Global News Podcast - Trump says Musk has 'lost his mind'

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Donald Trump has said Elon Musk has 'lost his mind' as the explosive row between the two men continues. Also: solving a brutal medieval murder, and what makes chimpanzees yawn.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Nowadays, paying for your luggage can cost more than a flight itself. Last year, passengers spent one hundred and fifty billion dollars on flight extras. And there's loads of confusion about rules and fees. So today we're asking, how do airlines justify these costs? And can you avoid paying extra? I'm Hannah Gelbart. I'm the host of What in the World, an award-winning daily podcast from the BBC World Service. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janak Jalil and at 13 Hours GMT on Friday the 6th of June these are our main stories. After their fiery public row Donald Trump says Elon Musk has lost his mind and says he doesn't intend to talk to him despite reports that White House aides are arranging a call. A former gynaecologist in Norway is sentenced to 21 years in prison for raping dozens of his patients. India's Prime Minister inaugurates a longer-waited strategic railway line to Kashmir. Also in this podcast, Seven Centuries On, has a brutal medieval murder mystery finally been solved? What is it about this case? Why does a woman hire hitmen to kill a priest? After their spectacular falling out it had seemed that the world's richest man and its most powerful

politician were inching towards a reconciliation. There were reports that White House aides were arranging a phone call between Donald Trump and Elon Musk after the two men traded a series of insults, accusations and taunts on the social media companies they each own. Well, as we'll hear in a moment from Washington, it may be too soon to say the row is over. But first, our North America editor, Sarah Smith, has this report on how the bromance escalated into a bitter breakup.

Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we're well anymore. I was surprised because... The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was the Oval Office guest star, but Elon Musk and his criticism of Mr. Trump's spending bill dominated the conversation. But I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than

almost anybody sitting here. Just minutes later, Elon Musk replied on X, saying, false, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast almost no one in Congress could even read it. Come on up here, Elon. Mr Musk obviously adored being in the spotlight as he campaigned alongside Donald Trump. of night so fast almost no one in Congress could even read it. Mr Musk obviously adored being in the spotlight as he campaigned alongside Donald Trump. He's claiming that without him and the more than 250 million dollars he donated, the president would have lost the election.

Mr Trump on Truth Social upped the ante with, 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. Musk called that an obvious lie and then really escalated the abuse, suggesting Donald Trump has withheld files related to Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested on charges of sex trafficking and died by suicide in jail, because he's named in them. Mr Musk tweeted,

Time to drop the really big bomb. Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. That's the real reason they've not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT. Mr Musk and his chainsaw were brought into government to aggressively cut government spending. A pointless exercise, he thinks, if President Trump will blow all the savings on tax cuts in his spending bill.

You know, I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it. Donald Trump is now suggesting the easiest way to save money would be to terminate Elon Musk's billions of dollars in government contracts and subsidies. It was probably inevitable this bromance would turn sour, but no one expected it to go this bad, this fast. Sarah Smith, well it had seemed that the volcanic falling out was cooling down, but shortly before we recorded this podcast, our Chief North America correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue, gave us this update.

Well Janet, we heard in the last few minutes that a correspondent in fact for ABC News here in America has spoken to Donald Trump this morning and he's telling us that Donald Trump says he's not inclined to take any kind of phone call with Elon Musk today and that Elon Musk has lost his mind was the quote that we were told. So it doesn't look like there's any sense in which the president wants to do that. Elon Musk, however, last night in response to a tweet from another billionaire, the hedge phone manager Bill Ackman, who said that the two should make up for the sake of the country, Elon Musk replied to that last night saying, you're not wrong.

So there may be more regret on one side than the other at the moment, but as things stand, it doesn't look like there's any kind of reconciliation anytime soon. But isn't that a big worry for Donald Trump given how powerful Elon Musk is and what more widely for the Republican Party who were hoping that Elon Musk would help them in the midterms? Yeah, there's a couple of things here. Obviously there is the centrality of Elon Musk's companies to the American space programme. You know, Elon Musk's rockets are the only rockets that can take Americans from American soil to the space station at the moment. And he threatened yesterday to cancel those rockets.

He walked that back later on in the evening. And as you rightly say, he also has pledged 100 million dollars to the Republicans ahead of, you know, next year's midterms and all that kind of thing. And has now threatened to spend that money in other ways, targeting Republicans who support the big tax cut bill, which he says will increase the deficit. So there are some concerns here for the president. The richest man in the world has an awful lot of power, even if he's not elected in

any way. So I think that's why you saw a little bit of circumspection from Donald Trump yesterday in his replies. I think it's probably fair to say apart from one or two, you know, his were the less, less inflammatory in what was a completely inflammatory exchange. But at the moment, there doesn't look to be any kind of resolution. And it depends, I think, really, how long Elon Musk is interested in kind of extending this or whether the problems he's having in his businesses, which have rebounded

somewhat from yesterday's falls but still has tens of billions of dollars down, whether he will move his focus to that more now. Gary O'Donoghue. Well, with more on how this row between these two powerful men is being viewed by the Republican Party at large and by the MAGA movement, Justin Webb spoke to the Republican consultant Scott Jennings. First, what did he make of Elon Musk's claim that he won the election for Donald Trump? Well, look, he was a big part of the campaign, there's no doubt. I think Donald Trump won

the election for Donald Trump. Donald Trump's name was on the ballot. He's now the president. And the reason he's fighting so hard for this bill is because the bill is essentially the agenda on which he ran that he won the national popular vote and won the Electoral College. There is a real problem with Elon Musk's money potentially now, isn't there, in as much as he might have funded primary campaigns against Republican candidates who fell out of line and voted against the bill, the spending bill, but he won't now. And indeed, there's a sort of suggestion, isn't there, that he might even fund Democrats. Even if he didn't win the election for Trump in 24, how big a

deal is the money now? Well, look, it's a big deal. As for Elon Musk supporting Democrats, what he wants to do is preserve Western civilization and bring down the national debt. Democrats don't want to do either of those things. And I also think this, the Republicans in Congress still have a chance to come back and do some of the things Elon wants, like codify some of the Doge cuts. What does it do to MAGA world? Well, look, you're going to have people out there picking sides. Some people will be, I told you so on Elon. Some people will side with Elon. I mean, any time you have a feud like this, it does leave an opportunity for

people to fight internally. My message would be every day that we're fighting, we're at each other's throats. The enemy, the Democrats are advancing. I've heard people in Maga well, particularly supporters of Steve Bannon, very, very keen to put it mildly Trump man, that actually Musk was a plant in the first place. Indeed, I've heard it said as a Chinese spy. Does it have a sort of political skewing then within the administration towards those people who are keen on concentrating politically on faith and family and community and don't

want the kind of Musk worldview that there is? Well, I think that ignores how you win elections and that's by building coalitions. What Trump did was build a very interesting and broad and elastic coalition that could include people like Steve Bannon and someone like an Elon Musk. And you look at who they represent. Bannon represents the more populous grassroots wing of the party. Elon Musk is kind of that old libertarian, even maybe more libertarian

than the old Tea Party DNA of the Republicans. So these are two different wings of the party, but in order to win a national election as a Republican, you have to build coalitions like that that have, you know, strange bedfellows. Look, I think politics is about addition. That's how Trump won. He built a coalition that included people as far apart as Bannon and Musk, RFK Jr. and Mitch McConnell. You know, I mean, he put Republicans together

that probably ordinarily wouldn't have dinner with each other, but they all wound up in the same tent to win a presidential election. That was the genius of Trump. And now the skill of it will be if he can hold it together. Scott Jennings. Since Ukraine's audacious coordinated drone attacks over the weekend on Russian fighter planes parked on the tarmac at bases deep inside Russia, Kiev has been bracing itself for retaliation from Moscow. And on Thursday night Russia carried out a massive missile and drone attack on the capital, Kiev, killing at least three people there with rescuers among the dead. Paul Adams reports from Kiev.

We spent a good part of the night down in the bomb shelter under our hotel and we occasionally ventured out just a short distance to get a sense of what was going on in the city and for hours you could hear the sound of machine gun fire as the city's air defences went into action to try and shoot down drones and we could hear drones occasionally coming overhead and then from time to time you would see a flash in the distance and then several seconds later some very large explosions. So that was the kind of flavor of the night. Not unlike dozens if not hundreds that the residents of Kiev have experienced over the past three years or more. And you know, four people were killed, three of those were rescue workers. Again, there have been worse nights than that. I think Ukrainians slightly roll their eyes when they hear talk of Vladimir Putin getting

revenge for any particular Ukrainian operation, because let's not forget the night before the Ukrainians launched their audacious assault on Russian airfields, 472 drones were used to target Ukraine. So this is part of an ongoing assault, not different in any real way from what we have seen before. But certainly it made for a very uncomfortable, long night for the residents of the capital. One told me that for the first time since the early months of the war he had actually sought shelter because it was simply so loud.

Paul Adams in Keefe. Now when someone else yawns near you do you feel like yawning as well? Well it seems we're not alone. Chimpanzees also get the same urge after being shown a robot imitating human facial expressions. That's a finding of a new study that raises more questions about the evolutionary origins of primate behavior. The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports. Didi Kruisheim is the head of research at the Mona Foundation

where the chimpanzees were studied. He stepped away from helping with their daily routine to speak to Justin Webb. There's already studies out there that tell us there is a contagion of yawning across species so there are studies that are telling you can even catch, as a human, you can catch a yawn from mice, from dogs, from cats. But the question is how far can we go there? So with the chimpanzees we were testing out several things there and the main culprit of all of this was Dr Amido GioglielMascheroni and he's doing actually several studies there and this one with the Android

is just one of them but it's the one that has been published recently. So what we were trying to see there, if it is necessary to be actually a living being that gives these cues of the yawning or if it's enough if it is an Android so a non-living entity although wasn't the Android sort of made to look like a human exactly the Android was made to look like a human so it was a human head so the chip it was a human we have to be always careful because we can never really state exactly what the chimps are thinking but normally I would say no they should be aware that it's not a human because they have the capacity to understand this far.

And what about that it's not just that they yawn, it's also that they start to find their bedding materials and think it's time to have a rest? Exactly, that is the very, very fascinating part here because one thing is having a nearly reflexing imitation of a yawn, which happens to us as well. We see somebody yawn, we yawn automatically. But there is more behind all of this. There is a decision making behind of this. There's a thinking process behind of this.

So the yawning might have induced a certain state of feeling drowsiness, becoming calmer. And that made them decide on, well, I'm going to be lying down. Well, I'm going to start collecting some bedding material and make a nest. And this only really happens when the Android was showing the yawning phase and not the neutral phase unless when it was the gaping phase. But there were even more studies there actually. So Dr. Romero, he was doing several studies. He was also working with humans and blind people to see, is it actually necessary to see the yawning to get this contagious impact.

And they were touching the faces of people that were doing a yawning face and there also was a contagion. Also with our chimpanzees, we did other tests with Ramiro, for example, seeing what happens if it's a stranger or if it's a person they actually know, a familiar person against an unfamiliar person. So is this empathy threat necessary to trigger more yawns or not? And there he actually saw that it is not necessary. And then in the last step, he also went further and we just showed them the sound of the yawns. So they didn't even see any person doing it,

just hearing a yawn from a human behind the screen. And that was also enough to trigger the yawn in response and to get them to calm down. That was the head of research at the Mono Foundation, Didi Kreisheim. Still to come in this podcast… The concern to the rest of the world is, is the current outbreak in animals in the US really just a trigger for a pandemic? We report on the rising global concern about bird flu. Nowadays, paying for your luggage can cost more than a flight itself.

Last year, passengers spent $150 billion on flight extras, and there's loads of confusion about rules and fees. So today we're asking, how do airlines justify these costs? And can you avoid paying extra? I'm Hannah Gelbart. I'm the host of What in the World, an award-winning daily podcast from the BBC World Service. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You're listening to the Global News Podcast. In a case that has horrified Norway, a court has sentenced a former doctor to 21 years in prison for 70 counts of rape. Orné Beer

secretly recorded his patients during medical examinations, amassing hundreds of hours of footage which were later discovered by police. Beer carried out the crimes over a period of nearly two decades. Paul Moss told us more. I want to be a 55 year old doctor in Frostor, a small town not far from the city of Trondheim for anyone who knows Norway. As you say, police found, in fact it was 6,000 hours of video he had taken which showed him carrying out procedures which prosecutors say constitute rape. They took place over more than two decades. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 67. He was initially charged with 34 rapes. Then the case came to court he was

charged with 88 rapes and there have been claims that the true number may be double that and the details are pretty shocking. One woman said she went to see him with a sore throat but he ended up carrying out a procedure on her using instruments which she said were so painful she thought she would die and what some patients have said is that the doctor deliberately placed them in a gynecological chair in a position where he couldn't they couldn't see what exactly he was doing. Now what Onabea said was well the only reason he recorded all this video was to show that he was not exceeding what a doctor should be doing. I think most people will

notice there are echoes here of the Pellico case in France where Dominique Pellico had kept photographs and video of the rape of his wife which showed his wife being raped and that was the main part of the evidence. Also I'm afraid echoes of other cases involving doctors and perhaps figures in the church because there were warnings about this back in 2006 and other doctors said several patients had complained that Ornabier, while he was carrying out gynaecological examinations, had begun massaging sexual parts of their body. Bee denied this and was allowed to carry on. Now that was in 2006 but the case against him

says there were rapes going on back to 2004. Paul Moss, the controversial US-Israeli-backed group handing out aid from military-secured hubs in Gaza, says the equivalent of more than 8 million meals have been given out since it started operations last week. But with dozens of Palestinians having been shot dead as they tried to collect aid, the group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been sharply criticized by many, including the UN. Much about the organization remains secret.

Our State Department correspondent, Tom Bateman, has been looking into it. We're on the road in rural Delaware, where the future for many people in Gaza currently rests. The new foundation supposed to feed its population was registered here in this state. At the black wooden doors of a brick building is the registered address for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It was incorporated here two weeks after Donald Trump took office. We're with BBC News. I'm trying to find the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Inside, I find two helpful women who tell me they can't help. Here is actually a registration agent, so the foundation doesn't actually exist here at all. I asked some questions to the agents here. They gave me the numbers of their lawyers and said I should talk to them. And when I asked why the foundation might register here but not be here, they said,

well, it's because they don't want to be bothered. If you were interested in helping suffering people, you'd let the UN do their job. This is Bill DeRee from UNRWA, the UN Agency for Palestinian refugees. Like other UN agencies operating in Gaza, he is uncompromising in his view of the new Israeli and American-backed foundation, saying it has militarized aid and endangered the population.

I cannot fathom, as a UN employee or even as an American, how the world can accept this circumstance, how the world can say four places in Gaza designed to pen people into a small area with a Hunger Games distribution network is acceptable. They say, of course, this is about denying aid falling into the hands of Hamas. This is just a made up excuse in order to create a system that looks like it's helping people without actually helping people. Well I've just come from a building where official documents are kept in Delaware and we've got hold of the certificate of incorporation of the Gaza Humanitarian

Foundation. The most notable thing about it is just how little detail there is on it. It tells us that it was initially incorporated as the Global Humanitarian Fund, but changed its name to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in late April. The only address on there is the place we've already been, which was the registration agents. Crucially, the documents reveal nothing about who is funding the foundation. We are committed to building a great wall of Christian Zionism all over the world. This is the Reverend Johnny Moore, a pro-Israel Christian evangelical preacher and PR executive who's now been named the foundation's chairman.

He was among a group who prayed for Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Yesterday in a Fox News web article, the Rev. Moore launched a scathing attack on the UN system and what he called pearl-clutching humanitarian activists, saying the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was saving lives and stifling Hamas. The Foundation last night press-released footage of Palestinians thanking President Trump behind the wire fences of its distribution sites. But the main ingredients of this aid are its politics. From a group opponents say is shrouded in secrecy, weaponising food and shutting out

those who could get to the most needy in Gaza. Tom Bateman. It's the first visit by Narendra Modi to Indian-administered Kashmir since a deadly attack on tourists in April led to fighting between India and Pakistan. Mr Modi was there to inaugurate a strategic railway link that finally connects the contested region with the rest of India. Our South Asia regional editor, Amrassan Itiraj Rajan explains the significance of the new line. It's a hugely important moment for the government as well as for the people in Kashmir, in an

administered Kashmir because this is the first time you have a rail link connecting Srinagar with the rest of the country and the Indian Prime Minister inaugurated the important link. In fact the railway lines were built before Katra and then near Srinagar but then they were finding it difficult to go through the mountains so they built this huge Chenab bridge which stands at nearly 360 meters tall considered as an engineering marvel. So the Indian prime minister was there waving the national flag and walking over the bridge basically telling the world this isn is an infrastructural challenge,

as an architectural marvel. So the Indians were able to build this over the years. But this project has been in the pipeline for decades. Even during the British colonial period, they wanted to connect Kashmir with the rest of the country by train. But it was the seismic zone and the landslides that delayed these projects. And it cost nearly $ 4.4 billion dollars the whole project about 272 kilometer line from Udampur, Srinagar and Baramu line in

Kashmir. So finally they've done it so it is a hugely important milestone for the government as well even though it was started by the previous governments now people are seeing that the railway line is going to operate all the way up to Srinagar as Mr Modi was saying. This is all weather connectivity. Sometimes the roads get blocked because of landslides or snow. And it will also boost job opportunities because this will encourage tourism, people can go all the way. Ambrasan Etirajan. There's rising global concern about bird flu. While it's extremely rare

for the viral disease to be passed on from human to human, in the US bird flu has spread to dairy, cattle and poultry, which has then infected workers with dozens of cases reported including one death. Scientists are worried that as the virus continues to evolve and move between species, it could turn into another pandemic. Angela Henshaw reports. Inside laboratories at the Pippa Institute in South West England, I'm standing in a room with several small pens filled with chicks. These chickens are part of animal vaccine trials here at the institute,

where they're studying viral diseases that can spread from animals to humans. More than 60% of emerging infectious diseases in humans come from animals. Birds do, by definition, have high level of contact with humans. Professor Ian Brown works in avian virology at the institute. He says there's one virus spreading from animals to humans we should be watching, and that's bird flu. This disease now is on every continent apart from Australasia. It's even in Antarctica. There is a strong focus at the moment in the US simply because it's the only place in the

world so far that's reported infection in dairy cattle. Currently avian flu or bird flu has been found in more than 400 animal species, from otters to domestic cats. It's been reported in all 50 US states. And by mid-May, there had been at least 70 confirmed cases in humans, including one death. There have also been cases in the UK, India, Vietnam and Cambodia. No scientist I think is going to say this cannot ever become a pandemic, but there has to be a balance at the moment that this virus is around the globe in many populations, particularly birds, and it hasn't yet successfully managed to find a way to infect humans

so that it can spread between them. Not every virus that infects animals poses a threat to humans because it may not have the characteristics needed for human to human spread. Cameron Khan is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. This is a good example of how wild animals are interacting with animals, livestock, poultry, animals that we use for food, and then we're coming in contact with infected poultry or livestock. I mean, influenza is a formidable entity. And if we give it enough room to continuously evolve and adapt to infecting other mammals, of which humans happen to be mammals, the concern then to the rest of the world is, is the current outbreak in animals in the

US really just a trigger for a pandemic. Professor Cameron Kahn ending that report by Angela Henshaw. It sounds like the plot of a crime thriller. A tale of a sex scandal, a mafia style hit and a vengeful noblewoman who got away with murder. Nearly 700 years after a priest was stabbed to death on the streets of London, a University of Cambridge criminology professor believes he has solved what may be the coldest of cold cases. His name is Manuel Eisner and he told me more. This priest who is called John Ford was killed in play daylight. It was late afternoon, according to the records.

There was many people on the street, there were many witnesses. And first he's approached by one of the accomplices, another priest. And the record says that the accomplice started a sweet conversation with the priest to distract him. And when they reached the end of West Sheep,

that's when the other three conspirators appear and stab him and he's left bleeding to death, very close, about 200 meters away from St. Paul's Cathedral. And the jury that is composed of 33 men returns a verdict that he was killed with some long knives, daggers, and they suspect that the four perpetrators were all incited to this crime by a woman called Ella Fitzpain.

And what did you find in your investigations? Were you able to confirm this? And what would her motive be in killing this priest? What I did once I saw this case is that I started to be really interested in what is it about this case? Why does a woman hire hit men to kill a priest? And so I went on a search mission using different strategies. In the end, I found an interesting document

in a completely unexpected location, namely among the archives of the Bishop of Winchester, which include two long letters by the Archbishop of Canterbury, sent to him in 1332. In these two letters the Archbishop of Canterbury makes allegations against Ella Fitzpain, claiming that she was having affairs with a large number of men, both married and unmarried and including clerics. But he names just one person and that one

person is John Ford. What made you want to investigate a murder that is 700 years old? Well, it's a little bit of a passion of mine. Much of the research that I've been doing on the history of violence is very much about trying to explain long-term trends in violence with numbers and so on. I started reading these records by the coroner in the 14th century. And when you read these records, you can see that they're just extraordinary little vignettes, if you will, little video clips of an event that is 700 years ago. And so I started to get really interested in trying to understand

what is it behind that brief story of about three, four, five hundred words. Is it possible to add more information to the background of the actors in that little scene and the social cultural context in which this event happens? So personally I find this quite fascinating. As a criminologist and a historian and a sociologist, I just learn a lot from investigating these cases. Manul Eisner, who's shown that even 700 years ago, knife crime was a big concern in London. And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Mike Campbell, the producers were Ariane Cochy and Alison Davis, the editor is Karen Martin. I'm Janet Jalil, until next time, goodbye. Nowadays paying for your luggage can cost more than a flight itself. Last year, passengers spent $150 billion on flight extras. And there's loads of confusion about rules and fees. So today we're asking, how do airlines justify these costs and can you avoid paying extra? I'm Hannah Gelbart. I'm the host of What in the World, an award-winning daily podcast from the BBC World Service. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.