Musk vs. Trump: A power couple tumbles into a messy divorce

It's splitsville for a global power couple. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are tumbling into a messy public divorce, with unusual political fallout.

Tension between the erstwhile Oval Office buds bubbled into open view Thursday, as they exchanged digs in public and on their own social media sites.

It got ugly, quickly. Within hours, Musk appeared to call for Trump's impeachment. Meanwhile, Tesla stock had plunged, as the market feared the president might punish Musk businesses.

The official cause of the breakup between the world's most powerful elected politician and its richest man was the hefty U.S. federal budget deficit.

Musk has been disparaging the president's signature budget bill since leaving his government role last week, fuming recently that the legislation will plunge the U.S. deeper into its debt hole. He called it "a disgusting abomination."

Trump's reply: Musk is just bitter. He suggests Musk is unhappy with parts of the bill that hurt his electric-vehicle business. He also suggests the Tesla billionaire misses the action in the White House.

And because this is Donald Trump's Washington, the chancellor of Germany happened to be seated in the room, witness to one side of the feud.

"Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we will anymore," Trump told reporters during a lengthy photo op Thursday in the Oval Office with Friedrich Merz.

"He's not the first. People leave my administration and they love us. And then at some point, they miss it so badly.... I don't know what it is. It's sort of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I guess they call it," he said.

"They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour's gone, the whole world is different — and they become hostile. I don't know what it is."

It degenerated from there.

Trump continued the dispute on his own social-media site. On Thursday afternoon, he posted on his social-media platform Musk was "wearing thin," and suggested he'd fired him.

"I asked him to leave," Trump wrote on Truth Social, to which Musk responded on X, formerly Twitter, "Such an obvious lie. So sad."

The president also uttered a thinly veiled threat: Trump wrote that one easy way to trim the federal budget is to cancel government contracts with Musk's companies, worth billions. "I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!" Tesla stock plunged abruptly, dropping 14 per cent within a couple of hours.