Musk responded with personal insults after Sean Duffy announced plans to seek proposals from Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin for the Artemis mission.

Elon Musk has a new nickname for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy: “Sean Dummy.” The childish name-calling, a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s political style, does not appear to have landed quite as firmly as “Crooked Hillary,

Elon Musk went off on X this week after President Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary, and interim NASA head, Sean Duffy took a public swipe at SpaceX. Duffy told CNBC on Monday that Musk’s company was falling “behind” on the administration’s timeline to get Americans back to the moon.

The awards highlight the company’s continued dominance over Pentagon space contracts, despite Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump’s public falling out earlier this year.

Blue Origin, the pet project of billionaire Jeff Bezos, has a shot at becoming the first private company to land humans on the moon.

In an appearance at the Italian Tech Week earlier this month, Bezos expressed his optimism when asked about humans living in space. "I believe we’ll have, you know, in the next kind of couple of decades,

Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation and acting administrator of NASA, appeared on CNBC on Monday to say that SpaceX had fallen behind in its effort to return Americans to the moon with the Artemis program. And SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was not happy about it.

The US Space Force awarded SpaceX five of seven critical military launch contracts totaling $714 million, reinforcing its dominance in Pentagon space missions. United Launch Alliance secured the remaining two missions for $428 million.

SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk lobbed criticism at NASA’s interim administrator Sean Duffy, taking high-risk shots at a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet as the nomination process for the agency’s top job intensifies.