AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with the escalating feud between President Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who, up until just recently, was a top presidential adviser and Trump’s top political benefactor. The fight could have broad implications for Trump’s presidency, the Republican Party and many government programs, including NASA, that rely on technology from Musk’s various companies. The feud became public Tuesday when Musk called Trump’s so-called big, beautiful budget bill a “disgusting abomination” because it will increase the federal deficit by $2.5 trillion. The tension then escalated considerably on Thursday.

During a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a reporter asked Trump about Musk’s comment. This is part of his response.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 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. … 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.

AMY GOODMAN: The feud then spilled into social media, with the two billionaires launching personal attacks on their own social media platforms, Musk on X and Trump on Truth Social.

At 2:37 p.m. Thursday, Trump wrote, “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!” unquote.

At 3:10 p.m., Musk wrote, quote, “Time to drop the really big bomb, @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

Then Trump wrote, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” Trump said.

Musk responded by threatening to decommission the Dragon spacecraft used by NASA. Musk also appeared to back the impeachment of Trump and took credit for Trump winning the presidency.

Trump ally Steve Bannon went further, calling for Musk to be investigated and deported. He also called Trump to seize Musk’s company SpaceX.

To talk more about the fracturing of the Trump-Musk relationship and what this could mean for the Republican Party, we’re joined by Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, working on a book about Elon Musk titled Muskism. He is author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, as well as Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

Professor Slobodian, welcome back to Democracy Now! Were you shocked by what you saw happen yesterday? I mean, who knows? They could be holding a joint news conference soon and announce they’re back in love.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. I mean, they are people who always have their eye on the bottom line, but they also are, obviously, titanically sized egos. And I think that, more than anything, this is just a sign of how dangerous it is to put billions of dollars, even the lives of astronauts, the whole future of the American economy and the political scene, in the hands of two sole human beings.

AMY GOODMAN: When you said threaten the lives of astronauts, explain.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, the Dragon unit that you mentioned is the only way for the astronauts in the International Space Station to get to and from where they are now. So, were he to decommission it, it might literally mean that they would be stranded out there, kind of Gravity style.

So, this is just one of the examples of many of the offloading of core government functions onto private service providers, that Elon Musk has been so masterful at playing, that we feel more and more exposed to, from the use of Starlink satellites in the field of battle in the Ukraine to the use of the same internet connection as leverage in his battle with the Brazilian government. I feel like, over time, we’ll only realize more and more how much we are at the mercy of someone who is acting with total impetuousness, and sometimes not even with his own self-interest in mind.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go from the threat to lives in space to here on the ground, Elon Musk taking on the budget, calling it an “abomination.” When Trump said he knows that — the budget bill better than almost anyone else, inside and out, Musk’s response was, “That is false. I never saw it. It was passed in the middle of the night.” Can you talk about the significance? I mean, this is the guy in charge of DOGE. How many thousands of jobs have been lost? And yet, at the same time now he’s viciously attacking the budget that was so narrowly passed, and it could threaten its ultimate passage.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I mean, I think it’s worth sort of returning to the question of why Musk got involved at all with Trump — right? — what he was doing with this DOGE project. And I think it’s possible to kind of split it up into three categories.

I think, first of all, he was doing a kind of a bear hug strategy. So, I think, especially on the trade war and his many, many interests in China, you know, he has a Gigafactory there that has capacity to make a million Teslas a year. He wanted to get out in front of any possible excess of economic nationalism that might be rolled out.

And then I think he was kind of making a Hail Mary move, that, you know, he hadn’t really clicked with the Biden administration, and this could be a chance to maybe use a window of opportunity to boost his own aspirations, especially in artificial intelligence, where he was being outpaced by people like Sam Altman and OpenAI.

And then, third, I think you could see it as a kind of moonshot strategy, where I think he was trying to really even more plug in his own services, especially SpaceX, to, in fact, not only get to the moon, but divert the whole project towards Mars. So, there was a lot of reasons why Musk would want to be involved.

But from Trump’s point of view, he’s never really been a fiscal hawk, right? He’s always actually run against austerity in certain ways and run against this mainstream obsession with the debt ceiling and the deficit that has so defined GOP politics for the last couple decades. So it was always kind of an odd fit, and it’s not surprising in that sense that Musk now feels that this budget is, you know, not hard austerity enough for his liking. It’s telling, for example, that he’s posted multiple Milton Friedman memes over the last couple of days, sort of implying that this problem of runaway debt inflation should be top of mind at all times for the government. But Trump has always profited by playing fast and loose with that kind of ideology.

And the question is: Why now has this led to a snapping point — 

AMY GOODMAN: So — 

QUINN SLOBODIAN: — for Musk? And I think there’s a — 

AMY GOODMAN: Keep going.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: If I could just say, I think there’s a couple of things there. I think Trump invokes the EV mandate, and that is a serious issue, right? What that is — it needs to be broken down — is the capacity of California to enforce a move towards electric cars over time, a part of which is a regulatory credit system that allows normal ICE — internal combustion engine — vehicles to buy credits from electric vehicle manufacturers. And this is now 40% of Tesla’s net income in the last year. It went up a billion dollars in the last year alone. And if that gets killed, it really does kind of kill Tesla’s margin. And I think that Musk is starting to feel the heat from Chinese producers like BYD, battery producers like CATL. And I think he sees here maybe the possible demise of the Tesla brand, as he is hated more and more from both sides of the spectrum. So, there’s reasons, as he returns to his businesses, to start to sweat about what he’s actually signed up for.

AMY GOODMAN: How about what this highlights around a rift within the MAGA movement, and where JD Vance fits into this, the vice president?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, it’s always interesting to ask what exactly was going on with DOGE, right? I mean, if you want to get into the real kind of Dangerous Liaisons kind of courtesanship, I think, that is happening inside of the White House, it seems that, based on reporting, Stephen Miller was kind of stage managing, along with his wife, a lot of what was happening with DOGE.

And if you look at what actually came out of DOGE — and this is a good time now for us to sort of do a autopsy or postmortem on it, as it winds down, really — he said he was going to do 2 trillion cut — $2 trillion in cuts, out of a $6 trillion budget — very unlikely — went back to $1 trillion, scaled it back to $150 billion. What did they end up taking out? I mean, it’s basically culture war stuff, right? I mean, it’s ways to trigger the progressives and the libs — get rid of USAID, attack NEH funding, arts funding, science funding, education, energy. These ended up being big wins not really for Musk’s own bottom-line, cost-cutting mentality, but very much for the culture war being waged by people like Miller and JD Vance and Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget. So there is a way of looking at this as having been a success from their point of view. They were able to use the credibility of Musk as a kind of supposed, you know, brilliant, Edison-like inventor and wonderful, efficiency-creating cost cutter to actually get to some of their political goals.

But they never could bring that big number down. Why? Because entitlement spending still dominates the state spending in the GDP. And when you come close to that, you come close to the kind of beating heart of the social contract. And we saw the town hall meetings. We saw the anger when things started to encroach on the questions of Social Security and Medicaid. And for me, that was a very telling moment, and it was one that I think took Musk by surprise, too. He’s not used to the idea of needing to engage with a kind of consent and legitimacy mechanism where people feel like they paid into something and should now get something back. He’s used to interacting with a Twitter fan base, a set of really bought-in Tesla investors, for whom, you know, he always walks on water and he’s a god reincarnate. And when he just was confronted with the anger of average people who want to make sure that they can pay for their next meal, he didn’t know what to do.

So, I think that there’s a kind of a — there’s a way to see this as a victory for the national conservatives. They got to do some of their their easy wins against the progressives and the libs, and now they’re able to keep the door open for more protectionism and expansion of spending, as we see in the so-called big, beautiful bill.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, do you think Musk has access to all of the private information that his DOGE army downloaded from all the agencies? Is that possible?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I am not a software programmer, and I do not know how databases work that well, but it seems at least likely that part of what they were doing there, when they were converting things done in old programming languages and updating them, was also harvesting a lot of that data for use for we don’t know what. Feeding the machine of Grok or xAI is the most likely answer.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, let me ask you: Steve Bannon, who’s on the anti-Musk side of the MAGA rift, has been calling for Trump to nationalize Musk’s businesses and for him to be deported, right? I mean, Elon Musk comes from South Africa.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah. I mean, this actually isn’t the harshest thing that Bannon has ever said. He referred to Silicon Valley as an “apartheid state” a few months ago. The idea of nationalizing SpaceX is an interesting one. It would certainly run against the core privatization ethos that Trump and the former GOP has been following for decades and decades. So far, I would chalk that up to just saber-rattling rhetoric for his podcast, more than an actual policy proposal.

AMY GOODMAN: Quinn Slobodian, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of international history at Boston University. Among other books, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, working on his new book called Muskism.

When we come back, we look at the deadly impact of the House budget bill. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Temes” by iLe, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.