Donald Trump and Elon Musk rift over Big Beautiful Bill gets ugly on socials, media

President Donald Trump has threatened to cut Elon Musk's government contracts as their fractured alliance rapidly escalated into a public feud on Thursday, 5 June.

Musk has now retaliated (6 June IST, still 5 June in the US) by naming the POTUS as featuring in the Epstein files.

Yep — boy, are they fighting dirty here!

Hours after Trump lamented his breakup with Musk and said he was “disappointed” in his former backer and adviser and Musk responded on social media, Trump escalated the feud by threatening to use the US government to hurt Musk's bottom line.

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

Earlier, Trump said he's “disappointed” with Elon Musk after his former backer and advisor lambasted the president's signature bill.

Trump suggested the world's richest man misses being in the White House and has “Trump derangement syndrome”.

The Republican president then reflected on his breakup with Musk in front of reporters in the Oval Office as Musk continued a storm of social media posts attacking Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill” and warning it will increase the federal deficit.

While Trump — days after felicitating the man on his way out — has said Musk was "wearing thin" at the White House and he was asked to leave by the POTUS, the billionaire responded with "obvious lie. So sad".

Musk, for his part, had asserted earlier that not even the Republicans defending the One Big Beautiful Bill on Capitol Hill had time to actually read it — which is why they could usher it in.

Musk also suggested his stance on the Bill was hardly new — or news to the POTUS — sharing a video clip from a 2021 Wall Street Journal interview.

He also dug out and threw Trump’s own complaints about Republican colleagues stacking up federal debt back at him.

Musk also labelled Trump’s tirades "ingratitude" and claimed the Big Ugly Bill would INCREASE the country’s budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (it being currently $2 trillion).

He had said earlier in an interview about his work at DOGE that the interest payments on that deficit were higher than the US defense department's budget.

As for Trump, his "disappointment" likely came from Musk posting that this "spending bill contains the largest increase in the debt ceiling in US history! It is the Debt Slavery Bill".

And now Musk's landed his latest little doozy: a claim that Trump is named in the Epstein Files — which suggests this is the reason they remain redacted.

With AP inputs