President Donald Trump and his billionaire "first buddy" Elon Musk publicly split and immediately fell into an acrimonious feud, and CNN commentators discussed where that spat might lead.
The tech mogul formally exited his government role last week at an Oval Office event where the two men lavished praise on one another, but Trump turned on him Thursday in the same room after Musk had harshly criticized his "big beautiful" budget bill as a "disgusting abomination," and the pair have traded threats and insults online in the hours since their split.
"I have so many thoughts about this," said New York Times podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro. "So, you know, I think this is bad for Musk. I am, if you look at the history around the world of authoritarians breaking up with their oligarch buddies, those oligarch buddies don't end up in a good place. They either end up impoverished, imprisoned or dead. I'm not saying that that's going to happen to Elon Musk here, but the power is with the government. You saw Donald Trump immediately say, 'All right, we're going to take away your you know, contracts, we're going to, you know, punish you and retaliate,' and he has the power to do that."
"We've seen Donald Trump exercise that power, so, you know, I actually think this is a losing battle for Elon Musk," Garcia-Navarro added, "and the other thing I would say is that I think Elon Musk has realized that when he was given the the golden key, it was like being given one of those bad watches when you retire early, when they want you out the door – basically, he was taken advantage of. They wanted his money, they wanted his power, and now they're like, you know what, my friend, you've caused a lot of problems – here's the exit, and his response is, 'Show me gratitude.' Well, you know, money only buys you so much."
CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere wondered how the social media feud would be perceived if Trump and Musk were women or children.
"I don't know if we had a couple of tweens in place doing their running their Twitter accounts if it would look much different from this," Dovere said, "as the thing that it's sort of a stunning moment when you think about how often in politics we've thought about, like, well, what if a woman was in a position of power? Would they be too emotional? Look at what is going on here, right?"
"The girls are fighting," interjected "CNN This Morning" host Audie Cornish. "That was your pundit way of saying the girls are fighting."
"This is sexist and I don't like it," added Garcia-Navarro, smiling, as Cornish laughed.
"No," Dovere protested, "I think that it's, if this were two women fighting, it would be like, 'Oh, this is a catfight,'" but it's not. It's two powerful people who are having a very emotional, childish back and forth. But what's really going on here is that we don't know what's going to happen with this [budget] bill that has major changes to the way government works, whether it's Medicaid and SNAP benefits or what it will do to the debt. Also in all of this, what happened to getting to a solution of the Ukraine-Russia conflict? What happened to figuring out what to do about what's happening in Gaza?"
"All these things that we we all sit in our seats and watch the stories on TV," he added, "and I mean stories like the soap opera."
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