Trump-Musk spat, SpaceX’s Dragon and travel ban
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Today, the gloves are off. Elon Musk and Donald Trump go for the jugular, with the spat slamming Tesla stock and risking an unprecedented shakeup to the US space program. And why the Trump administration is leaving some countries off the travel ban list. It's Friday, June 6th. This is Reuters World News.

bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Sharon Raish-Garson in New York. And I'm Tara Oakes in Liverpool.

You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that.

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A., pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply. The bromance is over, and a brawl has broken out in real time on television and social media. Look, Elon and I had a great relationship.

US President Donald Trump criticising Elon Musk as the once close relationship between the world's most powerful man and its richest unravelled publicly. The on-camera comments came after Musk blasted Trump's tax bill earlier in the week as fiscally reckless and a disgusting abomination.

He knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody. And he never had a problem until right after he left. The pair then lobbing verbal barbs at each other on their social media platforms, with Trump threatening to cut off government contracts to Musk's companies and Musk suggesting the U.S. president should be impeached. Our reporter Trevor Honeycutt is following all the twists and turns.

It was pretty widely predicted, kind of both within Trump circles and just kind of the general public, that these two big egos could not coexist simultaneously forever. And so there's always been kind of a betting pool in D.C. as to how long this bromance between these two big

personalities could last. Senior Republicans and even White House officials have told my colleague, Nantita Bose, that they find this infuriating and deeply worrying that there's been this split at a time when the Republican Party is trying to project unity behind Trump's vision. Musk seems to have taken Trump's threats to cut his government contracts seriously, saying he would begin decommissioning SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft used by NASA.

Hours later, however, he appeared to reverse course. Responding to a follower on X urging him and Trump to "cool off," Musk wrote: "Good advice. OK, we won't decommission Dragon." Still, Musk's mere threat to abruptly pull its Dragon spacecraft out of service marks an unprecedented outburst from one of NASA's leading commercial partners. Sharon spoke to our Business of Space reporter, Joey Roulette.

Musk has many contracts, right, with the government. How dependent is the U.S. on Musk? The United States is extremely dependent on Elon Musk and on his company SpaceX for accessing space and for kind of right now being one of the world's top space powers. SpaceX plays a crucial role in that.

And that's with SpaceX's launch business. Its Falcon 9 rocket launches a majority of the Pentagon satellites into space, as well as NASA's science payloads into space. NASA picked SpaceX to use Starship to land humans on the moon this decade, although that program is facing changes because of this administration.

So Starlink is an incredibly massive satellite constellation that the Pentagon has sought to use as well. And the intelligence community is working with SpaceX to build its own kind of spy constellation that is somewhat similar to the Starlink system as well. So...

There's a lot of links and dependencies between the U.S. government and SpaceX. SpaceX has won over $22 billion worth of contracts with the U.S. government. About $15 billion of that is at NASA, and about the rest is with the Pentagon. So there's a very, very huge interdependency between SpaceX and the U.S. government. Musk and Trump have been trading barbs throughout the day on Thursday. So...

Is it possible to de-escalate at this point or to rewind? Yeah, that's the big question that everyone's really asking right now. And it's really how far is Trump going to go with these threats? I mean, he threatened to basically cancel all contracts from Elon's companies. That would be devastating to SpaceX and that would be extremely unprecedented. So it remains to be seen.

The war of words certainly inflicted damage on Tesla.

Common Crimmins is here with more. Investors dumped Tesla stock on Thursday as the back and forth between Trump and Musk got more acrimonious. And the electric vehicle maker ended the day down 14%, wiping $150 billion off its market value. Continuing this feud is very risky for Musk's business empire. The fear is that US regulators craft rules in a way that could single out Tesla's plans for its driverless cars.

With EV sales falling, Musk has reorientated Tesla's future around self-driving robotaxis, so there's a lot of investor sensitivity out there. The US and China will resume trade talks that both sides hope will resolve a host of issues, including tariffs and critical minerals. Trump and Xi spoke by phone for about an hour and a half. We had a really good conversation. By the way, he invited me to China and I invited him here. We both accepted.

An intense Russian missile and drone barrage overnight has killed four people in Kyiv. That's according to Ukrainian officials. The attack comes on the heels of a warning by President Vladimir Putin that the Kremlin would hit back following Ukraine's audacious attacks deep inside Russia earlier this week. The Trump administration is imposing sanctions on four judges presiding over the International Criminal Court.

The unprecedented move is retaliation over the arrest warrant issued by the ICC for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. At least 10 Israeli airstrikes have pummeled Beirut's southern suburbs on the eve of a Muslim feast day. Lebanese officials say the attacks violate a ceasefire deal.

We told you yesterday about Trump reinstating the U.S. travel ban, preventing citizens from 12 countries from entering the U.S. The ban also limits entry for people from seven countries. Trump says it's needed to protect against foreign terrorists and for national security. It'll be in effect on June 9th, though visas issued before then won't be revoked.

Our Deputy Foreign Affairs Editor Humera Pamuk is in Washington. We should keep in mind that the administration has been working on this since coming into office on January 20th. Reuters reported in mid-March one iteration, one draft of this travel ban list. So it's fair to say that this does not come out of nowhere. And it really fits into their overall policy, right?

How different is this from the ban during Trump's first term? So the number of countries are higher, obviously. The first iteration that we reported in March had 41 countries. This one has close to 20. And so in that sense, it's much more expansive. I think this ban also requires a state of constant negotiation.

The president has said there could be some changes. Other countries might be added. We can understand that some countries might get off it. We have been hearing from sources that he's opening the door for a permanent period of negotiation. If those negotiations go well, you can get off the list. And are we likely to see any legal challenges?

I mean, a lot of scholars that we've spoken to say the ban is likely to face legal challenges. Those lawsuits, they say, probably have an uphill climb because the latest ban contains various exemptions and it cites very specific security concerns with each country. Those lawsuits probably will have an uphill climb. You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington.

And before the weekend, a recommended lesson.

how China came to dominate the rare earth supply chain, and what Beijing's dominance and their export curbs mean for the rest of the world. That special episode of Reuters World News drops on Saturday morning. For more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show.