Musk’s friendship with U.S. President Donald Trump has taken a hit after the tech billionaire blasted the White House for “undermining” him and treating DOGE like “whipping boys.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO spoke to the press before launching a SpaceX Starship into the stratosphere on Tuesday night, May 27, and unleashed on Trump’s $3.8 trillion spending bill.
“It undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk bluntly told CBS.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it.”
Musk, who spoke to multiple outlets about the White House betrayal, went on to decry the treatment he and his DOGE henchmen had received.
“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he told the Washington Post.
“Something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”
Musk, who helped Trump win the election, had great presence in the White House for the first several months of Trump’s second term.
However, his arrival ruffled feathers both within the political establishment and among governmental employees, particularly when he set about mercilessly slashing jobs in an effort to root out wasteful spending.
This led to protests at Tesla showrooms and people burning Teslas. Subsequently, Tesla stock prices nosedived and reports emerged that the board was seriously considering replacing Musk.
“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Musk admitted in a separate interview with ARS Technica.
“It’s not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”
Musk then took aim at Trump by criticising the President’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both,” he said. “My personal opinion.”
The bill is estimated to add another $3.8 trillion to the national debt which currently stands at a monstrous $36 trillion.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he said.
“I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
The “Big Beautiful Bill” is intended to be an encompassing piece of legislation to allow Trump to move forward with much of his agenda, with policies ranging from tax cuts to immigration.