Elon Musk goes on tirade after NASA said it will seek moon landers from SpaceX rivals

SpaceX founder Elon Musk took aim at NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy on X, after Duffy announced that NASA will open SpaceX's moon lander contract up to competitors.

NASA’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, seems to have provoked the ire of Elon Musk.

Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, took aim at Duffy on Tuesday in a flurry of social media posts, attacking his intelligence and recent efforts at the helm of the space agency.

“Sean Dummy is trying to kill NASA!” Musk wrote on X, which he also owns, using an insulting nickname to refer to the acting administrator. In a separate post, he said: “The person responsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ.”

Duffy announced Monday that in NASA’s quest to return astronauts to the moon — and to do so before China puts its own bootprints there — the agency is open to using moon landers from competitors to SpaceX.

NASA’s plan had been to use SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket system, which is in development, to land on the lunar surface.