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00:00The spectacular blow-up culminated in a Trump threat cut Elon Musk's government contracts
00:05and the world's richest man sharing a social media post calling for the U.S. president to be impeached.
00:12The Tesla boss is also claiming that the Trump administration hasn't released all of the records
00:17related to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein because the president is mentioned in them.
00:22Well, for the very latest, let's cross live to Fraser Jackson, our correspondent in Washington,
00:27who has been following events very closely for us.
00:30Good to have you back with us again, Fraser.
00:32This really has been an extraordinary public spat.
00:36It seems to have quietened down in the last hour or so.
00:38What is the very latest?
00:41A spat for the ages, really, Sharon.
00:44A complete public meltdown and showdown, really, between the world's richest man and the world's most powerful man.
00:51Let's set the stage and remember how we got here.
00:53Now, Donald Trump was asked about Elon Musk's opposition to his big, beautiful bill,
00:58the spending bill that he's trying to get through Congress at the moment.
01:02Elon Musk says it's going to add to the national deficit by about $2.5 trillion.
01:07And Donald Trump has pushed back against that.
01:09He said he was disappointed in Elon Musk's criticism.
01:13Elon Musk then responded to that saying, whatever, but then launched an online tirade on his social media platform,
01:18X, formerly known as Twitter.
01:20He even said, without me, Trump would have lost the election.
01:23Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.
01:28Such ingratitude.
01:29He started digging up old tweets of Donald Trump, who was talking about balancing the budget,
01:34saying that he missed that guy.
01:35He then put a poll on his Twitter profile saying,
01:38is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?
01:43Now, as of going to air, that poll now has 2.1 million votes on it, and 82% of those people have said yes.
01:51Well, Trump then fired back on his own social media platform, Truth Social.
01:56He said, Elon was wearing thin.
01:57I asked him to leave.
01:59Again, a massive departure from the happy families that we saw just last week in the Oval Office,
02:03when Elon Musk formally left his role as a government advisor.
02:06Trump then continued, I took away his electric vehicle mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars
02:12that nobody else wanted, that he knew for months I was going to do, and he just went crazy.
02:17Well, Musk then replied to that, saying such an obvious lie, so sad.
02:22But the biggest tweet that Elon Musk so far has produced then came around two or so hours into the spat.
02:30He said something about the Jeffrey Epstein files.
02:33Now, a quick history lesson on that, Jeffrey Epstein, the well-known sex abuser and trafficker, effectively,
02:40of course, his death in prison has long been the subject of conspiracy theories from people on the right.
02:46They say that he was effectively bummed off for knowing too much rather than having killed himself in prison.
02:52And the Trump administration vowed to look in and to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
02:57And when that happened around a month or so ago, they basically were a bit of a nothing burger
03:01for all the right-wing conspiracy theorists who believed there was going to be something in there.
03:05FBI Director Kash Patel also came out and said that there was nothing happening in those files.
03:11But Elon Musk then dropped a huge allegation, saying,
03:14time to drop the really big bomb.
03:15Real Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
03:18That is the real reason that they have not been made public.
03:21Have a nice day, DJT.
03:23Now, he then doubled down on that and said, mark this post for the future.
03:27The truth will come out.
03:28Well, since then, Musk is now calling for Trump's impeachment.
03:32Unclear on what grounds he's calling for that impeachment.
03:35But the president so far has not responded to this.
03:37He posted on True Social once since that allegation came out.
03:41But he tried to make it more about the big, beautiful bill again and stay focused on the policy.
03:45He's not responded to those allegations.
03:48The White House, my colleagues in the White House press pool, shouted questions at the president a short while ago, asking for response.
03:55He ignored those shouted questions.
03:57And Reuters is now reporting that the White House is holding an emergency meeting about this.
04:02So this has been a huge, massive public split between the world's richest man and the world's most powerful man.
04:09And this is very, very likely not the end of the story.
04:13And Fraser, people might be watching on horrified as events unfolded earlier.
04:17Some people might be entertained by what they've been seeing and hearing.
04:20But there could be a wider impact, couldn't there?
04:22We're already seeing that Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, is saying he'll begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft.
04:28So there could be consequences much wider than what we're initially speculating about tonight.
04:35Yeah, and Sharon, that is an important point to prove as well.
04:38That kind of got lost in the kind of wider swell of tweets from Elon Musk.
04:43But if SpaceX takes away its Dragon space crew rocket ship, effectively, the capsule that sends those astronauts to space, that has basically become the backbone of the American space program.
04:56They are using those Dragon capsules to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
05:01It basically is what NASA is kind of building its kind of future around.
05:05So if those government contracts that Donald Trump has now threatened to take away from Elon Musk, if those do indeed go away, then it's going to cost the American space race significantly.
05:18And, of course, Elon Musk is now saying prematurely, almost, that he's basically going to take them away anyway.
05:23So a major spat and a major kind of bump in the road for the American space program, for one thing.
05:28But the other company that Elon Musk owns that also gets American subsidies is Tesla.
05:33And we're really seeing the impact of this more widely in Tesla in the more immediate term.
05:39Their stock price down 14%, worth around $150 billion worth of value that the company has lost.
05:46So a significant spot between the two men.
05:48Fraser, for now, thank you.
05:49That is Fraser Jackson, our correspondent in Washington.