Elon Musk and President Trump are at it again.
A rift has emerged in the Republican caucus between some of the tech bros and populist economists in the Trump coalition.
The Senate passed the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” but you have the economic populists who’d like lower taxes and big spending, and then you have the tech guys, and what they’re mostly concerned about is deregulation; they would like some subsidies aimed at things like AI and green energy.
Thus, we are seeing that all break out into the open with regard to Elon Musk.
“Critics say that President Trump’s mega bill amounts to an abject surrender in the battle for the future of energy,” Axios reported. “The consequences for U.S. jobs, electricity prices and the arms race could reverberate for decades.”
Musk tweeted, “A massive strategic error is being made right now to damage solar/battery. That will leave America extremely vulnerable in the future.”
Jason Bordoff, who leads the Columbia University energy think tank, said the bill could hinder the United States in the AI race with China. He said, “Winning that race is going to require we increase electricity generation capacity in the US really fast by a lot. That soaring demand is creating tailwinds for natural gas and nuclear. But even those great sources cannot ramp up fast enough to meet the urgent near-term needs of data centers and AI infrastructure.”
He’s saying you need to throw everything at energy, including so-called renewable energy.
So this is a major battle that’s broken out again inside the tech-centric part of the Republican Party.
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Beyond that, there was supposed to be an amendment to the “Big, Beautiful Bill” in the Senate that was going to protect the development of AI in the United States by creating a federal moratorium to bar state-level experimentation with regulation on AI. Florida couldn’t have its own AI rules; California its own AI rules.
The idea was that there would be a federal ban on state-level legislation. The federal government could still legislate and regulate with regard to AI, but you don’t want AI companies having to navigate the thickets of 50 different state regulatory structures in order to develop, because we are in a national competition with China on the development of AI.
But the Senate voted 99-1 to strip a provision that would have blocked states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next ten years.
This is definitely going to hold up the development of AI on a national level.
All of this led to the massive clash now occurring between President Trump and Elon Musk. What exactly happened?
Musk decided that he was going to go to war with the bill again. He threatened to primary senators and congresspeople who voted for the bill. He also vowed to help Thomas Massie — the Republican congressperson who truly gets on President Trump’s nerves by voting against everything Trump wants — saying he’s going to help him in a primary.
President Trump then hit back with a long social media post of his own, seeking to frame Musk’s opposition as a bid to cling to his electric vehicle subsidies. He wrote:
Elon Musk knew, long before he so strongly Endorsed me for President, that I was strongly against the EV Mandate. It is ridiculous, and was always a major part of my campaign. Electric cars are fine, but not everyone should be forced to own one. Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!
He went right at Elon’s jugular, basically saying, “Listen, you started DOGE. Why don’t we examine the cost structure on the Tesla EVs? Why don’t we examine the cost structure on SpaceX and all the rest?”
This followed Musk pledging he would form a new party he calls the America Party. He wrote, “Nearly the entire House and Senate GOP will lose their primary next year if it’s the last thing I do on this earth.” He went out of his way to call out House Republicans who call themselves budget hawks, such as Andy Harris of Maryland, and Chip Roy of Texas, as well as Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
Trump is saying, “Listen, buddy, you know, we are friends. We’re on the same side of this. But if you keep going after this bill and you’re doing so because you want a subsidy, we could just remove all of those subsidies.”
Musk responded on X/Twitter, “So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.”
There are a few different factors clashing here, as I’ve said before. On an ideologically and politically pure level, Elon complaining about the “Big Beautiful Bill” is not wrong. It spends far too much money.
But that’s true for virtually every bill passed at the federal level. That’s just the reality.
I wish the American people approved of Elon’s spending plans. I do. I wish we were restructuring our entitlements in a serious way. I wish we weren’t going to sleepwalk our way like Thelma and Louise right over the cliff, that fiscal cliff that is going to come sometime in the next few years.
I wish we did all these things, but the American public simply is not prepared to do any of those things. And that’s where you enter the realm of the pragmatic, where President Trump lives.
Is this fight really about EV subsidies? Is this fight truly about political purism, or is it something more personal?
As I’ve suggested before, the fact that the Trump administration decided they were going to get rid of Elon’s hand-picked head for NASA — which Sergio Gore was apparently behind — is what ticked Elon off. He hasn’t let go of it. He’s still going after the bill. Because of that incident, as well as Elon’s idealistic view of how politics should work, it should not be a shock that Elon is now attempting to wield his power in a kind of blunderbuss fashion.
It’s also not a shock that President Trump is slapping back, essentially saying, “Listen, I’m the president of the United States. Thank you for your help. But I’m the president. I’m the one who has to do all this stuff. I’m the one who has to cut the deals, and I’m the one who has to live with it if we don’t make the tax cuts permanent.”
This bill indeed has a lot of pork, but so does every single government funding bill of my lifetime. There has yet to be a major government bill that is not a big-spending government bill because the American people lie to themselves all the time. We say we want lower spending, but when asked what we would cut, we start scratching our heads and looking around.
That is the problem if you wish to build a cohesive movement for serious cuts to the government.
That was never the MAGA movement. It wasn’t. I’ve been speaking publicly about not loving that about MAGA since 2016. President Trump was the one candidate declaring back in 2015 and 2016 that he was not going to touch entitlements. Although I am indeed a big fan of Trump, I’ve criticized him for that position for a decade, because I would love to touch the entitlements.
I think entitlements are a disaster area. They are bankrupting the country. They’re wildly ineffective as they currently stand. I think there are fixes that could be made to them. I think many of them can be delegated back to the state or local level. And I don’t think it’s the proper function of the federal government to be involved in three-quarters of this stuff.
But my opinion is not the MAGA opinion. If you’re going to be politically pragmatic about this, you have to recognize that what this bill effectively is about, more than anything else, is making sure the tax cuts don’t go away, making sure defense is paid for, and making sure immigration is paid for, among other things.
Is Elon going to force Trump to fight again? I want to know what the endgame is. What is it that Elon is really looking for here?
If he wants to build a popular movement outside the government in favor of slashing and burning large swaths of the federal government, sign me up today. But if we are talking about the idea that someone like Chip Roy is unsuitable for big government, or if we’re saying the choices here are letting the tax cuts expire and taxes radically increase, and you still don’t get lower spending, I think most Americans will choose the bill.
That doesn’t mean that the bill polls particularly well, because the bill’s been criticized every which way.
But I guarantee you: If Republicans don’t get this done and the taxes do increase, that’s going to be even more unpopular.
