Oh gee, I don’t know: because it’s stupid? Because it was inevitable? Because the news media is trying to pump it up to make Trump look bad, when what the reaction to the tiff really does is make them as well as the Democrats cheering for Musk look far, far worse?
I put the old reliable cognitive dissonance scale up right away to save time. The President of the United States is almost always higher on the scale than whoever his critics are. This was less true for Trump than most Presidents in his first term, but not Trump II.
Americans generally defer to their Presidents and support them when they are being criticized. The Trump Deranged, who are essentially mentally ill, are a special case, but they were Musk-Deranged too, because he was seen as an ally of Trump. So they burned his cars, and pretended he was a Nazi. They demonized him, and now they think they can suddenly flip-flop on Musk without looking like the foolish hypocrites we all know they are?
All the so-called “feud” proves is that Musk’s ego has no bounds, and his neurodivergence occasionally eats his brain. Trump gave him added power, prestige and influence: he’s throwing it away. Trump, meanwhile, is playing this exactly right. Musk is in negative territory on the scale: the more he attacks the President, the lower he falls and Trump rises. The more Democrats suddenly embrace Musk, who was supposedly a Nazi, the cruel killer of children and the poor in third world nations, the mean job-cutter and a chainsaw budget monster, the worse they look. Trump will get credit for what DOGE did under Musk, and Musk looks like a turncoat and whiner to turn on his patron.
Let him start his own party based on the “unsustainable debt.” That worked out so well for Ross Perot, who was weird, but not nearly as weird as Musk. What Perot’s crusade proved is that nothing will make Americans care about the unsustainable debt, and it is unsustainable, until it crashes the economy, which it will. The parties are handing a time bomb back and forth hoping that they aren’t the one holding the thing when it blows up. The debt will keep growing, because we will never, never, start paying the principle down. We should, but we won’t. Controlling the deficit just means that the debt becomes more unsustainable more slowly.
Yay.
Shut up and make your cars and rockets, Elon. This isn’t helping.
Ethics Alarms 
What’s the chances that Musk being very vocally against the “Big Beautiful Bill” out of the blue is a ploy concocted by Musk and Trump to take the heat off of Musk’s companies?
It wouldn’t surprise me. That would be smart, what we think we are seeing is stupid.
Yup it’s certainly stupid, but it has effectively turned the tide, the left is no longer against Musk and he knows that the conservatives will publicly tar him a bit but not boycott his companies and burn down dealerships. It’s a perfect plan but it’s going a bit far. This would be a good one to follow until well after Trump is out of the White House to see how him and Musk interact down the road.
Steve, I was thinking something along those lines except the plan was to make Trump/Musk detractors react like Fembots to Austin Power’s MoJo.
If Musk hates the bill then he is against Trump so they like Musk. But Musk wants more Draconian cuts than Trump so Trump is seen as the better pick. In the end their hatred cannot find the right target and their heads explode.
While I would love to see the budget balanced by reducing government outlays and actual personnel, I am wise enough to know that you cannot just slam on the brakes with massive cuts at one time. The deficits and debt grew over time so it must decline over time. Congress should pass legislation that bars any new mandatory spending without a simultaneous elimination of spending somewhere else. PayGo does not work because it can permit using estimates of potential future savings from said funding.
The deficit hawks need to tell us which of their babies they will sacrifice as part of the deficit reduction and should not just say it does not cut enough. Those who want more services should be required to put on the table how much in new taxes their constituents should have to pay to get these benefits. It is too easy to demand to cut something to which you have not grown accustomed to getting just as it is too easy to demand someone else pay for the things you want to be given to you.
This occurred to me, too. The public backbiting is almost comical.
Perhaps Musk saves the country a second time, by fracturing the deranged Democratic extremists into the realm of the Green and Libertarian parties.
DODGE party being built from a 80/20 balance of mostly traditional centrist Democrats and fiscal Republicans.
This cartoon that Musk himself posted comes to mind. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/my-political-journey