House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the Republican reconciliation bill after tech billionaire and recently departed special government employee Elon Musk called it “disgusting.”
“With all due respect, my friend Elon is terribly wrong about the one big, beautiful bill,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday. “We had a long conversation yesterday. He and I spoke for, I think, more than 20 minutes on the telephone, and I extolled all the virtues of the bill, and he seemed to understand that.”
Musk posted on X Tuesday that he “just can’t stand it anymore.”
“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” he wrote.
Johnson said he was surprised by Musk’s tweet, adding that it was a “mistake.”
“This is not personal, between any of us. I just deeply regret that he’s made this mistake,” Johnson said of Musk.
Johnson said that on his call with Musk, he “told him that we’re achieving not only all of our priorities, all the promises we made on the campaign trail, all the America First agenda wrapped into this legislation.”
Johnson also highlighted the fact that there are pieces of the legislation that could impact Musk’s business dealings at Tesla directly.
“I know that the EV mandate, very important to him, that is going away because the government should not be subsidizing these things as part of the Green New Deal. And I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said, referring to cuts in the House-passed bill to tax credits designed to incentivize electric vehicle purchases.
“We talked about the ramp down period on that, and how that should be duly considered by Congress, but for him to come out and pan the whole bill is, to me, just very disappointing, very surprising, in light of the conversation I had with him yesterday,” Johnson said.
Until last week, Musk had been working on the DOGE initiative to cut government spending.
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.