Elon Musk calls for Trump impeachment as feud escalates
Elon Musk called for the impeachment of Donald Trump after an explosive public fallout that exposed deep divisions.
Elon Musk called for the impeachment of Donald Trump after an explosive public fallout that exposed deep divisions.
The world’s most powerful men entered a war of words on Thursday, trading insults from their respective social media platforms.
The row was sparked by tension over Mr Trump’s flagship tax and spend bill he is trying to push through Congress.
Mr Musk suggested his former boss should be removed from office as disagreement escalated.
He responded “yes” to a user on X who wrote: “Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him.”
He earlier wrote:
Mr Trump in turn threatened to cancel all of the Tesla and SpaceX owner’s government contracts, while Mr Musk said he would decommission his Dragon spacecraft which is used by Nasa to deliver and collect astronauts from the International Space Station.
The president’s aides arranged a flurry of meetings to address the fallout, with White House staff reportedly preparing to force allies to pick sides between the president and his former adviser, according to The New York Times.
An administration official said Mr Musk is “clearly having an episode”.
Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s former adviser, encouraged the president to initiate a formal investigation into Mr Musk’s immigration status and have him “deported from the country immediately”.
Mr Trump kicked off the verbal sparring during an Oval Office sit-down with the German chancellor earlier in the day, saying the Tesla boss had “Trump derangement syndrome”. Mr Musk shot back, saying the president only won the election because of his support
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election. Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate… Such ingratitude,” he wrote on X.
Mr Musk then claimed that the president was named in the Epstein files, a term that has colloquially come to describe the classified intelligence the US holds on the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr Trump and Epstein ran in the same social circles in New York and were pictured partying together on various occasions in the 1980s and 1990s.
Epstein killed himself in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.
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In February, Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, pledged to release the Epstein files, however the “phase one” documents she released to a hand-picked group of conservative influencers contained information that was largely already in the public domain.
Questions about Mr Trump and Mr Musk’s broken friendship overshadowed the president’s meeting with Friedrich Merz, the Germany chancellor, on Thursday, with the president saying his former ally was lashing out at his legislation because he did not get his own way.
Mr Trump said: “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”
The president also appeared to threaten to cut government contracts held by Mr Musk’s companies, saying the easiest way for the US to save money would be “to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Tesla shares tanked as the rift intensified. Investors in the electric car company, which closed down 14.3 per cent, fear that Mr Trump might hinder the roll-out of self-driving cars in the US, hitting the company’s growth potential.
Mr Musk, who stepped down as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency last week, has called Mr Trump’s tax and spending bill a “disgusting abomination” for increasing the national debt.
The president claimed the world’s richest man was upset because an ally of his was not chosen for a role in the new Nasa administration and because the Bill meant the end of tax breaks for electric vehicles worth billions to his company.
“He knew it better than almost anybody, and he never had a problem until right after he left,” he said.
“And if you saw the statements he made about me … he said the most beautiful things about me, and he hasn’t said bad about me personally… I’m very disappointed in Elon.”
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