Trump and Musk's nuclear break-up

Their billionaire bromance turned out to be a situationship, and now they're publicly tearing at each other's throats.

Credit: Getty Images

I was incredibly annoyed last week to realize I hit publish on my post about Elon Musk possibly stealing Stephen Miller’s wife right before Elon showed up for his farewell presser in the Oval Office with a black eye, which he blamed on his 5-year-old son X Æ A-12 (pronounced “X Ash A Twelve”), and rolled his eyes around looking zooted out of his mind. It seemed like the drama was really escalating there for a moment—but then Trump heaped praise on Musk and insisted that Musk was leaving on great terms and would stay involved in the administration. And it seemed like maybe those two weren’t actually having any kind of falling out, despite whatever beef Musk might be having with Miller on a personal level.

But in the week since, Musk and Trump have been throwing some low-level shade at each other that has escalated into a full-blown public war, as of this afternoon. The men have been at each other’s throats today to an extent that I really don’t think could be faked by them, considering the size of their egos. And this display has me reasonably convinced that our nation’s two most destructive billionaires have actually turned on each other, and that whatever honeymoon period Trump had allowed Musk to enjoy in Washington for buying him the 2024 election has come to an abrupt end.

Let’s briefly recap the break-up. On Monday, just a couple days after Trump gave Musk a fond farewell from the White House, WSJ reported that Trump lashed out over news reports that Musk’s baby, DOGE, could actually cost taxpayers more than it saves:

WASHINGTON—President Trump recently posed an evocative question to his advisers about billionaire Elon Musk’s promise to slash $1 trillion in government spending.

“Was it all bullshit?” Trump asked, according to administration officials, wondering whether Musk could have ever come close to the cuts he promised to carry out through the Department of Government Efficiency.

(To answer Trump’s question briefly: Yes, it was all bullshit. And you should read NPR’s incredible interview with a fired DOGE employee who admits that they found virtually no waste or fraud in the federal government, despite breaking into nearly every govt building and ransacking their records, and that he was stunned by how efficient it actually is.)

The day after this reporting was published, Musk unleashed on Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill that slashes Medicaid and food stamps, calling it a “disgusting abomination” on Twitter:

Musk had made it clear for a while that he opposed the bill because it increased the deficit, but this was a new level of gloves-off attack on Trump’s pet legislation, which he’s still trying to get through the House and Senate by the hardest. Axios reported the same day that Musk was actually angry that Trump had screwed him over on a few of his demands, including extending his term at the White House, despite having spent $300 million on the election. Trump essentially lost interest in Musk after Musk lost public favor and the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin.

This brings us to today. Musk has been digging up old Trump tweets from 2013 about how this country needs to balance the budget, using them to accuse Trump of hypocrisy. Trump then claimed in an interview that he had already shown Elon the bill he’s complaining about and that Elon was fine with it then, until he suddenly changed his mind and got mad. He accused Elon of having “Trump derangement syndrome,” which translates from MAGA lingo to suggest that someone people simply dislike Trump because they’re mentally unwell.

Elon then started rage-tweeting that Trump and the GOP would have lost the 2024 election without him and are ungrateful for his efforts. He posted a poll asking if it’s time to create an entirely new political party and suggested Republicans need to pick a side now between him and Trump. “Oh and some food for thought as they ponder this question,” he wrote. “Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years.”

And Trump finally went nuclear, threatening to pull the roughly $38 billion Musk receives in government funding.

I am frankly surprised that two spoiled billionaire narcissists managed to share power, to the extent that they did, for this long. And it will be incredibly entertaining to watch them use whatever money and power and connections they have to try and rip each other’s throats out. My money is on Trump for this first round, as he already seems to have played Musk like a violin.

That said, it’s certainly not ideal for a president or a political party to have made an angry, unhinged enemy out of the richest man in the world. But will Musk end up turning on Trump so hard that he becomes an ally to Democrats? Will he join the Lincoln Project and start funding blue candidates and writing op-eds about how he was wrong? Absolutely not, and if anyone even tries to suggest in my presence that the left needs to “learn how to embrace him” going forward I will absolutely lose my shit.

And to close a thread from last week, the Robert Pattinson sci-fi movie was awful.