Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Elon Musk and Donald Trump attend a presidential campaign event at the Butler Farm Show, October 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.
I had been wondering if Elon Musk and Donald Trump would have a falling out. Two ultra-wealthy, ultra-corrupt, terminally online, megalomaniacal narcissists do not tend to make reliable partners. Augustus and Agrippa they are not. Yet until this week, they seemed to at least maintain a cordial front.
At the time of writing Thursday evening, the sequence of events went something like this. On Tuesday, Musk posted on Twitter/X that Trump’s enormous reconciliation bill was “massive, outrageous, pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination” that would jack up the budget deficit. On Thursday, Musk pressed the attack, complaining about the “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” and whining that he had bought the government fair and square. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he posted. “Such ingratitude.”
Trump responded on Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote. “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” he added.
Elon immediately escalated, posting that SpaceX would immediately begin decommissioning its Dragon rocket program, which is currently the only U.S.-based way to transfer astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (though he later walked that back), asserted that Trump “is in the Epstein files” and that “is the real reason they have not been made public,” suggested he would start a new political party, called for Trump to be impeached and replaced with J.D. Vance, and predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession.
No doubt there will be more petty, Mean Girls-esque drama by the time this article is published. But this is certainly a real dispute. They may patch things up later, or pretend to, but a fake conflict does not typically escalate to accusations of pedophilia right out of the gate. This is just what happens when people like Trump and Musk hold the reins of power.
A few initial observations about this slap fight: First, it is largely pretextual. Reporting indicates that Musk is upset that the bill does not have enough pork, namely the EV tax credits that have hitherto benefited Tesla, and a fat FAA contract for SpaceX. He has not breathed one word about the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the rich that are the actual reason the bill would blow up the deficit. If we take the “PORK” complaints at face value, Musk seems upset that Medicaid and food stamps were merely gutted instead of abolished entirely.
This is an object lesson in how government works when demagogues and oligarchs have all the power.
Second, Musk is correct that Trump is in at least some Epstein files; Gawker reported back in 2015 that he was included in the “little black book” of people who had traveled on his infamous private jet. Trump himself has been photographed and filmed partying with Epstein several times, and told New York in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy … He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” One Florida businessman told The New York Times that back in the ’90s, he said to Trump, “Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls,” but “Trump didn’t care about that.”
That said, Musk may not be innocent here either. Epstein reportedly helped his brother Kimbal Musk find a girlfriend, and Epstein claimed to the Times in 2018 that he had helped Musk find a new chairman for Tesla, though Musk denied it. Musk was also photographed with Epstein’s notorious fixer Ghislaine Maxwell in 2014, though again Musk claims he was photobombed.
But fundamentally, this is an object lesson in how government works when demagogues and oligarchs have all the power. Both Trump and Musk are aspiring autocrats, one with a propaganda death grip on a critical mass of disgruntled low-information voters, the other the richest man on Earth who also owns an important communications platform. Unlike, say, a union leader or political boss who represents and is therefore accountable to some organized constituency, they both have wide latitude to indulge their deeply erratic whims. Outside of a tiny minority of unhinged ideologues, nobody voting for Trump wanted to obliterate America’s scientific dominance, or to destroy America’s international reputation by killing millions of Africans, or to start a nonsensical trade war with every country simultaneously. There is no large organic constituency for any of this.
At the same time, both Trump and Musk are mutually dependent, and can therefore inflict serious damage on each other. Musk may be right that Trump would not have won without his money, but without Trump on the ballot money alone did not let Musk buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Musk is also right that NASA and the Pentagon have become totally reliant on SpaceX for their basic operations, but by the same token SpaceX depends on government contracts. Its Starlink service is reportedly somewhat profitable, but its future prospects of massive growth depend on the (dubious) prospect of government-funded missions to the moon and Mars. If Musk really tries to hold NASA and the Pentagon hostage, well, that has not worked out well for oligarchs in similar circumstances—but that won’t look great for Trump either.
That is government by ultra-billionaire and reality TV charlatan. Terrible, idiotic policies nobody asked for might only be stopped because two world-historical megalomaniacs could not sit down and hash out their differences.
