Where’s Elon? Trump and Musk’s predictable “breakup”

The end of the Trump-Musk “bromance” was as predictable as the sun rising in the East.

But the speed of the collapse and the vitriol unleashed was something to behold. The world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man—both billionaire narcissists and egomaniacs—attacked each other like scorpions in a bottle.

In the early days of online flame wars, “Godwin’s Law” tracked the toxicity of exchanges by how soon one flamer called the other “Hitler” or compared them to a Nazi. Among the MAGA set, those insults don’t carry the same weight. Some might even consider them compliments! So, Musk went in a different direction of accusing Trump of covering up his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker to the rich and famous.

Throughout the day on June 5, official Washington watched in various states of amazement as the online fight escalated, and Tesla’s stock crashed. By the end of the day, Tesla had lost $150 billion in market capitalization and Musk had lost about one-tenth of his net worth.

For opponents of Trump and Musk, it’s satisfying to watch the two chief clowns in the MAGA circus savage each other. But we need to step back and ask what this may mean.

The first question is whether the Trump-Musk breakup is real or whether it is just another episode in the reality TV White House. When Musk is calling for Trump’s impeachment, and Trump is threatening to end Musk’s contracts with the federal government, it seems serious. But Musk hasn’t yet spent any of his millions to campaign against Trump, and Trump hasn’t moved to cut Musk’s contracts yet.

So, there’s always a possibility that this cage match will end, and Musk will return to the fold. If erstwhile opponents of Trump are willing to grovel and debase themselves, Trump can welcome them back to the team. Ask “Little Marco” Rubio, who called Trump a “con man,” or JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler.” As secretary of state and vice president, Rubio and Vance are chief enablers in the Trump regime.

Whether that’s Musk’s future or not, just how and why the current situation developed is a key question.

From the Trump side, Musk was “wearing thin” his welcome, as Trump put it in one of his Truth social posts. In the early days of the regime, when Musk and his crew of 20-something acolytes were rampaging through federal agencies, Musk appeared as co-president. This caused friction with Trump and with cabinet officials like Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. There was no love lost between Trump’s appointees and Musk.

Musk came into Trump’s orbit promising his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) would root out $2 trillion in government “waste, fraud and abuse.” Instead, after DOGE marauded through one agency after another, stealing their data, ordering the liquidation of whole agencies and the firings of thousands of government workers, it could only document—at most—$160 billion in “savings.” Most of those savings will vanish as the DOGE cuts turn out to cost the government more to fix DOGE’s errors.

Therefore, DOGE was a failure on its own terms, but it succeeded (or is succeeding) in other ways serving Trump’s interests: illegally terminating programs and terrorizing thousands of workers. And putting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the “woodchipper” (Musk’s words), was both a sop to the xenophobic MAGA base and an end to the agency’s investigation of Musk’s corruption in seeking deals for his Starlink satellite firm.

There is plenty to criticize about USAID’s service to U.S. imperialism, but Musk and Trump aren’t concerned about that. Meanwhile, the destruction of its food aid and vaccination programs will cost the lives of thousands of children and adults. As Musk’s fellow billionaire Bill Gates put it, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

In a very short time—and due largely to the grassroots “Tesla takedown” protests that started in February—Musk became a major political liability to Trump. Musk’s “chainsawing” of the federal workforce and essential services, along with his embrace of far-right politics, transformed him into one of the most hated figures in global politics. Even Trump knew it was time to cut him loose.

Moreover, Musk’s association with Trump and his predations under DOGE had immolated the Tesla brand with its main customer base, affluent liberals. When Tesla Takedown protests in the hundreds regularly took to the streets of affluent suburbs like Walnut Creek, Calif. and Golden Valley, Minn., the Tesla board took notice. Tesla’s declining sales throughout Europe and the U.S. even led Tesla’s board to consider replacing Musk.

All of these, and more, reasons could explain why Trump and Musk were going to part ways. But the amiable May 30 retirement press conference, when Trump presented Musk with a golden key, gave way to threats and insults after Musk took to X to denounce Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” moving through the Congress as “disgusting” and a “pork-filled” “abomination”.

Of course, Musk did not object to the multi-trillion-dollar package of tax cuts because it threatens to throw tens of millions from health insurance or food assistance. He claims, along with other right-wingers in Congress, to be concerned with the bill’s addition of more than $2 trillion to the long-term national debt. As all conservatives who rail against debt and deficits, Musk would be happy to see more cuts to the social safety net if he can get his tax subsidies and the military can gobble up trillions.

It’s possible that Musk’s concern for the deficit is cover for more prosaic—and nakedly self-interested—objections to Trump’s (and the Republican Party’s) only domestic policy agenda, as Kelly Hayes summarizes here.

Trump withdrew the nomination of a Musk ally as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) administrator. Musk had expected his buddy at NASA to favor his SpaceX and Starlink companies. Trump sidelined Musk when other tech oligarchs accompanied him on his recent trip to the Gulf monarchies. And the “big, beautiful bill” cuts tax subsidies to electric vehicle manufacturers that helped to prop up Tesla when its sales slumped.

One of Musk’s tweets recounted that he spent more than $250 million to aid Trump’s election and that Trump was showing “ingratitude”. It’s doubtful that Musk’s money was the key element that swung the election for Trump in 2024. But the naked quid pro quo he implied shows how open is the corruption of government in the Trump era. It’s as if Musk was telling Trump, “Hey, bro, I spent a quarter of a billion dollars on you, and I expect the return on my investment.”

Musk got plenty from his West Wing sojourn, including the neutering of federal investigations into his corruption, and even the State Department’s open strongarming of foreign governments to sign contracts with him. But as a huge federal contractor, Musk could find himself in a similar position as Harvard and Columbia universities, if Trump decides to cut billions in contracts with Starlink or SpaceX.

Musk certainly has his own cards to play. He threatened to decommission one of his SpaceX rockets, which could impede the U.S. government’s ability to launch satellites and other payloads into space. But when evaluating threats like this, we should remember two of Karl Marx’s insights: first, that the capitalist class is a band of “hostile brothers” and second, that the “executive of the capitalist state” is merely a “committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.” This means that Musk may not have the running room he thinks he has.

First, his tech brethren like Amazon’s/Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and Open AI’s Sam Altman or Palantir’s Peter Thiel will be perfectly happy to screw Elon if Trump decides to invest in Blue Origin as an alternative to SpaceX or Open AI or Palantir as an alternative to Musk’s Grok or xAI. Second, the state (especially under a vindictive boss like Trump) still has many levers of power to bring Musk to heel. Perhaps Trump might be interested in looking into reports of Musk’s drug use, since federal law has strict prohibitions against it for employees of federal contractors.

The Trump-Musk alliance was the most public manifestation of the “shotgun marriage” that is the Trump regime: an alliance of “America First” MAGA nativists, Christian nationalist reactionaries and tech oligarchs that don’t always see eye-to-eye. Recall that Trumpworld erupted in controversy even before Trump took office. Then, the tech faction, including Musk and his then-DOGE sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy, fought with MAGA nativists over restrictions on H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. Against the MAGA racists who want to keep brown people out of the U.S., the Silicon Valley oligarchs are happy to encourage temporary visas for software engineers from Asia binding them to their employers.

There are many crosscutting interests among these main factions of the Trump regime. For example, the Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs hate Trump’s tariffs. But these are gospel to the America Firsters. For now, though, these factions remain mostly united. And that’s mostly because they hate the same people: trans people, pro-Palestine activists, government workers, “woke” liberal “elites” and the like. And while they are, in the argot of Silicon Valley, “moving fast and breaking things,” they seem to be a juggernaut.

If there is to be a reverberation of the Trump-Musk fight in the broader Trump project, the bill moving its way through Congress could feel it. It’s a monstrous bill in terms of its impacts on ordinary people, but it’s a Frankenstein’s monster assembled to keep all of Trump’s legislative enablers on board. The Christian reactionaries get Medicaid bans on gender-affirming care. The tech oligarchs get bans on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence. And the MAGA nativists get a huge expansion in the deportation industrial complex.

But the congressional majorities Trump needs to pass it are paper-thin, so any defection of any part of his support base could sink it. Recognizing this, Trump and his lackeys in Congress have jammed their entire agenda into this one bill. They want to make support for it to resolve as a single up-or-down vote on the full Trump agenda. For that reason, it’s still likely to pass with most of its worst provisions preserved.

But could Musk and his money cause Republicans heartburn as they try to pass the mega bill? Possibly, if he chose to mount a campaign. But if he’s true to what he says, Musk might approve of the bill if it became even more of a handout to the rich and a punishment to the poor. That’s why it’s beyond pathetic that at least one leading Democrat (California Rep. Rep. Ro Khanna, a prominent past Bernie Sanders supporter) is trying to move Musk and his checkbook over to the Democratic side. Now, that’s the way to revive the Democratic “brand”: ally with the most hated oligarch in the world!

The Trump-Musk feud is exhibit #1 of the rottenness at the core of U.S. politics.