Billionaire Elon Musk said he was "disappointed" with US President Donald Trump's legislative push for a massive spending package, which includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks, saying doing so will only "increase the budget deficit".
"I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," Mr Musk, who recently stepped back from running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said.
"I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful but I don't know if it can be both. My personal opinion," he added.
Mr Musk, who is close to the President but appears to remain at odds with him over the issue, made the remarks during an interview with CBS News.
The Tesla CEO was referring to the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that would fulfill Mr Trump's vision for a new "Golden Age", led by efforts to shrink social safety net programmes to pay for a 10-year extension of his 2017 tax cuts. The legislation also seeks to ramp up border security spending, enforce Medicaid work requirements and roll back clean energy tax credits.
The bill was passed by the House of Representatives last week and will now move to the Senate. The mammoth package passed along party lines - 215 votes to 214 - after Republican leadership quelled a rebellion on the party's right flank that threatened its passage.
The legislation had faced scepticism from Republican fiscal hawks who say the country is careening toward bankruptcy, with independent analysts warning it would increase the deficit by as much as $4 trillion over a decade.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers has, however, made hugely ambitious projections, well outside the mainstream consensus, that the package will spur growth of up to 5.2 percent.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the bill "does not add to the deficit," and would actually save $1.6 trillion through spending cuts.
