Marc Caputo Enumerates Four Reasons Musk Attacked Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

GEIST: “Marc, I want to start with you because you had the first reporting yesterday for ‘Axios’ about where this came from, this outburst from Elon Musk about the so-called big beautiful bill, which he said last week a bill can be either big or beautiful, but not both. So what’s driving his very public criticism of the bill?”
CAPUTO: “Well, we’re told that there were basically four inflection points for Elon Musk. There was the EV tax credit that was just referenced by Speaker Johnson. Starlink, which is a company that he owns, a satellite company, wanted a bid or wanted to control, we’re told, the FAA’s new air traffic control system. He was a special government employee. Again, it appears that he wanted to stay in that role and the White House told him, no, you can’t by statute. And then lastly, and most recently, and perhaps most importantly, relative to when he came out and said this, Elon Musk’s pick to be the NASA administrator, a friend of his or an acquaintance, Jared Isaacman, was summarily and unexpectedly canceled as Donald Trump’s pick on Saturday night. And there was a lot of suspicion that various White House staffers conspired to have this done as, according to one person who I spoke to, an FU to Elon Musk. And after that, it seems, and I’m told, and we see Elon Musk got very sour on the bill. He waited until White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was at the podium for maximum damage and then he released his post and just sort of wrecked the White House’s afternoon with what he said.”