Former White House chief strategist and MAGA stalwart Steve Bannon leaned into his tirade against Elon Musk after the world’s richest man got into a public feud with President Trump, warning the tech billionaire that “we’re going to go to f—ing war.”
“The president treated him almost like a son. He invited his family to Christmas dinner. He let him sleep over. He let him walk in and out of meetings,” Bannon, an ardent skeptic of Musk, said in an interview with Politico that was published late Thursday. “The president went to the max informality to welcome this guy.”
“You’re going to tell me we should allow some fucking punk to sit there and say he should be impeached and [VP] JD [Vance] should step in? F— you, dude,” the “War Room” podcast host continued. “We’re going to go to f—ing war, and I’m going to rip your f—ing face off.”
Hostilities between Musk and Trump were on public display Thursday with the two men trading blows on social media after the Tesla CEO slammed the GOP-backed megabill full of the president’s legislative priorities as an “abomination.”
Trump blasted Musk during Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s visit to the White House for criticizing the “big, beautiful bill” — the massive piece of legislation that is currently moving through Congress.
Musk fired back at Trump on social platform X, which he purchased in 2022, backing calls for the president to be impeached and Vice President Vance to take over as his successor. The tech mogul also accused Trump of being named in the convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein files.
Trump threatened to cut off billions of dollars of federal contracts with Musk’s companies, while the entrepreneur wrote that he would decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
Bannon told Politico that he hopes White House trade advisor Peter Navarro is “drafting executive orders even as we speak [to] implement the Defense Production Act to seize both SpaceX and Starlink and put them under government management until that time that all investigations into Musk are complete.”
As the bitter implosion was unfolding earlier on in the day, Bannon called for Musk’s immigration status to be investigated and for the billionaire, who was born in South Africa, to be deported.
“They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” Bannon said in an interview with The New York Times, published on Thursday.
Bannon also blasted the Tesla CEO during a “War Room” live webcast, saying, “Elon Musk is illegal, and he’s got to go.
“He’s illegal? Deport immediately,” he added.
Musk grew up in South Africa. He emigrated to Canada and later to the U.S., where he became a naturalized citizen. The Washington Post reported in October that Musk worked in the U.S. illegally while building his company, which later became Zip2.