It started with a tweet. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” wrote Elon Musk. Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill was a “disgusting abomination”.
What followed was a remarkable – and remarkably public – feud between the world’s richest man and the US president: insults were traded, threats were made, shares in Musk’s publicly traded companies plummeted.
It was quite the turnaround for the pair. Last year, Musk had given Trump’s re-election campaign more than $280m in donations. And only two weeks ago, when Musk stood down from his position in Trump’s administration, the two were still insistent that their relationship was good.
Yet even then, as the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent Andrew Roth reports, there were signs of tension. And as he tells Michael Safi, they were about more than a clash between two big egos, but over the future direction of the Maga movement itself.
