BURSTSome members of Congress believed the implosion of President Trump's relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk was so inevitable that they were wagering on how long it would last, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) suggested Thursday.
"We had wagers going on the floor: Is this relationship going to last three months? Is it going to last six months?" Gonzalez told CNN's Kaitlan Collins in an interview. "I don't think anyone thought it was going to last a year."
"I don't think you needed to be a genius, though, to foresee that this eruptive and public display of divorce was going to happen at some point," he added.
Starbase, Texas — the new city that is the cite of Musk's SpaceX headquarters — is in Gonzalez's district. Trump threatened to pull Musk's lucrative government contracts for the aerospace company and his other companies after their fallout. The tech billionaire also suggested he could decommission the spacecraft used to transport cargo and crew to and from the International Space Station.
"Obviously, that would be devastating for SpaceX, and obviously many other programs that Musk is running," Gonzalez told Collins.
Trump and Musk publicly traded barbs on Thursday in an explosive end to their previously tight alliance, with cracks beginning to show in recent days as Musk blasted the House GOP's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" — a key component of the president's domestic policy agenda for his second term.
The tech mogul lobbed a series of accusatory posts on social platform X, which he also owns, that attempted to link Trump to wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein — who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges — and claimed credit for the president's 2024 election win.
Meanwhile, Trump spoke openly of their emerging feud during previously scheduled press events at the White House.
"Elon and I had a great relationship, I don’t know if we will anymore," he told reporters.
Despite the tension, Musk signaled late Thursday that the heat between the two could cool.