Former President Donald Trump hit back at Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday night, slamming Tesla’s subsidies and Musk’s space ventures before claiming that he could have gotten Musk to “drop” to his knees to beg for government assistance.
Trump fired off a series of posts on his social media platform, Truth Social, less than a day after Musk laid into him on Twitter and said it was time for the former president to “hang up his hat” and “sail into the sunset.”
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless,” Trump wrote, “and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.”
Musk responded on Twitter with “Lmaooo.” He followed up with a meme depicting an old Simpsons character yelling at clouds.
MUSK SAYS TIME FOR TRUMP TO ‘HANG UP HIS HAT’ AND ‘SAIL INTO THE SUNSET’
The exchange is the latest in a growing feud between the two that started on Saturday when Trump called Musk a “bulls*** artist” at a rally in Anchorage, Alaska. The former president claimed Musk had previously said he was a Trump supporter and had voted for him, a claim apparently invalidated by the Tesla CEO’s recent assertion on Twitter that his vote for Mayra Flores as a Texas special election House candidate was his first-ever vote for a Republican.
Musk also said Trump should “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” adding in another tweet that “Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.” Musk then claimed that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) would easily beat Trump in 2024, insisting that “he doesn’t even need to campaign.”
Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.
If DeSantis runs against Biden in 2024, then DeSantis will easily win – he doesn’t even need to campaign.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2022
Trump concluded his message Tuesday night by saying Musk should “focus on getting himself out of the Twitter mess because he could owe $44 billion for something that’s perhaps worthless.”
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Musk companies Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp., and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. were found to have received $4.9 billion in government subsidies by 2015, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times. The billionaire’s companies have since received several billion in government contracts and subsidies, including SpaceX scoring a $2.89 billion contract with NASA in April 2021, according to Business Insider.
Twitter sued Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery on Tuesday, setting up a legal battle in which the social media giant aims to force the billionaire to follow through on his plans to purchase the company for $44 billion.
