The male loneliness epidemic has struck once again, with tech oligarch Elon Musk and President Donald J. Trump going their separate ways after a roughly year-long friendship based on unprecedented political spending and mutual corruption. C’est la vie, n’est pas?
Supposedly, the cause of this bromance breakdown was the “big, beautiful” tax bill Trump is looking to push through Congress, which Musk has complained — accurately, for once — will increase the national deficit by trillions. But longtime observers of the former “First Buddy” and the commander-in-chief have always suspected that their political alliance wasn’t built to last. Two erratic, vindictive, spotlight-hungry billionaires convinced of their own greatness occupying the White House together? Far more efficient to have just one.
To that end, Musk last week stepped down from his role as the de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which had accomplished its goals of arbitrarily firing thousands of government employees and killing hundreds of thousands of children abroad by freezing international aid. Appearing in the Oval Office with a black eye that he claimed was the result of his five-year-old son punching him in the face, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO received a chintzy decorative gold key for his efforts, with Trump promising that Musk was “not really leaving” the administration and would continue to advise from afar while tending to his neglected business empire.
Alas, for all that awkward theater of mutual respect, by the following Thursday the pair were beefing like Bravo TV stars after a few bottles of chardonnay. Trump told the press that he was “very disappointed” in Musk for criticizing the tax bill and suggested the oligarch was suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” then Musk posted on X that he deserved the credit for Trump winning the 2024 election, bemoaning the president’s “ingratitude.” Trump fired back on Truth Social that he’d gotten sick of Musk and told him to leave, and suggested the government could cut spending by canceling his companies’ federal contracts, which are worth billions. By this point, Tesla stock had plummeted about 15 percent, and Musk was ready to go thermonuclear. After he mused on X about creating “a new political party in America,” he announced, “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” The feud had officially turned into “Drake vs. Kendrick for Republicans,” as one X user put it.
This is not the first time Musk has angrily smeared someone as a pedophile, and odds are, it won’t be the last. While the Epstein “files” as right-wing conspiracists describe them are essentially a figment of their imagination (the administration’s pretense of disclosing explosive new information about the late financier Jeffrey Epstein‘s sex trafficking operation has yielded humiliating failures), Trump’s years of close association with Epstein are so well-documented that it’s a wonder Musk believed anyone might be surprised at this accusation. Yet the substance of this attack is almost beside the point: Musk was more than happy to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect a man he apparently regards as a sex offender when he stood to benefit — the post merely signaled a point of no return with respect to their diplomacy.
Liberals and leftists contemptuous of both Trump and Musk cheered the open hostilities as an entertaining bloodsport, with one comedian declaring it “our two dumb motherfuckers fighting day” in a meme edit of the climactic speech from Independence Day. On the other side, Fox News host Jesse Watters was left looking for ways to cope, insisting that the two were “blowing off steam” and speculating that they could “patch things up,” seeing as J.D. Vance once compared Trump to Hitler and still wound up his vice president. Conservatives quickly began taking sides, with fiscal hawks backing Musk and Trump loyalists holding their ground.
It was last July, minutes after a failed assassination attempt on Trump during a rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, that Musk first jumped aboard the MAGA bandwagon, bringing other Silicon Valley elites with him. He formed the Super PAC America PAC, channeling their wealth (and his own) into the presidential race, and finally took the stage with Trump in October, where he jumped around as if he were a Kindergartner who had been informed he could have an extra 20 minutes of iPad time. With Trump’s victory across all the swing states that America PAC targeted with an legally dubious lottery promotion that triggered multiple lawsuits, Tesla shares soared, and Musk became the highest-profile member of Trump’s inner circle — to the profound annoyance of those who had been there first. Following the inauguration, he spun up DOGE, tanking his image and his brands with a reckless and destructive assault on the administrative state that involved settling scores with regulators. Trump, in his boundless sympathy, staged a Tesla demo in the White House driveway in an effort to prop up his pal’s struggling automaker, though he still aimed to end electric vehicle tax credits.
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Of course, Musk’s affection for Trump was always contingent. In 2022, he argued that Trump should “sail into the sunset” rather than run for the GOP presidential nomination once more, prompting Trump to blast his “driverless cars that crash” and “rocketships to nowhere.” He had initially backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 primary contest. In the end, however, Trump was his best hope for thwarting an array of government probes into his corporations.
Now, as that arrangement of convenience implodes, everything seems to be on the table. Musk is in favor of impeaching Trump and replacing him with Vance, who is intimately connected in the world of tech and venture capital. He’s also threatening to decommission the SpaceX cargo ships that resupply the International Space Station. Meanwhile, Trumpworld influencers including Steve Bannon are calling for Musk to lose his security clearances, face investigation for drug use, and be deported as an illegal immigrant. Even if none of that happens, Musk is suddenly more exposed to federal enforcement actions, like an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission civil suit over his purchase of X back when it was Twitter (and noticeably lighter on Nazi content).
Surely this rift was a foregone conclusion — as inevitable as the fact that it’s playing out in trollish statements on social media from guys who throw tantrums at the slightest pushback. The whole thing might be an embarrassment to the nation, but it’s also about as American as it gets.
From Rolling Stone US
