Elon Musk has hit back at Steve Bannon after the longtime MAGA hardliner called on President Donald Trump to “seize” SpaceX.
Following this week’s nuclear fall-out between Trump and top campaign donor Musk—who until last week was also one of the president’s most important advisers—Bannon slammed Musk’s government cost-cutting efforts and called for him to be deported.
During Thursday’s episode of his War Room podcast, he also referred to a social media exchange between the former allies in which Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s government contracts, and Musk responded that SpaceX would “begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.
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“When he threatens to take one of the big programs out of SpaceX, President Trump tonight should sign an executive order calling for the Defense Production Act to be called and seize SpaceX tonight before midnight,” Bannon said.
Generally speaking, the 1950 act doesn’t give the government the power to “seize” companies. Instead, it allows the president to control domestic industries during emergencies by ordering companies to prioritize orders from the federal government, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The president also has the power to allocate materials, services and facilities for production, make loans or loan guarantees to companies, and prevent hoarding of necessary supplies.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have routinely used the act to place military orders, bolster domestic production of critical materials, and increase production of medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the CFR.
Rather than point any of this out, Musk responded to Bannon by calling him a slur favored by middle-school bullies—and MAGA culture warriors.
“Bannon is peak r----d,” the Tesla chief wrote in response to a post on the social media platform X. Under another post calling Bannon’s comments “authoritarian,” the Tesla chief repeated the slur, writing, “Bannon is a communist r----d.”
Ever since NASA officially ended the Space Shuttle program in 2011, it has relied on outside vehicles to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.
Originally, they traveled aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, but now, NASA relies heavily on SpaceX’s four-person Dragon capsule, which was developed with the help of government contracts.
Unable to help himself, Bannon also warned during Thursday’s show that a scorched-earth Musk would turn to backing Democratic candidates and “help steal the ’28 election, looking to imprison President Trump.”
Bannon was of course one of the leading conspiracy theorists leading the claim that Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election from Trump. He also predicted that Democrats would again “steal” the 2024 election.
