In a stunning turn, the once-unstoppable alliance between President Donald Trump and DOGE founder Elon Musk has erupted into a public war of words. What caused the fracture? And how will this chaos affect the looming vote on Trump’s make-or-break “Big, Beautiful Bill”? Ben Shapiro dissects the feud, the fallout, and what it all means for the future of the America First movement.
What is the feud between Trump and Elon Musk about?
Woo! So what the hell is going on? That is the question on everybody's mind. Obviously, Elon Musk and President Trump are now going at it like cats and dogs. And there's been a lot of speculation for a long time that this marriage would never quite last. You're talking about the world's richest man versus the world's most powerful man.
You're talking about two men who combined made President Trump president. Obviously, most of that is President Trump, but Elon's weight is... was not insignificant in the last election cycle. You're talking about a coalition between tech and sort of blue-collar workers. There are a lot of issues at play. But I want to break down what exactly is going on along three lines.
There is the political, there is the business, and then there is the personal. So... Let's start with the political. So Elon's term in office came to an end. There is a statute on the books that says that you're basically not allowed to work inside the White House for longer than 130 days without some sort of waiver or without some sort of clearance. And Elon ran out that time.
As I said on the air, I thought that what he did during that time was quite incredible. He put his companies on hold. He took a major stock hit. He took a major brand hit in order to come into the government and try to root out waste, fraud, and abuse through the Department of Governmental Efficiency. And Elon came in believing that he would be capable of doing all of that because
If you don't have a lot of time in the government, you always believe, as President Trump believed in his first term, that basically politics runs just like a business should run, meaning you can come in, you can fix the problems, and then you can move on to the next problem to fix that. You can come in, cut everybody. Elon was doing the kind of thing that Steve Jobs used to do.
Steve Jobs, of course, famously used to go into the elevators at Apple, and if he saw an employee, he'd ask them what they did. If they couldn't explain, he would fire them.
elon actually tried to do that exact same thing with the federal employment base it doesn't work that way so elon was running up against the hard walls of what politics actually looks like regulations bureaucracy the balance of power with congress and within those confines elon was doing some pretty astonishing things i mean i know people who were working for doge and with doge and what doge was doing was pretty amazing well in the end elon had to leave because his term ran out
And he was unsatisfied with what Doge was able to accomplish, and he was also unsatisfied with the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Why? Well, because he had spent the last six months attempting to cut waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level. He might have been able to cut $100, $150 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse, but the trillions that he thought he was going to be able to cut, in the end,
have to come from Congress. And so he's looking at the big, beautiful bill, and he's saying, why does this increase the deficit? My whole raison d'etre is to shrink the size of government and to shrink the size of our national debt, because it is going to be a gigantic burden on the American taxpayer, on our future, on future growth, on tech, on all of these things.
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