Big, Beautiful Billionaire Bromance Breaks up.
This breakup has serious repercussions and casts dark, lurking shadows
The breakup of the world’s most powerful billionaires is important because of what it has to say about Big Beautiful Bill who came between the once-happy couple. One of the big things the billionaire breakup is about is Donald Trump never being truly interested in what Elon was saying about cutting costs to reduce the national debt. That became clear when Trump claimed that Mad Musk, as post-relationship Trump now thinks of him, ran off because he was upset about Big Bill’s EV tax-credit elimination. That triggered Musk into revealing that he had actually asked for the EV tax credits to be ended prior to Big Beautiful Bill. He said it again, in another retort:
Clearly, Musk is more focused on cutting the hideous increase in spending consumed by Big Bloated Bill than on saving his EV credits. So, why did Don Juan reach for a lame explanation for their breakup? It seems he wanted to make it sound as if Musk was jealous of Trump’s other darling, Big Bill. You see, earlier tweets by Musk also prove his prior statements to remove the EV tax credits (i.e. keep the removal of those tax cuts in the bill) preceded Bill. Other people state they heard Trump and Musk talk about ditching the EV credits together in public speeches prior to Big Bloated Bill, too. Forbes reportedly says the same thing about Elon’s statements.
No, I think Trump’s musky partner in the former cost-cutting adventure is outraged that he blew a personal fortune by making austere cuts to government, which cost him billions and billions of dollars in financial hits to Tesla stock and in sacrificed Tesla sales and damaged dealerships and damaged inventory for doing so. It also destroyed his reputation among his largely liberal, formerly loyal customer base. Suddenly he found himself facing the estranged reality that all of that meant nothing to Trump when Trump turned his affections to his new favorite beauty with even bigger bucks—the multi-trillionaire Bill.
Musk lost an enormous amount, only to see worse than nothing trimmed from Big Bills fat hide. In fact, Bill’s backside only got larger while Musk lost weight:
Many pointed to the dramatic fall in the sales of Tesla, a 71% fall in profits in one quarter, and the inevitable impact on Musk’s reputation. And yesterday Tesla shares were falling even faster, as investors panicked. The attacks on Tesla showrooms couldn’t have helped either.
Musk also spent a fortune on Republican campaigns, particularly including Trump’s—all just to find out in the end that Trump and his crew-mates have no serious interest in making budget cuts. So Musk is outraged that NONE of his cuts became codified in Big Backstabbing Bill. Of course, he is incensed to find he took all those losses for the sake of the country … for NOTHING.
That explanation of his ire fits perfectly with where you see Elon focusing nearly ALL of his blame. It’s all about Bill! Yes, these breakups get personal, so there is, of course, all the usual petulant public shaming (both ways); but, when it comes down to what caused the breakup, Musk always makes it about Bill, and that makes total sense, given all he lost and all Bill gained in extra weight at Elon’s expense..
Big Bill’s rapacious military appetite
Ultimately, the person to blame for Big Bill’s extravagant appetite is Trump, because Trump has been the prime champion of nearly every spending increase stuffed into Bill. He raised this brainchild, called for him to be really big, and made him what he is. Most fat between Bill’s moist layers can be found in the massive expansion of military spending on Bill’s favorite toys. Of course, he had a lot of friends, as he grew to this size, telling him to ask daddy for more toys. The toy box gets such a big raise that it makes Ronald Reagan look like a military miser, even after adjustment for inflation.
During his entire presidency, Reagan increased military spending by $148-billion, depending on what source you go to), and he has been criticized for decades since by budget hawks, such as his budget director David Stockman, for blowing up the federal deficit worse than anytime prior to his presidency, other than during intense wars like WWII. Just like D.J., he did that in order to inflate the military budget. That would be $281-billion in today’s dollars; BUT that was also spread over TWO full terms (i.e. it came about through several annual budgetary expansions). Big Bountiful Bill increases military spending by $150-billion, but it is all in ONE YEAR (fiscal year 2026)! It is FAR bigger than ANY of Reagan’s annual increases, even adjusted for inflation.
And this from the president who presented himself when he was candidate Trump as relatively anti-war?
The military industrial complex won on this one if Bill manages to waddle through the Senate alive. Worse still, not-so Bodacious Bill swells the government wasteline at a time when US credit is being downgraded and interest rates on the US debt are rising and when tariffs are highly likely to raise those rates more, since it was the mere threat of tariffs that raised them in the first place (as I warned could even happen at a level that imperils the dollar’s global currency status). Wait until the tariffs start doing their actual inflation damage.
The government waste line
So Big Bill is hideously irresponsible at a scale of non-emergency spending that we’ve never seen and at a time when we can least afford it. Yes, we’ve had similar overall increases in the budget for economic stimulus during years of extreme economic damage as recovery bills (also ill-conceived) or during WWII to fund the war, but we don’t even have an emergency at the moment to justify emergency spending.
I wouldn’t like Big Bill, even if we did have a true emergency; but we DON’T. We certainly have one in the making, thanks to extreme tariffs being imposed self-destructively on all US foreign trade at a time when our national debt is reaching a critical meltdown stage. That’s a smart time to make it harder to fund the debt! According to Trump and his players, however, the Trump Tariffs won’t cause any inflation at all.
If you are one of my readers who thinks I’m being too harsh on Trump, as some do, wait to come at me until you see how you feel by this coming fall when tariffs have started to eat deep into your wallet or purse. You should, in fact, have a good idea of what is coming in the early summer. And then remember, on top of all that, that Trump is repeatedly goading Jerome Powell to rev up the money presses again! Talk about going bananas-republic. It’s financial insanity!
Now, to be clear, I think and have said DOGE was a wrecking ball in the ham-fisted way it went about things, but it also cut many things that needed that much cutting, even though it went about it in reckless manner, such as where many of the people who got fired were needed and had to be called back. The idea that we went through all that slaughter and then didn’t capture a single bit of it in budgetary savings is beyond deplorable.
So, I feel some sympathy for Musk taking all the personal damage he did when making his wholesale cuts, only to see all the savings go into Bill’s big belly. (I’m sure those who got fired feel no sympathy at all.) It’s totally reprobate to cause that much damage to the national economy, as massive government cuts would always do until equilibrium can be re-established and then INCREASE spending!
It’s even more despicable to damage so many people’s lives with the firings only to wind up with a BIGGER government budget. That has to make those tens of thousands who were terminated feel they lost their jobs just so we can feed them as fodder to our military—AGAIN—having already expanded it to about the size of the next ten nations together. It makes the sacrifice of those people like the deaths of soldiers who gave up their lives in a war for nothing because in the end their nation retreated and left all of its top-notch equipment for the enemy. What kind of nation would do such a thing? (You won’t have to think back far for that answer.)
I do agree with Trump that Musk is a madman, but who doesn’t? His brain is fractured and stewed in drug cocktails. He’s a man who never had moral underpinnings to begin with, similar to Trump, and who is so out-of-touch with humanity that his ultimate dream is to live on a lifeless, frozen, red rock where he hopes to create his own civilization where, of course, he will be the Bondesque, CEO king. Naturally, with Trump stating publicly he wanted to become czar for a day (now expanding well beyond a hundred days), there was no room on Earth or in the White House for two wannabe kings.
So, it’s not that I think Musk is a great guy. Heck, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if he has a big, black Neuralink chip coded with 666 inside his AI-wired brain. I’m just saying is can surely understand why he feels so abused and jilted. Maybe, like the Joker in the last Joaquin Phoenix movie, that kind of treatment becomes the thing that turns his strange brain even darker. Speaking of the dark side …