He may be out of the White House, but former president Joe Biden has played a starring role in the messiest divorce in Washington.
Days before he went nuclear by calling Donald Trump’s mega-spending bill a “disgusting abomination”, Elon Musk blasted out a post that marked a key turning point for the president and his allies.
As Musk prepared to depart from his official duties at the Department of Government Efficiency, the Tesla chief and his electric vehicle company took to social media to warn that the “big beautiful bill” would gut clean energy tax credits and undermine Trump’s “drill baby drill” American energy revival.
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“Abruptly ending the energy tax credits would threaten America’s energy independence and the reliability of our grid,” Tesla wrote on its X account on May 28, which Musk then reposted to his 220 million-plus followers.
“There is no change to tax incentives for oil & gas, just EV/solar,” Musk added, once again highlighting the fact that clean energy was being gutted while subsidies for other sectors remained.
While it was hardly the scorched-earth tirade Musk has embarked on since, Trump and his allies were not impressed.
After all, here was a man who had been invited into Trump’s inner circle, to Mar-a-Lago and high-level Cabinet meetings, suddenly attacking the bill publicly for gutting a Biden-era initiative that Republicans had long viewed as a “green new scam”.
“As the president said, he was very disappointed with Elon,” a White House source told the Daily Beast after the pair’s bromance ended on Thursday.
The clean energy tax credits formed part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden views as a key part of his legacy.
“It’s the largest climate investment in history!” the former president would often boast.
But Trump’s mega-spending bill would put those credits on the chopping block, disqualifying Tesla electric vehicles from a $7,500 incentive at a time when the company’s sales have plummeted.
In a note to clients on Thursday, JPMorgan estimated that eliminating the EV tax credit could cost Tesla about $1.2 billion annually.
Trump has suggested that the loss of federal support for EVs led Musk to turn on him.
“I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social.
It wasn’t a “mandate” but a tax credit designed to incentivize investment in clean energy technology.
It also happened to be signed into law by the only person who has beaten Trump.
