Now, it has all gone sideways.
What
happened? A lovers’ quarrel over tariffs and taxes? Did the stock
market plunge too deep for Musk’s brittle ego to absorb? Is something
deeper brewing, something obscured behind the patriotic hashtags and
choreographed punch-ups?
The year of living deliriously
It
had become clear by late 2024 that Musk and Trump were locked in a
full-throttle bromance. Joe Biden, the US president and Democratic Party
candidate, had withdrawn from the race after a humiliating debate
defeat.
Musk, who once straddled the political centre like a yoga
teacher in an ethics class, had become a full-blown sugar daddy of
America’s Grand Old Party. He pumped nearly $250 million into Trump’s campaign and even joined rallies, belly on display, decked up in Trump merchandise.
In return, Trump gave him a ceremonial helm at the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, a bureaucratic fever dream intent on turning governance into a crypto meme.
Musk responded with what appeared to be an episode of Black Mirror written by Ayn Rand. Thousands of US federal workers were sacked.
Entire programmes gutted: the US Agency for Global Media, USAID, the
National Endowment for Democracy, Ebola prevention, food aid – all
tossed aside.
Trump called him a “genius patriot”. Musk called him “a friend”. For a moment, their union seemed unshakable.
Then came the snap.
The tweet heard around Wall Street
On
June 5, Musk, freshly resigned from DOGE and clearly nursing a bruised
portfolio, logged onto X and set the internet ablaze. He denounced
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (a title presumably conceived during a
fever dream in an Arby’s car park) as a “disgusting abomination”.
Musk claimed
it would balloon the US deficit by $2.5 trillion and reposted calls to
“fire all politicians”, including one sly repost calling for Trump to be
impeached.
Trump, as thin-skinned as ever, responded
on his Truth Social account like a jilted contestant from The
Apprentice: “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!.”
Within hours, as Reuters reports, shares of Tesla, Musk’s company that manufactures electric vehicles, plummeted by 14%, wiping out roughly $150 billion in market value.
So much for market stability. Or adult supervision.
Ego vs empire
Let
us be honest. Musk does not play second fiddle. He is used to rooms
full of nodding heads as he rants about AI, Mars, and the “woke mind
virus”. Trump, on the other hand, only shares the stage with himself.
Their fallout was inevitable. What made it explosive was timing.
Musk’s businesses are suffering. Trump’s tariffs have hit Tesla like a brick. Protests have recast
Musk not as a genius but a neo-feudalist with a rocket fetish. Turning
on Trump may have been a desperate attempt at rebranding: “Look! I am
still the edgy rebel billionaire. Down with the swamp. Up with the
vibes.”
Civil rights and democracy?
DOGE was a bloodbath.
Programmes supporting global health, media freedom, and human rights
were savaged. Federal workers were forced to justify their roles through
humiliating email chains. Musk’s supposed “free speech absolutism” on X transformed into coordinated censorship, especially against critics of Trump.
Yet Musk had no problem amplifying claims of “white genocide”
in South Africa and calling for punitive measures against the African
National Congress. It was a dog whistle so loud, it cracked glass in
Soweto.
Trump embraced these claims and offered refugee status to white Afrikaners, eagerly slotting the narrative into his anti-globalist, nativist pitch.
Neither man is shedding tears for democracy. They are simply fighting over who gets to drive the bulldozer.
The new party gambit
Now Musk is floating the idea of a new centrist party
in the US “for the 80 percent in the middle”. It is the kind of vague,
populist piffle that sounds profound until you realise it’s just a shiny
distraction.
Is he serious, or is this another Muskian fever
dream, like colonising Mars by teatime? A third party could be a vanity
project, a way to siphon off GOP voters miffed at Trump’s
deficit-busting ways.
But Musk’s track record, pouring millions
into Republican campaigns, suggests he is more likely to bankroll a
splinter faction than build a centrist utopia.
This tweet-roll, anyway, is enough to rattle a fragile GOP already torn between MAGA zealots and Reagan necrophiliacs.
More likely, Musk wants leverage.
So what now?
Musk is licking his wounds, firing off
erratic posts on X. Trump continues his deficit-fuelled joyride through
the US Congress. The bromance is over. The receipts are public. His
contracts with the US government are under threat. And, as always, it is
the public, Americans and otherwise, left footing the bill.
Civil society is disoriented. Markets are volatile. The so-called sensible centre has been reduced to a tweet thread.
What is the takeaway? There is none, really. No fresh insight. No profound lesson.
If
I were a trained psychologist, I might describe this clash as a case of
unresolved daddy issues and masculinity gone rogue. But I am a student
of policy and politics, so I would call it what it is: God complexes.
Musk and Trump are cut from the same cloth, narcissists who feed on
chaos and applause. Do not let the schoolyard insults fool you.
This
feud is a crack in the polished façade of American plutocracy. But it
could be anywhere – India, Germany, Brazil. Musk’s pivot to
critic-in-chief may be a genuine stand against fiscal lunacy, or it may
simply be a cynical manoeuvre to save his own skin. Trump’s threats to dismantle Musk’s empire could be the tantrum of an autocrat or a strategic bid to hold his base.
Either
way, democracy and civil rights are mere collateral damage in their
endless game of thrones. The bromance did not collapse over principle.
It collapsed over profit. Not because one of them grew a conscience, but
because their interests stopped aligning.
And if we are smart, we will stop watching the cage match and start noticing who is looting the arena while we are distracted.
Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate from the Willy Brandt School and Central European University.