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It was only a matter of time before the most powerful man in the world and the richest would have a spectacular falling out. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Trump, Musk and the inevitable break-up
In the Oval Office a fortnight ago, on behalf of his White House, the world’s most powerful man bade farewell to the wealthiest. Donald Trump and Elon Musk were, in this moment, still willing to perform magnanimously for each other and the cameras. Graciousness does not come easily or convincingly for either man, but Trump acknowledged Musk’s contributions and gave him some tack – an ornamental key to the White House. As chief of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – not, technically, a department at all but a razor gang Trump conceived by executive order – Musk had delivered “the most sweeping and consequential government reform program in generations”, the president said.
Say what you will about Musk, but he is an evangelical rationaliser of capital – a man who never quits thinking about how to maximise the efficiency of his various companies. He regularly patrols the floors of his factories, looking for suggestions of even the most subtle bottlenecks. Once, he demanded that safety sensors be removed from an assembly line because they were slowing production intolerably. Over many years, Musk has settled several lawsuits alleging unsafe and hostile work conditions.
His are the following maxims: “Delete any part or process you can” and “simplify and optimise”. This is the man who enforces, throughout his empire’s many arms, an “extremely hardcore” work culture – one of supremely long hours and ruthless peer appraisal. The idea, Musk holds, is that complicated design and manufacturing systems inevitably accrue inefficiencies and complacencies and that one must unsentimentally “extrude shit out of the system”.
And so, during the US presidential campaign, Trump pledged to appoint Musk to perform a colonoscopy upon the country’s public service. Both men agreed that it was sick with graft and that a purge of “waste and fraud” would yield some $2 trillion in savings.
The problem was that Musk had little understanding about the public service – other than the size of the generous government incentives that his companies have enjoyed for many years – and neither did those he employed to apply the razors. Little understanding and little care: DOGE cuts were as crude as their accountancy was flawed, and Musk stepped down as the White House efficiency czar having found only a small fraction of the “fraud and waste” that he promised to expunge. There simply wasn’t nearly as much as Musk had assumed.
Erroneous assumptions, flawed accountancy and outright misstatements (such as his assertion that the Social Security Administration’s retention of the names of deceased recipients had created a giant system of corrupt payments) were rarely, if ever, publicly acknowledged. The ferocity of DOGE was perhaps best illustrated by its treatment of the US government’s foreign aid program. USAID was a vast program whose remit included addressing global health threats such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. While it was arguably deserving of scrutiny given reports of waste from the Office of the Inspector General, DOGE didn’t reform its budget, they just killed it. The Center for Global Development now suggests that could contribute to the deaths of millions of people around the world.
For a time, the two men were inseparable. Musk became one of the most influential, and visible, presidential advisers. They made a show of their mutual bonhomie. They cracked wise together in public and attended cage fights together with their families. Trump bought a Tesla; Musk tweeted in February “I love @realdonaldtrump as much as a straight man can love another man.”
A weird and lurid dissolution of their partnership was inevitable. Both men are paranoiac, pungently egotistic and colossally insensitive. They possess two of the strangest and most influential egos in the world, and to assume their mutual compatibility was to ignore their own histories.
There was a great weirdness in the Oval Office for Musk’s farewell. As Trump sat at the Resolute Desk, Musk stood behind him rocking on his feet and radiating the latent kinetic energy of a spring. Perhaps he was enjoying some lush reverie or dissociation: that same day, The New York Times reported that Musk’s recreational drug use was much greater than he’d admitted, and that much like Hunter S. Thompson once had, he carried with him at all times a container of heavy pharmaceuticals. “We were somewhere around Washington on the edge of the military-industrial complex when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel light-headed, maybe you should drive the Tesla’ and suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like flying androids…”
The unnatural performance was made stranger by Musk’s black eye. Asked about this by a reporter, Musk answered that while rough-housing with his five-year-old son, X (full name: X Æ A-12), he’d invited him to take a swing at his old man. X obliged, Musk told us. “That was X that did that?” Trump said. “X could do it. If you knew X.”
A week later, the pretence of mutual regard was spectacularly shredded.
Elon Musk’s father was a rogue and a grifter; an abusive husband and dad who once described his parenting as “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy”. He was an engineer by training and crooked hustler by temperament, and to support his lavish tastes he traded in illegal emeralds and once tried to game the local casino’s roulette wheel with microwaves.
Whether through sadism or a sincere belief in the benefits of his “stern autocracy” – one can always justify the other – Errol Musk made a habit of demeaning his wife and children. Young Musk, already conspicuously awkward, retreated to the world of computers and role-playing games.
Trump’s father, Frederick, was a similarly stern and tyrannical domestic figure. Ruthlessly, he made a fortune building residential apartments in Queens and Brooklyn – avoiding Manhattan, unlike his son, because the prices were too high and its politics too baroque.
Fred Trump, like his son, would be investigated for fraud. Legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie would write a song about his racist tenancy practices. Though ruthless, Fred Trump was, in sharp contrast with Donald, anxious to present publicly as a quiet and diligent man. He was at pains to avoid the gauche or self-aggrandising, either in the design of his buildings or his personal tastes and behaviour.
Though Trump and Musk were born in different countries and to separate generations, and the latter has a far stronger claim to being a self-made success, it’s tempting to see them as an unstable psychological dyad. They had both long desired to become masters of the universe. Both men are caustic: Trump presenting as a kind of semi-addled Rodney Dangerfield insult comic, while Musk’s register is that of smirking teen sarcasm. They have both drawn upon and inflamed gothic conspiracy theories about “the elite”, and have done so via equally impulsive and unhinged posting. Trump and Musk are both obsessed with disloyalty, and are constantly purging their orbits of it, and both are unusually puerile. In fact, their puerility seems to have only increased as their power has grown – greater responsibility has done nothing to tame it.
Their breakup came this month with a public carnival of impulsive posts, as infantile as they were savage, and the tapping of the grotesque underbelly of American conspiracy.
The public trigger was almost reasonable. Musk had long had reservations about Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” – a compendious and contradictory attempt at budget reconciliation that proposes to raise the debt ceiling to better help fund a domestic missile defence system, and the resurrection of the incomplete US/Mexico border wall. The bill also provides for tax cuts, while severely cutting the provision of Medicaid. Those cuts are publicly unpopular and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, inconsequential to offsetting the grand expenditures the bill would authorise.
In fact, the CBO projected that the bill would add US$2.4 trillion to the country’s federal deficit over the next 10 years, and Musk – already furious about Trump’s aggressive imposition of tariffs, at considerable cost to his businesses – could no longer hold his tongue about something he thought was recklessly profligate. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk tweeted last week.
“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
Not only that, the bill will help drain America of foreign investment. Buried within its 1000+ pages is section 899, named “Enforcement of Remedies Against Unfair Foreign Taxes”. The provision would impose “retaliatory” taxes on the income of investors in the US tied to countries whose taxation regimes are deemed by the administration to disadvantage American companies. The additional tax can be up to 20 per cent upon what’s already paid – a major problem for foreign investment, not to mention the US$30 trillion market for US government debt, roughly a third of which is held offshore. Australian superannuation funds currently have about $400 billion invested in the US and if a new, cavalierly severe tax regime is imposed upon it, they may go looking elsewhere.
Musk’s hostility, of course, could not go unanswered by Trump. Via his own social media platform, Trump first expressed – with relative restraint – disappointment in Musk’s ingratitude. Things naturally escalated and soon the president was posting insinuations that Musk was insane and that the “easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts”.
In turn, Musk called the president a liar, demanded his impeachment, and suggested that, without his extravagant campaign donations, Trump would not have won re-election. Then came Musk’s mic drop. “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files,” he posted on his platform, X. “That is the real reason they have not been made public.”
Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier who hanged himself in a cell while awaiting trial for sex trafficking, possessed a thick book of golden contacts. A good part of the American imagination has long wondered what classified documents might reveal: who among the gilded classes enjoyed the favours and sordid networks of Epstein and his convicted pimp Ghislaine Maxwell?
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist in his first term, weighed in, saying that all federal contracts to Musk should be suspended, that he should be investigated for his drug use while a government employee, and that he was likely an illegal alien who should be deported.
A few days ago, there was a short admission of contrition from Musk – made, once again, on his social media platform. “I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,” he said.
This circus stopped being fun a long time ago.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "Dummy spat".
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