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Elon Musk admits he’s ‘disappointed’ in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ in first public break with president

May 29, 2025

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Elon Musk, President Trump’s former right-hand man and the driving force behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has publicly come out against the administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” in scathing comments.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told CBS News in an interview set to air in full Sunday morning.

The world’s richest man even shared his skepticism of the name of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a nod to Trump’s own description of what he wanted Congress to send him.

“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday he felt a “lot of things” in response to Musk’s comments.

“We will be negotiating that bill, and I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it,” he said, without elaborating on what he was frustrated with.

House Republicans narrowly passed the legislation 215-214 during an all-night marathon on May 21 after Trump’s personal intervention.

The bill must now go to the Senate, with GOP leaders hoping to have it on Trump’s desk by July 4, but changes to the text are expected as some GOP holdouts look for additional spending cuts and insist on preserving current rules around Medicaid.

Musk had spearheaded DOGE in the first months of the Trump administration, stirring public opinion over his initiatives to gut whole agencies and look for wasteful spending.

He has since departed the White House after his special government employee status expired, but Trump officials have stressed he will stay around to be an adviser.

“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he told the Washington Post. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

Musk made the remarks as he returned to Texas to be closer to the action of his other companies, including SpaceX and Tesla — the latter of which had been the target of violent left-wing attacks during his government service.

“People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool,” Musk said.

The South Africa-born billionaire also painted a pessimistic picture of the sclerotic federal bureaucracy, which he said was “much worse than I realized.”

“I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least,” he said, later adding: “There’s, like, so many situations where the computers are so broken, even in the intelligence world.”

According to Musk, even for as simple an operation as shifting “data from one computer to another, you have to print it out and then type it into the next computer. And this is just literally a thing that was brought to my attention.”