Tech mogul Elon Musk went on a tirade Tuesday against President Trump’s marquee One Big Beautiful Bill Act days after leaving the administration — ripping the legislation as an “abomination” and condemning lawmakers who supported it.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote on his X platform. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.
“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
The 53-year-old added in subsequent posts that the bill “will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America [sic] citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” In a third post, Musk groused that “Congress is making America bankrupt.”
“In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” he later fumed.
Musk had previously dropped hints of his disdain for the megabill, politely telling “CBS Sunday Morning” in an interview that he was “disappointed” to see that the legislation increases the deficit and “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
“The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in response to Musk’s tirade. “It doesn’t change his opinion.”
The South Africa-born billionaire marked his final day as a special government employee this past Friday, with Trump giving him a formal send-off in the Oval Office.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday that he had “sent a long text message” to Musk to try to answer his concerns, apparently to no effect. Johnson also claimed he had a more than 20-minute chat with Musk on Monday.
“For him to come out and pan the whole bill is to me just very disappointing, very surprising in light of the conversation I had with him yesterday,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday.
“Obviously, [I] respect everything that Elon did with DOGE. On this particular issue, we have a difference of opinion,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters Tuesday.
“My hope is as he has an opportunity to further assess what this bill actually does … he’ll come to a different conclusion.”
Multiple estimates have found that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase the federal deficit by between $3 trillion and $4 trillion over a 10-year period. The measure features about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over a decade as well.
GOP leaders have argued that extending key provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — many of which are set to expire by the end of the year — shouldn’t be thought of as deficit-increasing because those provisions were intended to be permanent.
Musk wasn’t buying it, as Tuesday’s posts indicated.
The billionaire’s diatribe against the measure comes amid delicate negotiations among Republican lawmakers. The mammoth bill cleared the House last month but still needs to go through the Senate and then the House again before it can get to Trump’s desk.
Multiple lawmakers have complained that they’ve since discovered provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of which they weren’t aware.
Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) flagged a provision in the bill that curtails state rights to regulate artificial intelligence over the next 10 years. She said Tuesday that she would have voted against the bill if she had known it was in there.
Last week, Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) admitted during a town hall that he wasn’t privy to a provision in the megabill that restrains district judges’ ability to hold people in contempt.
Both sections highlighted by Greene and Flood could be removed once the Senate deliberates the bill.
The measure spans 1,038 pages, and was quickly rammed through the House following marathon markup sessions by multiple House committees.
Several fiscal hawks such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have signaled they have deep issues with the megabill in its current form. Trump and GOP leadership had been working to move them.
“Some of us are trying to stop that,” Paul replied on X to Musk’s withering attack on the legislative bundle.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of two GOP “nay” votes in the House alongside Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), praised Musk’s screed, saying on X that “he’s right.”
The world’s richest man holds significant sway over fiscal hawks in both chambers of Congress.
Last month, he publicly lamented that congressional Republicans neglected to codify the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts he helped shepherd. Almost immediately after, a chorus of GOP lawmakers in Congress began demanding that leadership do so.
In December of last year, Musk helped torpedo a government funding agreement to avert a government shutdown. That prompted GOP leadership to back off and put forward a significantly watered-down spending patch to keep the government’s lights on.
Johnson has stressed that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act can only address mandatory spending, on programs like Medicaid and food stamps, because it is utilizing the Senate reconciliation process to bypass a 60-vote threshold needed to break a Democratic filibuster.
He’s argued that Republicans will later address discretionary spending — the area DOGE has dealt with — in rescission packages and during the next government shutdown fight in the fall. Discretionary spending accounts for just over a quarter of the federal budget.
Currently, the fiscal deficit for 2025 is expected to exceed all discretionary spending.
