Musk-Trump Feud Shows Need to Tax the Rich

Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have gone from best of friends to brawling in the last 24 hours. Musk has called Trump’s signature tax bill a “disgusting abomination,” and Trump says Musk has “lost his mind.”

It’s tempting to pop some popcorn and enjoy the drama. But amusing as the mud wrestling might seem, the bigger picture is not at all funny.

The excessive wealth of billionaires like Musk gives them extreme power over our democracy. Musk used his billions to buy a social media platform and try to steer the election. As he himself tweeted yesterday, “Without me, Trump would have lost.”

Trump then gave Musk power to take a chainsaw to our institutions, fire hundreds of thousands of public employees, and destroy life-saving public agencies. Trump may now not want to talk to Musk, but that is little consolation to Southerners who can’t access federal emergency aid during hurricane season, senior citizens who can’t reach anyone at the Social Security Office, and schools that can’t offer lunch to hungry students, all services Musk badly damaged when Trump empowered him to do so.

Trump and Congress are now seeking to spend upwards of $3 trillion to further enrich millionaires and billionaires like Musk with tax cuts that go almost entirely to the top. The absurdly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) gives $124 billion in tax cuts to the richest 1 percent of tax filers next year, far more than what goes to a group 60 times as large that includes most middle-income and low-income filers. And more than $2 of every $3 in tax cuts from the bill goes to the wealthiest 20 percent. See how OBBBA increases inequality in your state here.

If we include the tariffs, which fall more heavily on low- and middle-income families, many Americans pay more than they save in tax cuts. And if we include spending cuts, the story gets worse still.

To deliver these tax cuts to the top, OBBBA would make the biggest cut to food aid in all of American history, taking meals off the plates of more than two million hungry children. The health care cuts in the bill would mean 22 million people have to pay more for insurance, 15 million lose it entirely, and 51,000 people would actually die, based on careful estimates of what happens when people can’t afford care.

The bill will hurt states and harm towns and cities, reducing the quality of our schools, roads, and safety services. It even sneaks in a special tax shelter for wealthy stockholders, allowing them to make a tidy profit by donating their stocks to private school voucher programs (weakening public schools and public services in the process).

Musk and Trump are now using a fraction of their money and power to take each other down a peg. And while big corporations should pay taxes (Tesla didn’t last year), we probably don’t all have to lose sleep over their public feud. What we should remember is that they’ve already used their immense riches to make our country and our lives much worse.

Here’s the upshot: our tax policies enable people like Musk and Trump to accumulate more wealth than anyone could ever use in a lifetime. They then use it to steer elections and shape public policy to further enrich themselves and others like them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Enough. Policymakers should reconsider the enormously destructive OBBBA and craft a tax policy that taxes the rich, makes our democracy more fair, and returns resources to the rest of us.

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