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The political disagreement between President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk escalated into an open feud on Thursday, June 5, stirring up both traditional and cryptocurrency markets.

drama seemed to unfold after Musk publicly denounced Trump’s proposed Big Beautiful Bill on Wednesday. The billionaire called it a disgusting abomination in a June 3 post on the X platform (formerly Twitter). He added: Shame on those who voted for him: you know what you did was wrong. You know it.

The Big Beautiful Bill is President Trump’s administration’s major and controversial government spending proposal. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the bill would raise debt service costs by $551 billion between 2025 and 2034, increasing the overall deficit to $3 trillion over that period.

Trump responded by threatening to strip Musk’s companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, of billions of dollars in federal contracts. The easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to end Elon’s government subsidies and contracts, Trump wrote on Truth Social. It always amazed me that Biden didn’t do it!

According to a February Washington Post report, Musk’s companies have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax breaks over the years.

The feud escalated further when Musk claimed on the X show, without providing any evidence, that Trump’s name appears in classified government documents related to previously convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and that this is the reason the documents have not yet been released.

Experts say the confrontation has only added uncertainty to an already volatile market, especially in the cryptocurrency space, where asset prices often react quickly to news.

The public spat between Musk and Trump was entirely predictable, says crypto analyst Nick Pakrin, but given their impact on the news cycle, the markets don’t like it at all, and the situation is only likely to worsen as emotions escalate.

While the major cryptocurrencies recorded little movement in response to the feud – bitcoin (BTC) briefly fell 4.5 percent to $100,980 – it was the smaller memcoins linked to the two billionaires that experienced the most volatility.

On June 5, Trump’s official memcoin fell 12% to $9.50, though it has since recovered and is now trading at $10.63.

The MELANIA token has also fallen about 13% over the same time period. Notably, pumpfun launched a new memcoin dubbed KILL BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL (KBBB) on Thursday in response to Musk’s comments. The memcoin soared to $0.065 on Friday before falling more than 98% to its current price of around $0.001.

Meanwhile, the original memcoin, Dogecoin (DOGE), which is commonly associated with Musk after he actively supported it during the COVID-19 pandemic, has fallen about 10.5% as of June 5. DOGE has experienced a broader decline since late May, coinciding with Musk’s official departure from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

the Department of Government Efficiency is not an official government department – instead, it was created by Trump and Musk as an advisory body to cut government spending. At the time of his departure, Musk thanked the president on Site X for the opportunity to cut wasteful spending.

The evolving relationship between Trump and Musk illustrates how cryptocurrency markets are increasingly integrated with broader economic and political developments, Jonathan Rose, CEO of BlockTrust IRA, said in comments to The Defiant. Rose said the integration with broader markets is a sign of the growing importance of the asset class in the global financial ecosystem