President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested that the country’s immigration enforcement apparatus could be turned against erstwhile ally Elon Musk after the Tesla executive renewed criticism of the tax and spending megabill on which Trump has bet his legislative agenda.
Speaking to reporters as he departed the White House to visit an immigration detention facility in Florida, the president was asked if Musk, a naturalized American citizen who originally hails from South Africa, could be deported in retaliation for his attacks on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act under debate in the Senate.
He replied: “I don’t know. We’ll have to take a look.”
The president added that the administration might turn the quasi-agency once run by Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency, on his ex-friend.
“We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon,” he said.
Musk, who spent the first few months of the president’s second term as an unpaid Special Government Employee leading what was initially described as a cost-cutting effort that spiraled into operating more as a roving band of ideological enforcers who at one point fed the country’s entire foreign aid apparatus — the U.S. Agency for International Development — into what Musk called a “wood chipper” in a span of days, leading to the agency largely shutting down, left the White House in May after being denied a request to remain in that unpaid status for longer.
Since returning to the private sector, he has become a vocal critic of the partisan spending package Trump has touted as a vehicle to fund his anti-immigrant deportation operation and other GOP priorities without making use of the regular appropriations process that would ordinarily require buy-in from Democrats, particularly in the Senate.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has been lashing out on X, the social media platform he owns, to amplify critics of the massive spending bill and threaten to support electoral challenges against lawmakers who vote for the legislation on account of the bill’s negative impact on America’s national debt.
Trump has claimed that Musk’s opposition to the bill is driven solely by pique over the administration’s efforts to eliminate tax incentives intended to promote sales of electric vehicles such as the ones sold by Tesla.
Echoing a post on Truth Social in which he threatened to cut the massive government contracts on which SpaceX — and to an extent Tesla — rely for significant portions of revenue, Trump repeated his claim that Musk is motivated by his own financial needs rather than concerns about debt and threatened once more to punish his former ally financially.
“He’s upset … that he’s losing his EV mandate … he’s very upset about things. But you know, he could lose a lot more than that. I should tell you, right? Elon can lose a lot more than that,” he said.
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