Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other Trump tech allies have slowly been turning on his big beautiful bill. And earlier today, Musk took to X to post his thoughts, calling Trump's outrageous pork-filled congressional spending bill, he said it was a quote, disgusting abomination. For more, we've got Yahoo Finances Ben Werschkul. Ben, we were just talking about deficits and how that's been more of a talking point for market participants, but it's not just market participants, right? It's big tech and Elon Musk really going public here uh with his displeasure.

Yep. For sure. Yeah, Musk has made his opinion on this bill. He had some comments last week that he was disappointed with the bill, that he didn't like it, but this is a flurry of four posts this afternoon that really are next level. You you mentioned some of the choice words he has, but it was a it was a bunch of posts including a retweeting of a Congressman who a Republican Congressman who said Musk is right. So he's And I think that's the most important thing in terms of what happens with this bill is that it does tap into a growing concern about the fiscal cost of this bill. This is a bill that analysis after analysis shows is going to add $3 trillion to the to um to the national debt over the coming decade if it's passed as is. It could go higher um if it's amended going forward. And the White House immediately tried to kind of cast off Musk's criticisms with um the White House Press Secretary Karin Le saying Trump already knew Musk's position, but this is a real kind of war of words that's now set to get up um in the in in the weeks ahead with Musk kind of leading this this side against the the fiscal sides of this. Uh one more reaction for you just a moments ago was Mike Johnson who who of course shepherded this bill through the House of Representatives, said he sort of said Elon Musk is totally wrong and suggested that it's part of his business um interest here that there's there's parts of the bill that would take out EV credits and suggesting that could be a reason for it. It doesn't quite make sense with the overall fiscal point that Musk is trying to make that this bill simply costs too much. But but it's definitely Trump and Musk on opposite sides now going forward of this bill.

I I'm curious, Ben, how do you think a post like this by Musk, which is obviously so public and so sharp. How do you think it it's taken on Capitol Hill by American lawmakers and specifically I I'd be curious what you think how senators react to it. Do you think it carries do you think it carries great weight and they say, hey, okay, this is this is a guy who's estimated worthier $424 billion or do you think listen, you know, you're not even around anymore. You've gone back to work at Tesla. How How do you think it plays?

Right. I think it I mean I think if there's any time that this is going to play highly, it's right now. Um Trump after all has been spent months and months talking about what a genius Musk is and aligning him so closely with the mega movement that Musk still has a lot of sway there even though as as you noted he he did his last day as a special government employee was was last Friday. One of the one of the Congressmen who immediately retweeted him is the sort of leader of the one of the leaders of the fiscal conservatives. His name is Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The kind of question is how many more jump on there. The senator to watch here is Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who's been kind of who's been sort of leading the efforts in the Senate to amend this to overcome overcome some of the fiscal challenges here, but he hasn't responded to it as of yet, but the question is sort of how many senators kind of can he rally to his side in in the wake of this Musk post.

And Ben, just quickly before we we shift gears, um what are the changes that those senators are considering to sort of trim some of the size of the bill? Where where would that come from?

So there's yeah, there's there's about three different areas that that are cost savings in the bill, changes to them to the Medicaid program, these green energy credits that Mike Johnson brought up, um and as well as a few other changes. So they they're trying to kind of expand all those. Uh the food stamp program, the Snap program is is the other aspect. And sort of the conversation right now is is increasing those some. I think the bottom line, at least in the current conversation is there's no there's no scenario where we get to a bill that that decreases deficits for real on net um because it's sort of doing these three these three levers to a certain extent, but but you it's really hard to overcome this this three trillion price tag that the bill has. And the tax cuts of course remain very popular amongst Republicans. Musk isn't speaking out directly against the tax cuts. Um that has a lot of support amongst Republicans and so cutting those would be very hard.