Trump says he will ‘take a look’ at deporting Musk as feud reaches new height

Donald Trump said he would “take a look” at deporting Elon Musk after his former ally renewed criticism of the tax and spending megabill on which the president has bet his legislative agenda.

As he departed the White House on Tuesday to visit an immigration detention facility in Florida, the president was asked if the Tesla billionaire – a naturalized American citizen originally from South Africa – could be forced out in retaliation for his attacks on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act under debate in the Senate.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “We’ll have to take a look.”

Trump also hinted he might turn the quasi-agency once run by Musk, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), on his former friend.

“We might have to put Doge on Elon,” he said. “You know what Doge is? Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.”

Musk 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.

Doge’s efforts led to the agency largely shutting down, and Musk 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, Musk has become a vocal critic of the partisan spending package Trump has touted as a vehicle to fund his anti-immigrant agenda 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 (Twitter), 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 claimed Musk receives “more subsidy than any human being in history” and suggested that the centibillionaire “would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa” without federal support, 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,” Trump said. “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.

For his part, Musk has declined to respond directly to the president’s threats thus far. But in reply to a post on X highlighting the video of the president threatening deportation, he suggested that he could do so in the future.

“So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now,” he said.