Steve Bannon splits with Elon Musk on key Trump policy in new interview

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon revealed in a new interview that he differs from Elon Musk when it comes to at least one key policy – tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

“I keep telling the wealthy, you’ve got to understand something: Unless this changes, you’re going to have a French Revolution in this country,” Bannon said during an interview with British newspaper The Times.

Bannon, whose show War Room has been banned from Spotify and YouTube for spreading misinformation, ultimately opposes tax breaks for billionaires, something President-elect Donald Trump has promised to do.

Bannon served four months in prison between July 1 and October 29 in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut after he was found guilty in 2022 of two counts of contempt of Congress.

Bannon failed to respond to a subpoena issued by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Bannon stance on tax cuts puts him at odds with Elon Musk – a new, prominent ally of Trump who helped secure the 2024 election – as someone who has previously demonized taxes on the billionaire class. Trump announced that Musk will partner with Vivek Ramaswamy to head up the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

In a 2021 post on Twitter, made before Musk bought the platform and renamed it X, Musk claimed, “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you.”

Musk made the post in response to engineer and blockchain worker Rick McCraken, who criticized the plan to tax unrealized capital gains, saying the changes would “slowly make their way down to middle class retirement investments over the next several years.”

“It will start with billionaires, then eventually millionaires, then the modest investments will get hit possibly within a decade,” McCraken wrote.

Newsweek reached out by email for comment on Saturday evening from Steve Bannon and Trump’s transition team.

Trump proposed tax cuts on corporations, cutting the tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that do not “outsource, offshore or replace American workers” and extending his tax cuts from 2017, which remained in effect throughout the Biden administration but are set to expire in 2025.

New tax cuts include his now-famous “no tax on tips” policy and ending taxes on Social Security benefits.

President Joe Biden, however, accused Trump of telling wealthy donors at a closed-door event in April that he would “give you tax cuts” by extending his 2017 program.

In comments made last year during an episode of War Room, Bannon demanded “massive tax increases on billionaires,” drawing a line in the sand between the ultra-rich and the MAGA movement.

“Let’s have massive tax increases on billionaires,” Bannon said. “The 499 of them are not MAGA, right, not MAGA at all. In fact, the large proportion are radical progressives. They made this mess…why shouldn’t they pay for it?”

Bannon’s comments followed Biden’s announcement that he would seek a 25 percent minimum tax on billionaires, seeking to include taxes on rising value of assets.

He also in 2021 insisted that government needed “to start increasing the marginal tax increases for the wealthy.”

“This is absurd. This is a scam. You’re being scammed, just like you were being scammed on free trade,” Bannon said after ProPublica’s report that found many of the country’s most wealthy individuals paid little or no income tax at times over the previous decade.

Lindsay Owens, executive director of the left-of-center economic think tank Groundwork Action, wrote in a Rolling Stone op-ed published earlier this month that Trump’s return to power would bring “even bigger handouts to the ultra-wealthy,” including individual tax cuts to the richest Americas, “further slashing the corporate tax rate … reducing taxes on capital gains, and more.”