Trump Threatens to “Take a Look” at Deporting Elon Musk
Donald Trump and his former First Buddy have reignited their fight over the budget bill.

The next victim of Donald Trump’s deportation crusade could be Elon Musk.
The president suggested Tuesday that he’s open to giving his biggest financier the boot, telling reporters before boarding Marine One that his administration would “have to take a look” at getting the South African out of the country.
“We might have to put DOGE on Elon,” Trump said. “You know what DOGE is? DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible. He gets a lot of subsidies.”
Reporter: Are you going to deport Elon Musk?
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 1, 2025
Trump: We'll have to take a look. We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? The monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies. pic.twitter.com/6I0OAIv7Js
The world’s richest man has become one of the most vocal opponents of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which would extend his 2017 tax cuts for millionaires and corporations at a cost to critical social programs such as Medicaid. But Musk’s frustration with the bill stems more from the initiative’s exorbitant price tag, which he claims is incongruent with Trump’s previous promises to size down government spending. On Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate legislation would increase the deficit by more than $3.9 trillion over the next 10 years.
Trump, however, suggested that Musk’s real reasoning behind his recent opposition of the administration was due to the termination of electric vehicle mandates.
“When you look at it, who wants—not everybody wants an electric car,” Trump said. “I don’t want an electric car. I want to have maybe gasoline, maybe electric, maybe a hybrid, maybe someday a hydrogen—if you have a hydrogen car there’s one problem, it blows up.”
“So I’m going to give that one to Peter,” Trump added, likely referring to trade adviser Peter Navarro.
(It’s interesting Trump says he doesn’t want an electric car, considering he staged a whole Tesla dealership at the White House for Musk in March. Trump promptly sold the Tesla he bought that day after he and Musk publicly broke up.)
Responding to the video Tuesday, Musk posted on X: “So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.”
Musk has spent the last several days elevating opposition to the bill and its contents. Late Monday night, the billionaire retweeted a post claiming that “ELON NEVER WANTED AN EV MANDATE OR SUBSIDIES,” pointing to a 2022 interview in which Musk argued that ending the electric vehicle mandate would improve Tesla’s performance.
He also shared graphs of America’s rising debt and questioned why both parties continue to raise the debt limit ceiling. He underscored that the conservative hoopla regarding undocumented immigrants receiving Medicaid was effectively a red herring, since it’s already illegal for them to do so, and posted a poll on X for his 221.5 million followers asking if the bill should be “allowed.”
“Removal of funding for enforcement of federal contempt of court orders is the actual crux of this spending bill,” Musk wrote. “This is nominally aimed at removal of illegal immigrants, but obviously also enables many other abuses of power by the President.”
An hour after the poll was shared, more than 65,000 respondents, or 64.7 percent, had voted “no.”