Two titanic billionaire egos couldn’t get along forever. Who could have predicted that?

I’m kidding. It was entirely predictable that Donald Trump and Elon Musk would eventually have a falling out. And boy howdy did they ever. Neither man is a stranger to divorce, and this week, their bromance devolved into a major spat splashed all over social media and front pages everywhere. It was what SpaceX engineers might call a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

The real news might be that their partnership lasted for the duration of Musk’s scheduled 130 days in government service, all the way up to Trump giving Musk a golden key to the White House in a fond farewell last Friday.

Yet the breakup began last week with Musk expressing that he was “disappointed” to see the massive spending bill dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Republicans certainly proved that Democrats don’t have a monopoly on giving legislation terrible names. There are welcome and necessary parts of the bill, like extending Trump’s 2017 tax rates and preventing the biggest tax increase in history, but in other ways, it’s kind of a stinker. It continues generally the same insolvent spending trajectory that Washington has been on for years now. As Musk put it, the bill “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”

I can’t read Musk’s mind, but that comment speaks volumes. If I were in his shoes, here’s what I’d think:

I prominently joined Trump’s campaign and spent nearly $300 million to help him win because I believed in his promises. I displayed patriotic selflessness by setting aside my work at several major businesses so I could focus on draining the swamp at DOGE, just as Trump has promised to do for the last 10 years. I endured Musk Derangement and civil terrorism, watching as my companies — especially Tesla — took a major financial and reputational hit due to my work, and now I’m less popular than ever. Thanks to forces outside my control, it seems that I overpromised and underdelivered in terms of DOGE savings, and I left my post as scheduled, wondering, what did DOGE really accomplish? Is this bill really the best Republicans can do? The more I think about it as I reflect on the last six months, that really ticks me off!

Essentially, Musk isn’t a politician, and he’s astounded at how hard it actually was to get Republicans on board with cutting a dime from the federal budget. Trump used to be a non-politician. Now he’s been one for a decade, and he knows that deals require concessions. House Speaker Mike Johnson has a razor-thin GOP majority, comprising competing groups that want very different things. “If I could cut $8 trillion in federal spending today, I would do it,” Johnson said Wednesday, “but I do not have the votes for that.”

Getting a bill through that chamber was not far short of miraculous, but it’s also why the end product is so ugly.

In any case, within a week, Musk went from being “disappointed” to calling the bill “outrageous” and “a disgusting abomination.”

In a series of X posts of which I’ll only highlight a few, he renamed it the “Big Ugly Bill” and shamed those who voted for it, urging voters to call their senators and congressmen, demanding that they “KILL the BILL.” He reposted old Trump tweets about spending and debt, asking rhetorically, “Where is this guy today??” He claimed Trump only won the election because of Musk — “such ingratitude,” he marveled. He polled his followers, asking, “Is it time to create a new political party?” He even posted “Yes” to a call for Trump’s impeachment and dropped “the really big bomb” that Trump “is in the Epstein files,” which is “the real reason they have not been made public.”

I can almost hear Will Ferrell’s character Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman” saying, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”

Memo to Musk: If Trump were in the Epstein files, that information would have been released a long time ago. Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have needed to pay for that phony dossier about Russian prostitutes.

Trump never takes a punch without returning five, of course. “Elon and I had a great relationship,” he said Thursday in the Oval Office. “I don’t know if we will anymore.” He claimed, “Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here,” adding that he suspects that Musk “only developed the problem because he knew we had to cut the EV mandate.”

(“False,” Musk soon retorted. Indeed, he has long supported ending the mandate, probably because it helps his competitors who may not otherwise even be making EVs.)

Trump wondered if Musk wasn’t now suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” like nearly every Democrat. “I asked him to leave,” he later posted on his own Truth Social. “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!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.”

After that comment, Tesla stock plummeted, losing $150 billion (14%) in valuation yesterday, though it has rebounded some so far today. Will Trump sell that Tesla he made such a show of buying?

Musk said earlier this year that he loved Trump “as much as a straight man can love another man.” Something tells me that’s no longer true.

There’s always a chance that this could be the 4D chess people think Trump plays. Maybe it’s a rallying cry for Senate Republicans to unite behind Trump’s signature legislative agenda, or, conversely, maybe it’s part of a strategy to blow it up and start over on something better. Perhaps it’s a way for Musk to completely separate himself from the Trump administration as he literally gets back to business.

Or maybe what you see is what you get, and two erratic men with colossal egos simply couldn’t get along anymore.

Then again, those aren’t mutually exclusive things. Today, it’s hard to see how this falling out helps anyone but Democrats. Tomorrow, we may see things in a different light.

“I support @realDonaldTrump and @elonmusk,” hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted on X, “and they should make peace for the benefit of our great country.”

Musk responded, “You’re not wrong.”

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Update: Faster than their titan tit-for-tat escalated, Musk is attempting to de-escalate his feud with Trump. According to Bloomberg: “Musk … eventually backed down when Tesla’s stock price tanked and his personal net worth crumbled by $34 billion, the second-largest loss in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the 500 wealthiest people on the planet. The only bigger one: Musk’s own wipeout in November 2021. Hours after saying he would end use of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, Musk reversed course and signaled there could be a cooling-off period with Trump. Tesla shares recovered some losses on Friday, but the damage to Musk’s business empire will be difficult to repair.”

On X, Musk posted, “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.”

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.