Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: X
When Elon Musk joined Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2024, their various antagonists — liberals and progressives and each man’s factional enemies on the right — started making versions of the same prediction: Musk wouldn’t last long. The two were obviously “doomed to clash.” On Election Night, the prospect functioned as a dark coping mechanism (“Well, at least we have an inevitable and absolutely grotesque Trump-Musk falling-out to look forward to in a few months,” etc.), while reports of ego-driven tensions arrived with scriptlike inevitability. The prospect of a Trump-Musk blowup was instant Beltway wisdom. “The joke among some Trump officials is that neither man enjoys sharing the stage or power or acclaim — so the bromance could easily go sideways,” the Axios boys concluded in November.
The Trump-Musk alliance depends on Trump following Elon’s rules. Elon is more powerful and Trump knows it & his fragile ego won’t be able to withstand that for long. @TheRickWilson on @AymanMSNBC predicts what looks to be the inevitable: the breakdown of their partnership. pic.twitter.com/2ksw00s5oU
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) December 22, 2024
The meltdown, the whole world now knows, came in June. Before long, Musk was making Jeffrey Epstein accusations, threatening to decommission SpaceX rockets, and talking about a tariff-fueled recession:
Time to drop the really big bomb:@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.
Have a nice day, DJT!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025
As of Friday, Trump says he’s “not even thinking about” Musk, who has “lost his mind.” He may even be selling his new Tesla.
If the potential for conflict was obvious, the implicit outcome was glaringly clear: a humbling for Musk, who had inserted himself, and his money, into the election suddenly and shockingly. This wasn’t based just on the specific dynamics of their relationship, of course — it was precedent. One of the main things everyone remembers about the first Trump administration is how few people made it through as the president turned on those he had hired, appointed, or brought into the fold, up to and including his own vice-president. He hired, fired, and punished.
The thing about memories of the first Trump administration, though, is that they were generally formed in the aftermath of frequent blows to the head as the resident tweeted his way from scandal to scandal, churning through not just staff but he-can’t-possibly-do-that stories, the material realities of his term largely divorced from the weekly personnel crises and investigative reports that dominated the media coverage. For news-addicted liberals in particular, the effect was teasing and anticlimactic: Comeuppance and payback and karma were always trailing just behind; the tension of Trump’s hypocrisy and contradictions was always about to break the whole thing apart; and an underlying justice, be it an actual system of laws or a vague, invisible contraption built from morals and norms, was about to snap into shape, maybe even in the form of a literal jail. The closest thing to genuine catharsis the sizable portion of the public horrified by late-first-term Trump experienced was the election of Joe Biden. Trump had been vanquished, and the system had worked. Then, of course, he came back. With Musk’s help, he won.
This led, for some, to a resigned view of a president who, at the beginning of his second term, felt at once more powerful, more ridiculous, more dangerous, and less likely to be thwarted by lawsuits, reporting, or protest. This time around, from the view of these news-addicted liberals, it was Musk who would eventually suffer the consequences of all that scandal. For firing thousands of government workers and slashing lifesaving aid, he would pay with his valuable reputation; Tesla stock would crash and stay crashed; surely, after saluting like a Nazi, he would lose control of his companies or maybe end up deported or in jail. None of these theories is fully unfounded, but they can often feel hopeful. They also feel familiar, albeit with a grim adjustment: Last time, much of Trump’s opposition pinned its hopes on systems and processes and assumed they would unite with the latent power of civil society to deal with the existential threat of Donald J. Trump; this time, the main theory of Musk’s downfall isn’t an imagined confluence of various forces Right and Good — it comes down to Trump’s deciding that Musk is annoying.
As an outed investor in X, I appreciate what this kayfabe with the biggest accounts probably does for metrics 🤣.
But you took it a bit far today.
USA is VERY lucky to have both E and Pres Trump.
🇺🇸
— Joe Lonsdale (@JTLonsdale) June 6, 2025
I won’t go as far as some who have suggested this “breakup” is all a kind of show, a coordinated effort to part ways for long-term mutual benefit, all kayfabe and psyop. (A lesson of the first Trump term was that, as well as things tended to work out for him, the explanation, in hindsight, was never 4-D chess.) And I think Ross Barkan is right that a genuine breakdown in relations really could be a lot worse for Musk than for Trump, to the extent that such a thing matters. The general public sees Musk much less favorably than it once did, and his alliance with Republicans doesn’t seem as if it’ll durably make up for it at all:
It’s also quite possible these guys will really see this conflict through — again, these are two massively egotistical men who hold grudges and genuinely believe they should be in charge of the world. But there’s more than a hint of inauthenticity and showmanship here, particularly in the most attention-grabbing threats and insults. Is it shocking and sort of unbelievable to see Musk accusing Trump of association with Epstein? Sure, except that, by any reasonable definition of “the Epstein files,” Trump, whose name was in the black book leaked by Gawker all the way back in 2015 and who has flown on Epstein’s plane, been photographed with him, and called him a “terrific guy” who is a “lot of fun to be with” and who likes women on the “younger side,” is very much in them, meaning a version of Musk’s “really big bomb” has in some sense already exploded (amazingly, and unsettlingly, to no apparent effect). Is it wild to see the president threatening to manifest his opposition’s Musk-smackdown fantasy by canceling all his SpaceX contracts? Sure, except I doubt that even Musk fears Trump will really do it given how entangled the company is with the government and how dependent the country is on its launch capabilities.
It was clear from their first lengthy public interactions, in the form of an excruciating live interview on X last year, that their new public relationship would involve a lot of pretending to like or even to understand each other. Why should we assume the “breakup” of their “bromance” would be much more authentic? Why should this stretch of Musk’s increasingly erratic and unhinged output on X be taken at face value and not the rest, other than narrative temptation? It’s certainly wild to read about one of Trump’s old and trusted advisers telling the president that there should be a “formal investigation of Musk’s immigration status” and that he should be deported and SpaceX should be nationalized. But it’s somewhat less interesting when you remember that this undead adviser, Steve Bannon, was one of the first people Trump ejected from the White House in his previous term, just a couple of months further into it than we are into this one.
Yesterday, during the clash between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on X and Truth Social, global DNS traffic to both platforms surged, and was 20% higher than the previous week at 20:00 UTC. Truth Social was up 268% and X up 20%, with elevated levels continuing for hours. pic.twitter.com/L4nwQbyqOa
— Cloudflare Radar (@CloudflareRadar) June 6, 2025
A nasty public feud doesn’t need to have been orchestrated or stage-managed to make a queer sort of sense for both of them, and it’s completely compatible with a world where they’re driven by both contempt for each other and overriding self-interest. Trump got a few months of DOGE, which substantially crippled much of the government and set the stage for deeper cuts but which ended up deeply unpopular, and now gets to part ways with a guy whom even many in his own party see as an unappealing freak. Musk, who is less rich than he was a few months ago but much richer than he was a year ago, got to fire his own regulators, leaving DOGE behind with more contracts, a bunch of deputies in positions of power, and, perhaps, access to a whole lot of competitively valuable information and data. Plus, he now gets to claim he was simply too brave and principled to survive in a government he has long suggested basically shouldn’t exist. Musk seems genuinely surprised by the level of backlash he has gotten for his alliance with Trump, and he may not have anticipated how risky the relationship could become for his businesses. He could use a way out.
But given where they both stand now, the most obvious path forward — one that won’t provide much in the way of resolution, catharsis, or justice, no matter how long and nasty the spectacle becomes — would be to do what Trump usually does: Put on a huge show, get it out of their systems, forget or decide not to follow through on the harder parts, and move on to the next crisis as if nothing happened, a trail of disorientation and disappointed opponents in their wake, two insanely wealthy and powerful men whose interests, whether they see themselves as allied or merely stuck together, remain mostly aligned.
