Tag: billionaire
Elon Musk

Congressional Republicans Veer Between Musk And Trump Over Budget Bill

President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk are locked in an ugly breakup—and Republicans are having a hard time choosing sides.

Since leaving the Trump administration in late May, Musk has gone rogue, openly attacking the House GOP’s "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" for its deficit-busting tax cuts. He called the legislation—which cuts Medicaid and food stamps but still would add trillions to the deficit thanks to its tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the rich—a "disgusting abomination." Ouch.

That has angered Trump, who told reporters on Thursday that his friendship with Musk may be over, and that Musk is against the legislation only because it ends electric vehicle subsidies.

Some Republicans, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, are taking Trump's side, saying that Musk is wrong and that Republicans need to pass the legislation.

“I think he’s flat wrong … and I’ve told him as much,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday, insisting that he's not worried that the legislation will negatively impact Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune also downplayed Musk's criticism and its potential impact on how Senate Republicans will handle the bill.

“I can’t speak to his reasons other than what he stated, and I think that what he stated was that he thought it was something that would add to the deficit. And we believe the opposite,” Thune said, rejecting the nonpartisan independent analysis that shows the legislation will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.

Other Republicans say Musk's concerns about the fact that the bill lifts the debt ceiling and increases the national deficit are valid.

"He has real-world experience. [JPMorgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon has real-world experience. When they throw up red flags about the deficit, we ought to pay attention," Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland told reporters. Harris cowardly voted “present” on the bill to allow it to pass the House despite his reservations with the legislation.

"So @elonmusk is right to call out House Leadership. I wish I had a nickel for every time the @freedomcaucus sounded the alarm and nobody listened, only to find out the hard way we were right all along," Rep. Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, wrote in a post on X, even though Perry voted for the legislation he now says is bad.

"It’s insincere for @SpeakerJohnson to insinuate @elonmusk is against the Big Beautiful Bill because it doesn’t benefit his companies specifically," Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of two House Republicans who voted against the bill, wrote on X.

"Musk is a true America First entrepreneur who could have had a much more comfortable existence and a higher net worth by sitting on the sidelines of politics. But he cares about this country, so he got involved. He knows if America collapses financially, we aren’t making it to Mars. He’s right,” Massie added.

Other Republicans want nothing to do with the fighting at all, like little kids who stick their fingers in their ears when their parents are arguing.

“I ain't got any thoughts on that. We got a lot of work to do. He doesn’t get to vote," said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama.

It's an ugly war that could end badly for the GOP no matter which side they choose.

Republican lawmakers can face Trump’s MAGA mob if they vote against the legislation, or they might go up against a Musk-funded primary opponent if they vote for the bill.

Republicans made a deal with two devils—Trump and Musk—and they’re finding out the hard way that their actions have consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Elon Musk

Musk Wins $5.9B Spacex Contract As He Torches Social Security Agency

Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s space company was recently handed a $5.9 billion contract subsidized by taxpayers, even as his so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to take a wrecking ball to key government agencies.

The U.S. Space Force announced on April 4 that Musk’s SpaceX was among three companies awarded government contracts for the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 program. Space X will receive more than $5.9 billion of the $13.7 billion in spending that was announced.

Musk is the CEO of SpaceX and owns approximately 42 percent of the company.

While SpaceX is newly flush with government money, Musk’s DOGE has been laying off critical federal workers at multiple agencies. Federal judges have ruled that some of those firings are illegal.

At the Social Security Administration, DOGE has cut 7,000 jobs even though millions of Americans rely on their Social Security payments for day-to-day living. The Washington Post reports that the agency’s website, which citizens use to access information on their benefits, has had repeated outages in recent weeks.

The Post noted that “many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team,” according to current and former officials that they consulted. Those sources told the outlet that Social Security’s tech staff didn’t test new software installed by Musk’s group and the computer servers have been unable to handle the traffic.

The revelations come as DOGE has repeatedly lied to the public about how much the rogue agency’s actions have purportedly saved taxpayers. Musk, who is the richest person in the world, has benefited enormously from public spending while attacking and gutting agencies that provide vital services to middle-class families.

Despite Musk continuing to siphon money from the government while attacking it via DOGE, President Donald Trump has made it clear that his crony and biggest political benefactor will not be subject to any guardrails or oversight for corruption.

The arrangement has led to Musk and Trump becoming a major target of grassroots protests. Over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. took part in “Hands Off” demonstrations, pushing for Trump and Musk to stop their harmful actions and encouraging other lawmakers to stop them.

Musk isn’t the only high-profile billionaire in the MAGA movement making money from the Space Force announcement. Blue Origin, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, will receive over $2.3 billion from the arrangement.

Trump recently offered praise for Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, after the paper’s pivot in recent weeks to be more MAGA-friendly.

The stock price and revenue for Musk’s other major company, Tesla, have been sinking as he marched in lockstep with Trump. The public has expressed its revulsion and anger at DOGE’s actions even as Republican leaders continue to back the effort. [Musk has lately expressed alarm over Trump's tariff policies.]

But even while Trump’s closest billionaire allies are losing money due to his chaotic and catastrophic tariff policies, they are raking in billions from the government he now leads.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Elon Musk

GOP Strategists Fear 'Mounting Voter Frustration' Over Musk Misconduct

It’s not all sunshine and roses for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) among Republican voters, The Hill reports.

“Republicans are facing mounting voter frustration with Trump administration cuts” spearheaded by the tech billionaire, The Hill’s Julia Mueller writes.

GOP strategist Alex Conant, who served as Marco Rubio’s communication director in 2016, told The Hill that voters “haven’t necessarily heard about the benefits”of DOGE, warning “there’s gonna be political costs” if the department slashes services Republicans support.

“What Republicans should be concerned about is Musk’s effectiveness,” Conant said. “If DOGE actually breaks things that people care about and rely on, there’s gonna be political costs to that.”

Republican strategist Doug Heye warned that DOGE's efforts to slash jobs throughout the federal government will eventually show in “real job losses.”

“There’s gonna be real job losses that we’re not measuring yet, but we’re going to in the coming weeks and months,” Heye told Mueller.

Heye added the losses will have an “an impact, especially in specific communities,” and could make “life harder for the reliable voter, typically, for Trump.”

“That kind of slow burn, I think, could have an impact,” Heye added.

University of Delaware political science professor Dannagal Young said with the GOP’s near-total control of the government, “what really matters is what is going on in Republican districts with Republican voters who have Republican lawmakers who are representing them.”

Young said the trust Republicans have in Trump isn’t necessarily translating to Musk — despite the billionaire being “aligned with the Trump agenda.”

“The trust in Musk, in DOGE, while still higher among Republicans, is not ginormous,” Young noted.

“I would love to be a fly on the wall to hear what it is that Republican lawmakers are saying internally about these pressures and what fears they may have about their own re-election prospects as a result,” Young said.


“I think that the more that Republican lawmakers are hearing from angry constituents, and the more that they become aware that these angry constituents are, in fact, Republicans who maybe voted for them just a couple months ago, I think that there’s going to be perhaps intra-party conversation about the extent to which Musk has been given the keys to the castle, and how their constituents don’t love that,” he added.

Read the full report at The Hill.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

'This Will Kill People': House GOP Guts Medicaid For Billionaire Tax Cut

'This Will Kill People': House GOP Guts Medicaid For Billionaire Tax Cut

By a slim 217-213 margin, House Republicans narrowly passed a bill Tuesday night that makes deep cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps while simultaneously extending President Donald Trump's tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans. Wall Street Journal congressional reporter Olivia Beavers tweeted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had a group of Republicans "shaking his hand, back slapping and congratulating him" after the vote was confirmed.

As Politico reported, the vote was initially slated to fail with multiple Republican holdouts expressing reservations about the scope of cuts in the bill. While the legislation makes $2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts, Forbes reported that roughly $800 billion of those cuts came from federal support for state Medicaid programs, which provide health insurance for low-income families. But some Republicans, like Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN), Warren Davidson (R-OH, Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Victoria Spartz (R-IN) wanted deeper cuts.

After Johnson and Trump both leaned on the four holdouts, three of them ended up flipping to support the bill, while Massie voted with the Democratic opposition. The Kentucky Republican explained that his primary hangup with the budget bill was that it added $20 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

The bulk of that debt comes from extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for the next decade, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) said was "skewed to the rich, expensive and failed to deliver on its promises."

"As a share of after-tax income, tax cuts at the top — for both households in the top 1 percent and the top 5 percent — are more than triple the total value of the tax cuts received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent," the CBPP wrote.

Democrats were united in their opposition to the bill, and made sure to travel to the House of Representatives chamber to cast their vote after Johnson made it impossible for them to vote remotely or by proxy. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) tweeted that she traveled to Washington to vote on the bill despite giving birth to her son earlier that day.

"They want to rip away health care from 400,000 CO kids, take food off the plates of seniors & veterans, and make life more expensive for hardworking Coloradans – all so they can give tax breaks to corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk," she wrote.

Political scientist and New York Times contributor Miranda Yaver condemned the bill in a post to Bluesky, pointing out that Medicaid "covers 1 in 5 Americans overall, including 41% of births and 63% of nursing home care." She added that the bill cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (also known as food stamps), which 41 million Americans depend on to afford groceries.

"This won’t just harm people. This will kill people," Yaver wrote. "They own this."

According to Bobby Kogan, who is the senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, the bill would "cut SNAP down to just $1.60 per person per meal on [average] while cutting taxes for the top 0.1% by $278k." He pointed out that the bill still has a major obstacle in the Senate, where Republicans are more reticent to green-light the tax cut extension and cut Medicaid. Kogan also reminded his followers that Trump's attempted 2017 repeal of the Affordable Care Act was finally halted in the Senate during the "vote-o-rama" amendments process.

Democratic activist Joe Katz opined that "all purple district Republicans" will have immense difficulty "trying to convince people this wasn't TECHNICALLY a vote for cutting Medicaid and SNAP to pay for billionaire tax cuts." Journalist and editor Jonathan Cohn asserted that Tuesday night's vote proves that "there are no moderate Republicans in Congress."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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