Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former White House chief strategist, has renewed his feud with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a top Trump adviser, calling him a “parasitic illegal immigrant” in an interview published online Tuesday.

Bannon made the comments in an interview with UnHerd, a British news site, that took place last week.

“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and playact as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions,” Bannon told the interviewer. He appeared to be referring to news reports that Musk, who was born in South Africa and who has become an aggressive voice against immigrants in the U.S. without legal permission, overstayed his visa as he built a company in the United States. Musk has denied the accusation.

Bannon has repeatedly criticized Musk, calling him a “truly evil person” before the inauguration last month and vowing to prevent him from having full access to the White House. But Musk, who initially irritated Trump with his omnipresence at Trump’s private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, during the presidential transition, has made himself invaluable to Trump as an internal enforcer of executive orders and efforts to aggressively cut spending and reduce the size of the federal workforce.

That has made Musk a particular target of Democratic elected officials and critics of Trump, drawing some of their fire away from the president who empowered him.

“It’s pretty evident the president’s using him as an armor-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state,” Bannon said in the interview. But he also described Musk’s work as “performative” and complained that Musk had not focused on the Pentagon, with which Musk’s private companies have many contracts. (Trump has suggested Musk will at some point look at Pentagon spending.)

Bannon Close to Trump Again

Despite his dramatic and fractious departure from the White House in 2017, Bannon became close with Trump again in the final year of Trump’s first term. Bannon is still a close ally and, more significantly, a popular figure within the Trump movement: His show, War Room, is watched closely by a number of Trump allies, as well as the president himself.

While Bannon has endorsed some of the efforts that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency group is taking, he has condemned Musk as not pure to the movement that propelled Trump back into office.

Musk has generally avoided responding to the jabs Bannon has made over the past few months. Two weeks ago, he posted on X, his social media website, an insult he’s used about a number of people in private discussions since joining Trump’s team.

“Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” Musk wrote. “What did he get done this week? Nothing.”

Neither a White House representative nor Bannon immediately responded to a message about the interview.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Maggie Haberman/Jefferson Siegel
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