His passion died as it lived, on X. “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” Elon Musk posted in February, evoking Napoleon’s words to Josephine after he made his alliance with the tsar of Russia: “If Alexander were a woman, I would make him my mistress.” Now Musk is using X to call Donald Trump’s budget bill a “disgusting abomination” and to bang the table about the President’s well-known ties to the financier and child abuser Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock value is evanescing, the President is threatening to cut off Musk’s corporate-welfare payments, and Trump’s backers are calling for Musk to be investigated and possibly deported. (As the Bluesky user Deontological Warfare put it, “If the wheels had come off this thing any faster it’d be a Cybertruck.”) The whole situation, once again, echoed that of Napoleon after he broke with Alexander I, invaded Russia, was inevitably defeated, and got drop-kicked to the island of Elba, where he experimented heavily with phencyclidine and posted bitchy gossip about the Congress of Vienna. The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.
“I’m very disappointed in Elon,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “I’ve helped Elon a lot.” And perhaps there was a Trumpian magnanimity in allowing Musk to sink two hundred and fifty million dollars into the 2024 campaign, to demolish careers and essential services at the President’s behest through the Department of Government Efficiency, and to function as a sponge for much of the vitriolic public reaction to the Trump Administration’s war on democracy and justice. Presumably, Musk expected repayment of his loyalty in the form of favorable terms for his companies’ federal contracts and the occasional marketing event on the White House lawn. But Trump has been stiffing contractors for decades, and his obsession with optics was incompatible with his patron-supplicant’s unsettling behavior. On May 30th, at Musk’s stilted sendoff in the Oval Office, he sported a mysterious black eye and indulged in a very specific style of swaying on his feet—while clenched of jaw and dissociative of affect—that appeared less suited to the present-day White House than to a Slowdive concert circa 1991. (The Bluesky user News Eye added a reassuring caption to this queasily compelling footage: “It’s fine, he’s just got all your personal data.”)
In the course of Wednesday, Thursday, and into Friday, the Trump-Musk spat unfolded via press conference, Truth Social, and X (as @Fred_Delicious observed, “This is like kendrick vs drake but with two drakes”). Musk struck out harder but couldn’t land a blow, largely because his objections to the President—that Trump is fixated on tariffs that could be economically ruinous, that he advocates budgets that would drive up the deficit—were all common knowledge long before Musk told Joe Rogan that “if we don’t elect Trump I think we will lose democracy in this country.” With the Epstein allegations, Musk strained for the buzzy suspense of waiting for the Mueller report, or for Geraldo Rivera to open Al Capone’s vault: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files.” But Trump and Epstein’s association has been out in the open for nearly a quarter century; nineties-era footage of the gruesome twosome together at Mar-a-Lago, leering at a group of young cheerleaders, has been circulating since at least 2019. (“The Plan?” @theemmamont jokingly posted to X above a still of Nathan Fielder, in his “Nathan for You” persona, wearing a confident smile. “Spend millions to get a pedophile elected, and then tell everyone he’s a pedophile.”) On Thursday, when a reporter asked Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, about the Epstein allegations, she dismissed them as “an unfortunate episode from Elon.”
Trump has kept the upper hand so far, partly because of the Presidential bully pulpit, and partly because he has remained relatively understated. He acknowledged on Truth Social that, before departing the Administration, “Elon was ‘wearing thin.’ ” (A white-phosphorus puff of insult by America’s preëminent insult comic—the faux-genteel restraint of the quotation marks is perfect.) “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote in another post. These views may well have bipartisan support. In a large recent poll by the market-research company AtlasIntel, fifty-seven per cent of respondents were found to have an unfavorable view of Musk.
Of course, if a prominent individual in government with conservative or even reactionary views indicates their displeasure with Trump, that’s a signal to the Democratic Party that the center can hold, that a fanciful abundance of swing voters can be yet persuaded of the error of their ways. (This worked out great when, for example, Kamala Harris gave over several precious days of her short Presidential campaign to a right-wing former congresswoman.) Representative Ro Khanna, of California, espying an opportunity in the Trump-Musk fracas, urged Democrats to “be in a dialogue” with the lead assassin of DOGE. (Like movie dialogue? Or as some kind of literary device?) Representative Ritchie Torres, of New York, said, of Musk—who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories and seemingly performed Nazi salutes in public—“I’m a believer in redemption, and he is telling the truth about the legislation.”
At the same time, a Democrat must not appear to be too captivated by significant and consequential public conflict between the two most powerful and destructive men in the country. Though A.O.C. quipped, “The girls are fighting, aren’t they?” and Chuck Schumer workshopped a Taylor Swift joke, perhaps the most statesmanlike Democratic response is simply to roll your eyes, as Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, did via X: “When 15 million Americans lose their health care and plunge into personal crisis, none of them are going to give a shit about a made-for-clicks twitter fight between two billionaires arguing about who gets the bigger share of the corruption spoils.” It’s difficult to parse the meaning of this statement, given that the two billionaires in question are the ones plunging us into crisis.
As is usually the case, it was the rightward and reactionary forces in our politics who knew what they wanted out of what they were watching, and how to put it into words. Before Thursday was out, Steve Bannon was urging Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act in order to “seize SpaceX tonight before midnight.” (“lol the socialist revolution has begun,” David Dayen, the editor of The American Prospect announced on X). Discussing Musk with the Times, Bannon said that the Trump Administration “should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.” It’s likely that nothing will come of these stated desires, but they have value unto themselves for being clearly and forcefully articulated.
Trump and Musk may kiss and make up by week’s end—they may be simply “in a dialogue” of their usual stupid bullshit. (Ye, for one, is hoping for healing: “Broooos please noooooo 🫂,” he lamented on X after the fight became public. “We love you both so much.”) Or the rift may persist: on Friday morning, Trump told ABC News that, despite reports that he had a call planned with Musk, he was “not particularly” interested in speaking with “the man who has lost his mind,” and a White House official stated that Trump intends to sell the red Tesla he recently purchased. And yet, no matter how this plays out, I understand exactly what these awful people want, what they believe, what motivates them. I can’t say that for the other side, which only knows appeasement, rapprochement, and performed disdain. All they can do is watch.
They could at least try to come up with better jokes. Or some oratory—or dialogue! Just some good writing, before it’s only robots doing it. During Napoleon’s doomed Russian campaign, as he was entering Moscow, the Russian Army set the city on fire, which accelerated his defeat and downfall. “Mountains of red, rolling flames,” Napoleon recalled, of seeing Moscow burn, “like immense waves of the sea. Oh, it was the most grand, the most sublime, and the most terrifying sight the world ever beheld.” ♦
