Former Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Elon Musk are going for the jugular in their escalating feud.
Bannon lashed out Friday after Musk polled his 220 million followers on X about launching a third party—the “America Party”—to challenge President Donald Trump and the GOP.
“No, brother, you’re not an American. You’re a South African,” Bannon said on his The War Room podcast. Musk has been a U.S. citizen since 2002, but Bannon has repeatedly tried to cast doubt on the billionaire’s immigration status.
Mocking him as “Elmo the Mook,” the MAGA podcaster fumed, “You should be deported because it’s a crime of what you did—among many.”
Musk promptly responded on X—the site he bought and often turns into his personal battleground, most recently to spar with Trump during their breakup.
“The fat, drunken slob called Bannon will go back to prison and this time for a long time,” he wrote. “He has a lifetime of crime to pay for.”
Bannon, who helped run Trump’s first campaign in 2016, was released from prison in October after serving a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
During Trump’s second term, he has stood out among MAGA allies for refusing to cheer on the president’s now-shattered alliance with the Tesla CEO, slamming Musk’s efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), calling out his drug use, and saying that the world’s richest man doesn’t care about working class voters.
“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 told The New York Times in June.
Musk in return has called Bannon a “r——d liar,” “dumber than a doorstop,” and “truly peak r—-d.”
The billionaire has been hammering Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which Congress narrowly passed Thursday, because it balloons the national debt. The bill also rolls back Biden-era green energy tax credits, potentially hurting Tesla.
