Front Burner - Trump and Elon’s messy breakup

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

<p>A feud between Elon Musk and U.S. President Trump escalated and exploded over the course of 72 hours last week.</p><p>It started off with Musk’s criticism of Trump’s new spending bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination.” Trump later criticized Musk during a press conference in the Oval Office, saying that he would have won the 2024 election without the millions of dollars Musk spent to support him. From there, a barrage of attacks ensued over social media, and threats to cancel government contracts and cooperation. </p><p><br></p><p>Dasha Burns, Politico’s White House Bureau Chief and host of “The Conversation with Dasha Burns”, is here to walk through the twists and turns of this public breakup, and reflect on who wins and who loses when two of the most powerful people in the world fight.</p><p><br></p><p>Fill out our listener survey <a href="https://insightscanada.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bfIcbmcQYPwjUrk?Podcast=Front%20Burner&Prize=Yes" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>. We appreciate your input!</p><p><br></p><p>For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts</a></p>

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Hey everybody, I'm Jamie Poisson. So I don't know about you guys, but last week was easily the most entertaining 72 hours that I have ever had on the internet. You probably know at least the big highlights by now, but I think it is worth rehashing. I mean, it will likely be taught in history books someday. It started on Tuesday with Elon Musk complaining on X about Trump's new spending bill, saying that it was a disgusting abomination, pork-filled,

that it would erase all of his Doge savings, et cetera. He continued to troll the president and other Republicans, posting years-old comments from them complaining about government spending and deficits. He went on about how the majority of Republican voters don't want the bill, this kind of stuff. Around midday Thursday, Trump chimes in from the Oval Office telling reporters this.

And you know, Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate and you know, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles. And you know, they're having a hard time with electric vehicles. And they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy. And you know, Elon knew this from the beginning. Look, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we'll anymore. I was surprised because in between a torrent of more complaints about the bill on X,

Elon then really ratchets it up. And he posts this, without me, Trump would have lost the election. Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51 49 in the Senate. Such in gratitude. control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate. Such ingratitude. By the end of the afternoon Thursday, Trump entered the social media fray posting on his own social media site that he asked Elon to leave the White House because he was, quote, wearing thin and that he went crazy when he took away an EV mandate. Oh, and that the easiest way to save money would be to cancel the billions of dollars in government contracts that go to Elon's companies.

One might have thought that this was the climax. It was not. Musk then went on to post that the reason the Epstein files have not been released is because Trump is in them. He threatened to decommission the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that returned astronauts from the International Space Station. He agreed with an ex-user calling for Trump's impeachment. He said that tariffs will cause a recession by the end of the year. What's the latest? Well, things calmed down somewhat over the weekend. Trump said that he wasn't even thinking about Elon. Reporting, as we will get into, does suggest otherwise.

Maybe all of this was expected. It was wild, nonetheless. So today, Dasha Burns, political playbook's chief correspondent and White House bureau chief is here to talk about who wins and who loses when two of the most powerful people in the world fight. Dasha also recently launched her new Sunday show called The Conversation with Dasha Burns. Dasha, thank you so much for making the time today. It's great to have you on.

Hey, Jamie. Thanks so much for making the time today. It's great to have you on. Hey, Jamie. Thanks so much for having me. So you actually interviewed Trump on Friday. What did he say to you when you asked him about this? Very briefly. Very briefly. First of all, your introduction, walking through all of the step-by-step popcorn-worthy moments of last week was incredible.

Just like to think about it all at once that this is what we are living through. It's unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, I'm taking this- But also very believable. Yeah. That's the thing about living in the era of Trump. It's like everything is shocking and also not at the same time.

You know, as this is all going down, I'm just thinking, what is Trump actually thinking? I mean, a lot of the time he puts it on true social, but I decided to just pick up the phone. I've spoken with him over the phone a number of times, and he does just sometimes pick up the phone, and that's what happened. So I said hello and I asked him how he's feeling about his sort of breakup with Elon Musk and he said, oh, it's okay, you know, everything's never been better and started talking about his poll numbers. And this was the same day that I had reported out that his, some of his senior advisors in the administration had spoken to him about tempering his response to Musk. We had seen you walked through it

so well, just this fire hose of insults back and forth between the two escalation after escalation and then suddenly you saw Trump to oppose to true social law you know it's I don't mind that Elon's turned against me let's focus on the bill that seemed to have been a direct result of a conversation with with a couple of his very close and most trusted advisors saying you need to de deescalate and really kind of treat Elon like a child. Like the more you feed into this, the more you're going to instigate him and provoke him. One of the White House allies that I talked to said literally like treat him like a toddler and don't engage. And that, you know, that sort of seemed to work with the president.

And he toned it down. And then there was backchanneling. We can get into that. And Elon toned it down. And now here we are. Well, just tell me more about the backchanneling, because I know you've got some reporting out that says that AIDS for both sides had some sort of meeting on Friday. And so what came of that? There was a conversation. There was a conversation. The goal from both sides was to get the two of them to sort of put down their arms, which they seem to have done. What I've been told is that neither particularly wanted to. And just because we're not seeing a plethora

of posts from President Trump on social doesn't necessarily mean that he's happy. But for now, for now the ceasefire is holding. But even the people closest to President Trump and those closest to Elon Musk have no idea what is coming next here because these are two completely unpredictable erratic individuals. Impossible to control. I know you got some insight into what irked Trump the most here. Was it the Epstein stuff? Was it taking credit for the election? So, so the Epstein, the Epstein stuff is definitely when it started to take a turn internally. It's one thing.

Even when Musk was working in the White House with Trump every day, he had come out a couple of times and kind of contradicted Trump on some policy issues that he disagreed with. So that wasn't as shocking as once it started to turn personal like that. So Epstein was kind of the first strike where the president was starting to get really unhappy, but it was taking credit for winning the election that really got under his skin. Okay, so take me back in time a little bit because people will of course remember that very warm oval office send off just a little bit over a week ago. That was a bit odd in part due to Elon's black eye and the fact that the New York Times had literally just dropped a story about his ketamine use. But anyways, they were quite effusive. Both of them painted this picture of like a mutual partying where Elon would still be

very involved in the White House. So I just want to thank Elon for his time as a special government employee. Can you imagine? They call him an employee, but it's a special government employee for coming and helping us. And he really has changed the mindset of a lot of people. And I'll continue to be visiting here and be a friend and advisor to the president. And I look forward to, you know, times being back in this amazing room. By the way, isn't this... But now, of course, Trump even posted it this week,

saying that he actually asked Elon to leave the White House because he was wearing thin. And so what do we know right now about what really kind of led up to this? When did the relationship between these two men kind of start to sour? Look, I had been reporting for a while that the tensions between Musk and a ton of the staff, I mean, just about every cabinet secretary and a lot of folks in the West Wing, the working relationship wasn't fantastic, but the president himself was for a while very much eager to still have Elon around, was happy to have the richest guy with the biggest megaphone on his side.

However, the big promises that Elon kept touting of the $2 trillion that Doge was going to cut. How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget? Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion. Yeah! That was starting to become apparent to the president that he was overselling what he was going to be able to do. But the fallout from the way that Doge was going about doing his business was so significant

and took up so much of the oxygen of that first hundred days. Just about every time I was in the briefing room, 50% plus of the questions were about Elon Musk. All of the coverage was so focused on Doge. Is the White House willing to share evidence of those fraud claims or can Elon Musk come to the briefing room and share material evidence of what he's talking about? Sure, I would love for Elon Musk to come to the briefing room. That's why we had him go to the Oval Office yesterday,

where I think he provided great answers. He was speaking in layman's terms, speaking common sense to all of you in the media, but also to Americans at home. But I would say especially to all of you in the media. And that, I think, started to become a real problem for Trump and his aides. But then it was the disagreements around policy. And the straw that really broke the camel's back was actually, it sounds small, but interestingly,

it was not seen as small for Musk himself. It was a polling the nomination for one of a Musk ally, this guy Jared Isaacman that they had nominated to lead NASA. That nomination was polled claiming that he was to align with Democrats in the past, but that struck a chord because it was part of kind of this long simmering war between Elon Musk and Trump's head of the White House Office of Personnel, which is Sergio Gore. The two of them were supposed to be working together at the beginning.

That relationship really, really soured. Both of them had been kind of taking jabs at each other behind the scenes. And it was, I think, Trump agreeing to pull that nomination that set Musk over the edge, right? As he was already sort of planning to wind down and head out and that felt like just a little bit too much for him for whatever reason.

I'm not in Elon Musk's head, I think, for better or for worse. But that one, from my reporting, that one really got to him. He wanted and rightfully, you know, he recommended somebody that he, I guess, knew very well. I'm sure he respected him, but to run NASA. And I didn't think it was appropriate. And he happened to be a Democrat, like totally Democrat. And I say, you know, look, we won. We get certain privileges and one of the privileges, we don't have to appoint a Democrat. NASA is very important. We have great people. You mentioned that he had clashed, that Elon had clashed with all these people in the administration.

There's been a reporting of clashes with Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, and Peter Navarro. And a fistfight? We get a fistfight in the middle of all of this? This isn't even a question, but I just feel like we have to talk about the Washington Post report, right? Yes. Where essentially he body checks Treasury Secretary Scott Bissett because they both had different plans for the Internal Revenue

Service and it like explodes into this physical altercation. Which is wild because Trump's cabinet is full of a cast of very interesting, dynamic, outlandish characters. Scott Bessette is probably the most, the guy that's holding it all down, right? And so for Bessant to be the one involved in a physical fight is just, it's beyond. For a brief moment in the year 2000, the city of Phoenix was on fire. You could see a glow in the sky. An arsonist was on the loose.

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How much of a role does the bill, the spending bill, actually play here, you think? Let me put this question a different way. What exactly is it that Elon finds disgusting about the bill? I know that he says that it's pork-filled, is it like, where's the pork in his estimation? Is it really about the bill? So the motivations are a big question and there are a lot of different people with opinions about why Musk has been going off on the bill. He's saying that the spending is unacceptable, which fiscal hawks do agree with, which is why it is kind of dangerous, given how small the margins are

in the House and in the Senate. That has been a fight within the Republican Party and the margins are tough. And Elon Musk, the world's richest guy with a whole lot of money and a whole big megaphone coming in and dumping on the bill in crunch time here is really, really not good. But if you talk to people in the White House, as I have, they will tell you Musk has been walking around for weeks talking about the damage that the cuts and EV credits are going to do to Tesla. So White House folks are saying that this is all motivated by his own business interests, which isn't an outlandish accusation given like, yeah, this bill

would hurt Musk's businesses in a number of different ways and he's certainly not happy about it so that all makes sense but his message which you know Musk is is a smart guy the way that he is messaging the bill and his problems with it do hit on the same issues that that some fiscal conservatives have with the bill as well. I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it can be both. It is not ideal for Republicans to have this battle in this moment. I was reading this piece in Politico this morning

by your colleague Ian Ward, going even further back, right? He was making the argument that the seeds of this fracture actually started before Trump even took office, right, in December over a disagreement about high-skilled immigration. Yes, yes, the H-1B visa fight is sort of fundamental to this odd marriage between like the mega nationalist populace and the tech right. Because the tech right is full of people from all over the world that came here and were successful, built companies.

They want to see more smart people come to the US legally. That's not necessarily what like the Bannons of the party want to see. And that was an early break in what Trump had, Trump through the campaign, built quite a big tent for the Republican party, which was great for getting elected and great for him being able to say, I have this mandate now. Democrats had had a big tent for a long time

and it became, and you're still watching the fallout from it. It's a huge challenge to have a number of different ideological, generational factions within your party. That is now what the Republican party is dealing with. And Elon made the tech right loom so large that there were a lot of MAGA voices that were actually not super happy with Elon Musk. He's got the maturity of 11 year old, you can tell that.

He can't take criticism. One of his weaknesses is that he needs to be loved. He needs the masses to love him. You can tell he's on the stage. He needs that. I mean, Bannon had been critical of him from the beginning. You have the Laura Loomers that had been going after him for a while. And so this was predictable from a number of standpoints. First of all, you saw some of the incompatibility or the tensions between the basic ideology of what Musk and Silicon Valley

versus the base that elected Trump in the first place back in 2016, the base that brought him up, and then this new MAGA, this new right coming in. Yeah. And then there's the predictability of, you know, these two outsized personalities. Everyone had been waiting. I think some people are surprised it took this long. Others are not surprised by the fallout, but are surprised by once the break was real, just how fast and how intense and how bizarre the whole thing became. Completely scorched earth.

I wanted to ask you about some of the people who are kind of wrapped up in this feud. One, I think would be Stephen Miller, top aide to the president. And where does Stephen Miller fit into this? This is a complicated moment for Stephen Miller, in part because of a very personal aspect of this, which is that his wife, Katie Miller, is working with Elon Musk. She left the White House and is now focused on helping Musk with his work and his companies in the private sector. Stephen Miller is still at the White House and is extremely loyal to the President. I cannot imagine what being a fly on the wall in that household is like right now. But it is, I mean, Stephen Miller

was actually an early ally of Musk's and a lot of people in Congress, once Musk was brought into the fold, I mean, Republicans were thrilled by this, especially given the large size of his checkbook, right? And how much he was involved with and he's just this big cultural figure. And so there's a lot of intertwining that's going to be hard to untangle now between Musk and the government, Musk and the Republican Party, Musk and a lot of individuals within Trump's orbit. Yeah. And just talk to me more about that. You know, you talked about this tech right. This includes really powerful people like the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, David Sacks,

the current AI czar, Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir. Like, what's going to happen now? Is there a sense that the coalition, that kind of coalition could really break up? I think that's the fork in the road here and what my next reporting targets are going to be, frankly, because you haven't really heard that group of people pipe up yet. But I mean, David Sachs is in Washington all the time, like Peter Thiel is a close ally of JD Vance. I'm sure JD Vance isn't thrilled

by this breakup because if he's going to be running in 2028, I'm sure he was certainly hoping that he would have the likes of Elon Musk and some of those Silicon Valley tech right relationship that he's cultivated for a long time on his side. So the ripple effect of this, I think we're still waiting to see how large it's going to be. And if people are forced to choose sides, like right now, I don't think, I think the spotlight right now is on the hill because that is where the immediate like do you, are you going to live with mom or dad, impacts of the divorce are going to play out. But as this moves further and more of those relationships are tested, that's where it could have significant impacts, not just for Trump and Musk and their immediate circles, but like the allies of both men down

the line. Just speaking of JD Vance, I caught a bit of him on Theo Vonn's podcast on Saturday and he really tried to play both sides. I'm the vice president to President Trump. My loyalties are always gonna be with the president. And I think that Elon, he's an incredible entrepreneur. He's actually done, I think Doge was really good. The sort of effort to root out waste, fraud,

and abuse in our country was really good. And look, man, I'm always going to be loyal to the president. And I hope that eventually Elon kind of comes back into the fold. Maybe that's not possible now because he's gone so nuclear. Tightrope walking. Tightrope walking. Yeah. And you can see why.

I mean, characters like JD Vance and the Republican Party who are younger, who really do understand the power. I think Trump respects and understands the usefulness and the weight of Musk in one way. I think people like Vance understand it in a very different way. They are so online, like Musk is is and Trump is in his own way. I'm not saying he's not a creature of the internet himself, but I think that what Vance and others are seeing with the future of tech, with AI, with crypto, right? And how important that is going to be in our lives and and potentially to

their campaigns and are seeing this this breakup and it there are a lot of people who were really really hoping this this wasn't gonna happen and I think JD Vance was certainly one of them. So I know that there is this attempt at a detente right now, but I do want to talk to you about what could happen if it does continue, right, in the direction that it was going last week, right? And I just, you know, I've been thinking, like who wins, right? When it's like the most,

or one of the most powerful men in the world up against the richest man in the world. And I guess let's start with Trump and what he could do to Elon. So Steve Bannon has been this really vocal critic of Elon and he said that he told Trump to cancel all of his government contracts and to investigate him as an illegal alien. Which Trump threatened to do. Yeah. The government contracts piece he told Trump to cancel all of his government contracts and to investigate him as an

Alien to you. Yeah, the government contracts species threatened to do he hasn't gone down the immigration road just yet I mean, can he do any of that right? Can he do that Bannon also said the administration should investigate Elon's drug use and Attempt to get and his attempts to get a classified briefing on on China Those are the three investigations I think have to happen right away his drug use is outlined in the New York Times his involvement the Chinese Communist Party That's been outlined by the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal And also now the citizenship question which his brother and other people have been pretty brazen about the fact that he's overstayed a visa and Illegally applied for citizenship

and got a citizenship. Those three things also- They could try. I mean, there also Musk has a ton of money for lawyers and all of that, so there'd be lawsuits, but we've seen that time and again with this administration. I don't think at this point Trump would hesitate to do anything that he feels like he wants to do and is able to pull the levers on, even if it's unprecedented or legally questionable or probably deemed not legal by most, but people like Stephen Miller and others in his administration have been finding these loopholes and ways to do it.

So, I mean, let's talk about the Musk piece of it and then what that all adds up to. Because Musk, as we talked about how intertwined his relationships are, he's also deeply intertwined with his companies, with the federal government. So while Trump could punish him that way too, it kind of goes both ways because he had SpaceX, for example, I mean, has been so, so massive. What NASA has done frankly kind of pales in comparison to what some of what SpaceX has done and how much the government has started to rely on SpaceX for so much of our interstellar work.

So, well, and again, Musk has money to spend potentially against Trump. He's talked about starting a third party, which is not realistic in our current political system, but he certainly could do a lot of damage politically in the way that he spends. He has a super PAC that could do a media blitz and really do some damage. Maybe not to Trump himself, but certainly to his agenda. On the Hill, for example, people might not want to pick Elon over Trump, but if Musk does enough damage to the bill on his own and public opinion starts to turn, that could do a lot of damage to the biggest piece of legislation that really matters to this White House.

And so, one of my colleagues, a group of our colleagues, Megan Messerly and a few others, wrote a great piece last week about the de-escalation coming from, in part, this idea of mutually assured destruction, like Cuban Missile Crisis days, because both men are so powerful that if they unleashed the full might of their wrath on one another, it could end up in mutual assured destruction. And I think both of them have that in the backs of their minds will see because they both also have unleashed anyway at times, even when it's been potentially harmful for themselves. So that's where no one is predicting. Everyone I talk to just says, we're, everyone's sort of on the edge of their seat, like holding their breath,

hoping that the ceasefire holds. Okay. Oh my God. Absolutely wild. Dasha, this is great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. All right. That is all for today. I am Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and we will talk to you tomorrow.