Billionaire Elon Musk has criticised Donald Trump's signature spending bill, in his first major break with the US president since he stepped back from his role in cutting government spending.
The South African-born tech tycoon said Mr Trump's bill would increase the deficit and undermine the work of Mr Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has fired tens of thousands of people.
Mr Musk - who was a constant presence at Mr Trump's side before pulling back to focus on his SpaceX and Tesla businesses - also complained that DOGE had become a scapegoat for dissatisfaction with the administration.
"I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," Mr Musk said in an interview with CBS News, an excerpt of which aired late yesterday.
Mr Trump's 'One Big, Beautiful Bill Act' - which passed the US House last week and now moves to the Senate - offers sprawling tax relief and spending cuts and is the centrepiece of his domestic agenda.
But critics warn it will decimate health care and balloon the national deficit by as much as $4 trillion over a decade.
"A bill can be big, or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it can be both. My personal opinion," Mr Musk said in the interview, which will be aired in full later this week.
The White House sought to play down any differences over US government spending, without directly naming Mr Musk.
"The Big Beautiful Bill is NOT an annual budget bill," Mr Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said on Mr Musk's social network, X, after the tech titan's comments aired.
All DOGE cuts would have to be carried out through a separate bill targeting the federal bureaucracy, according to US Senate rules, Mr Miller added.
In response to Mr Musk’s comments, Mr Trump said he will be negotiating the tax bill and is not happy with certain parts of it.
"We will be negotiating that bill, and I'm not happy about certain aspects of it, but I'm thrilled by other aspects of it," Mr Trump told reporters.
Mr Musk's comments represented a rare split with the Republican president whom he helped propel back to power, as the largest donor to his 2024 election campaign.
Scapegoat
Mr Trump tasked Mr Musk with cutting government spending as head of DOGE, but after a feverish start Mr Musk announced in late April he was mostly stepping back to run his companies again.
Mr Musk complained in a separate interview with the Washington Post that DOGE, which operated out of the White House with a staff of young technicians, had become a lightning rod for criticism.
The tech tycoon told the Washington Post ahead of SpaceX’s latest launch at the Starbase launch site in Texas that he believed DOGE has become a scapegoat ‘for everything’.
"Something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it," he added.
Mr Musk blamed entrenched US bureaucracy for DOGE's failure to achieve all of its goals - although reports say his domineering style and lack of familiarity with the currents of US politics were also major factors.
"The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realised," he said.
"I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least," he added.
Mr Musk has previously admitted that he did not achieve all his goals with DOGE even though tens of thousands of people were removed from government payrolls and several departments were gutted or shut down.
Mr Musk's own businesses suffered in the meantime.
Demonstrators protested the cost-cutting targeted Tesla dealerships while arsonists even torched a few of the electric vehicles, and the firm's profits slumped.
"People were burning Tesla’s. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool," Mr Musk told the Washington Post.
Mr Musk has also been focusing on SpaceX after a series of fiery setbacks to his dreams of colonising Mars - the latest of which came yesterday when its prototype Starship exploded over the Indian Ocean.
The tycoon last week also said he would pull back from spending his fortune on politics, having spent around a quarter of a billion dollars to support Mr Trump.
