Elon Musk and Donald Trump's Feud Has Them Going for One Another's Heads
Elon Musk appears to want JD Vance to be president.
Published June 6 2025, 9:46 a.m. ET
After five months of working together in the White House, a rupture seems to have emerged between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The two spent much of the day on June 5 going back and forth on social media, which Musk suggesting that Trump is in the Epstein files and Trump suggesting that he should cancel all of Musk's government contracts.
Amid the barrage of back and forth, Musk even suggested that Trump should be impeached. Here's what we know about exactly what he said.
Did Elon Musk call for Trump to be impeached?
Given how close the two of them seemed to be at various points in the campaign, it might be shocking to some that Musk would call for Trump's impeachment, but he seemed to endorse the idea on X.
"President vs Elon. Who wins? My money's on Elon," Ian Miles Cheong wrote. "Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him."
Elon endorsed this idea, simply writing "Yes."
The deterioration between the two of them started after Trump said that he was "very disappointed" in the world's richest man. Musk has been a vocal opponent of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, in part because it stands to raise the deficit by trillions of dollars.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote on X. “Such ingratitude.”
Things really got heated when Trump started threatening Musk's government contracts, though, and Musk in turn suggested that the president was listed in the Epstein files, which is the reason they have not been released to the public.
Trump did release some papers related to Jeffrey Epstein, and the two of them were friends decades ago, but he has yet to be connected to any wrongdoing. There's a picture of the two of them together. It's not exactly a secret.
It's unclear where we go from here.
The alignment of Musk and Trump was a powerful force in American politics, but also one that caused some issues for Trump. Musk is not a popular figure, and his DOGE cuts were not popular either. This rift could help the president's approval, even as it might hurt to not have one of the world's richest men backing your party.
As for what this means for the future of the Republican Party more broadly, that's still unclear. Trump has been the North Star for the Republican Party for almost a decade, and he's the president for at least 3 more years. Musk, though, is the world's wealthiest man, and could singlehandedly finance campaigns and challengers wherever he wants.
As he learned in Wisconsin, putting money behind a challenger doesn't guarantee them a victory, but money certainly doesn't hurt either. Musk's government contracts might be at risk, but the billionaire still has plenty of money to play around with. It's also possible that the two of them will hug it out within a week. When you're dealing with dramatic people, the outcome is bound to be unpredictable.