the bill.
And it surprised me, frankly.
And I don't take it personal.
We don't take it personal.
Policy differences are not personal.
I think he is flat wrong.
I think he is way off on this, and I have told him as much, and I have said it publicly and privately.
I am very consistent in that.
But am I concerned about the effect of this on the midterms?
Precarious Bill Spot00:02:33
I am not.
Let me tell you why.
Because when the big, beautiful bill is done and signed into law, every single American is going to do better.
This bill is geared for middle and working class Americans, and they are going to feel the effects of it, and they are going to feel it before the midterms.
But now I think the big, beautiful bill, let's be honest, is now in a more precarious spot.
And I think midterms are now in a more precarious spot.
Now, let's hope he can patch things up, that they can patch things up.
But, you know, I got to say, like Elon kind of went for the nuclear option on the Epstein thing.
That's something else.
I would also say this, you know, he has a history of saying, look, you want to punish me with money?
Good luck on that.
It's never going to work.
Remember what he said to Bob Iger at Disney when Bob Iger was pulling all his ad money after Elon had bought X?
Formerly known as Twitter.
This was a rather epic moment.
There's advertisers leaving.
We talked to Bob Eigenstein.
I hope they stop.
You hope?
Don't advertise.
You don't want them to advertise?
No.
What do you mean?
If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f yourself.
Go yourself.
Is that clear?
I hope it is.
Hey, Bob.
You're in the audience.
Well, let me ask you then.
That's how I feel.
Yeah.
So that was kind of a go yourself, right?
Move with Donald Trump.
This is big, guys, okay?
This is big.
You get two major personalities, big personalities, and they're pretty darn mad at each other right about now.
Thought there was an opportunity today for everybody to kind of move their own way.
That's kind of coming apart at the seams.
Maybe Mike Johnson can help repair the situation.
We shall see.
In the meantime, as I said, shares of Tesla just getting whacked down as much as 16.7 actually maybe as much as 17% earlier in the session trading as I closing the day out, actually down about 14.
So we'll see how the stock fares again tomorrow.
But this is this is massive And this is about as epic a breakup thus far that I think we've ever seen, right?
Like in Washington, D.C. We'll have more on the story tomorrow.
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