President Donald Trump on Sunday said his former ally, Elon Musk, has gone “off the rails” after the Tesla CEO announced he would form a new political party to rival what he described as a one-party system in the United States. 

Messrs Trump and Musk’s bromance degenerated into a public spat ever since the president sought support to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill, which would increase the U.S. debt ceiling by $5 trillion and cut off support for electric vehicles, a sector in which Mr Musk had heavily invested.

Following the passage of the bill, Mr Musk said, “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it! When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.

“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

In response, Mr Trump said he was “saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a train wreck over the past five weeks.

“He even wants to start a third political party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States.”

The president said he never hid his plans to cut off support for electric vehicles from Mr Musk, who funded Trump’s campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars last year.

Upon election, he entrusted Mr Musk with a new office, DOGE, whose assignment was to cut government spending on federal projects and initiatives.

Although Mr Musk said his grouse was that the president’s bill would reverse all his efforts at DOGE to slash government spending, Mr Trump said it was the bill’s lack of support for EVs that stung the Tesla boss.

“It is a great bill, but, unfortunately for Elon, it eliminates the ridiculous Electric Vehicle (EV) Mandate, which would have forced everyone to buy an Electric Car in a short period of time. I have been strongly opposed to that from the very beginning,” Mr Trump said in June.

“Elon was ‘wearing thin’, I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went crazy!” Mr Trump added.

Still, Mr Musk insisted the bill was a bomb waiting to explode and that it would harm the U.S. economy. 

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country! Utterly insane and destructive,” the Tesla boss wrote in a post on June 28.