17 thoughts on the Trump-Elon feud
This was nothing if not predictable. But is it the world's funniest social media spat, or a seismic event for American politics?
Believe it or not, from research to final publication, the average Silver Bulletin newsletter takes something like the majority of two full working days: let’s call it 12-16 hours of work. This … is not one of those newsletters. I’ve got an hour here. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are feuding, and it’s escalated to the point where Elon is alleging that Trump “is in the Epstein files” while Trump has suggested that he’ll cancel “Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts”.1
The Internet hasn’t been this excited since the Luka trade.
But obviously this story could have far more profound implications for the future of American politics. So I’m going to do the best I can with a list of off-the-cuff thoughts.
Above all else, this is predictable. In my Trump predictions post, I estimated a 70 percent chance that Musk would tweet critical things of Trump by the 2028 midterms, and a 90 percent chance that DOGE would fail to cut at least $500 billion from the federal budget.
Musk has claimed that “without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate”. This is dubious. Musk donated around $300 million to Trump, but the influence of money on presidential elections is generally overrated as campaigns spend long past the point of diminishing returns (and Trump’s win was close-ish in the swing states but not that close). Elon’s money certainly didn’t help in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, for instance.
The effect of turning X from a left-leaning to right-leaning platform is harder to quantify, however. The platform formerly known as Twitter is gradually declining in importance but still dwarfs its competitors, particularly Bluesky, which has been in steady and steep decline since a surge around Trump’s election. We may get a natural experiment on Twitter’s influence here if Elon tweaks the dials to surface more anti-Trump content.
Likewise, Elon contributed to a vibe shift that is now very much imperiled, but which brought Trump success with certain types of voters, particularly young men.
Elon has more to lose for one simple reason: he’s a less popular figure than Trump. Musk’s favorability is -13.8 in our tracking whereas Trump’s approval rating has rebounded to a -3.7.
Elon’s unpopularity was a good reason for Trump to want him out — however much he did or didn’t help Trump during the campaign, he was doing him absolutely no good as a White House advisor. But that doesn’t mean a nuclear feud with the world’s richest man is in the White House’s political interest. It’s telling that Trump had initially been fairly gracious to Musk as compared with other people who have left the White House.
In the short run, there’s probably going to be way too much schadenfreude from Democrats for any sort of courtship of Elon. In the long run, people have short memories.
It’s not out of the question that Trump and Musk could kiss and make up. Trump recently said (in the context of foreign relations) that “I have never believed in having permanent enemies”.
Tesla shares were down more than 15 percent today, counting after-hours trading. Investors seem have two conflicting ideas in mind. On the one hand, they’d prefer that Musk tended to his businesses; Tesla in particular is struggling with competition from both Chinese and domestic automakers. The stock actually rebounded to some extent after Musk became less involved in the White House beginning a month or two ago. On the other hand, they were hoping that Tesla would benefit from favorable treatment from the White House. However explicitly vindictive Trump chooses to be, he’s probably not going to be doing Elon any favors from this point forward.
The conflict was escalated by Elon writing mean tweets about the GOP budget bill, calling for far more fiscal austerity, and this really could create big problems for Republicans. (The bill has already passed the House but was due for big changes in the Senate.) You can’t take either party’s commitment to deficit reduction seriously, but the GOP’s majorities are so narrow that if the handful of deficit hawks are emboldened in the least, the party is starting to fight a multi-front war, where some members are worried about cuts to popular programs, others want even more cuts, and then there are some third wheels who are concerned about issues like the SALT deduction.
The broader bromance between Trump and Silicon Valley was already starting to look like a bad bet for Silicon Valley, and I don’t know to what extent it will survive this. When I was reporting for On the Edge, Musk was still very widely respected in Silicon Valley even as his behavior was becoming more erratic. I don’t know to what extent that remains true now, but I’d expect some Lord-of-the-Flies-type groupchats.
Furthermore, even absent the Elon factor, the alliance was already strained because of issues like tariffs and immigration. Say what you want about Silicon Valley — On the Edge isn’t particularly kind to it — but it does have its fair share of people with a coherent political philosophy.
Although Elon may have won over Trump, a huge liability for him — and perhaps a sign of what I’ve called his “spiky intelligence” where the people skills aren’t very good — was his failure to build alliances with anybody else in the Trump orbit. Other Cabinet members were leaking all over the place about Musk, including a very extensively reported New York Times story last week on Musk’s alleged frequent drug use.
As a corollary to the above, I assume Trump wanted Elon out more than Elon wanted out.
At the same time, I’ll give Elon some credit for recognizing the mess he’s made for himself. When we launched our Musk approval tracker, he published a surprisingly self-effacing tweet that blamed the media but also acknowledged his own role in “digging my own grave”.
Musk today floated the idea of creating a “new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle”. Us cynical blogger types are supposed to be extremely dismissive of third parties, pointing to things like Duverger’s Law, the fact that independent voters have all kinds of miscellaneous political views instead of being committed centrists, and that the Electoral College disadvantages third parties because if nobody received 270 electoral votes, the election gets kicked to the U.S. House. But what if such a party is backed by hundreds of millions of Musk’s bucks and an incredibly influential social media platform? At a time when Americans are really fed up with the status quo? It’s a long shot, to be sure. But maybe not quite as much of a long shot as the conventional wisdom holds.
With that said, Musk is probably not the right leader for such a political movement. He has no particular eye for which issues resonate with voters, he’s too mercurial, he isn’t popular, he has all sorts of personal liabilities, and Trump’s experience with him could suggest to other politicians that taking his money comes with a lot of strings attached.
If you want more, Elon was the main subject of Risky Business this week, though I’ll note that we taped the episode on Tuesday before the latest news.
Strange capitalization reproduced from Trump’s original.
I’m more amused than anything. I have some sympathy for Musk because he’s 100% right on the bill on the merits so breaking people on principle is always a plus in my book.
That being said: Musk fucked up. Supporting Trump was a stupid idea and he got nothing out of this; Trump used Musk and then dumped him. Shocking I know (narrator: it was not shocking), but this was a hilariously short marriage of convenience.
I get that both-sidesism has become a big part of your brand, but the repeated suggestion that the parties are equally hypocritical about deficit reduction is downright disingenuous. We've now lived through multiple cycles of GOP leadership tanking the economy while exacerbating deficits with tax cuts and increased military spending. The succeeding Democratic administrations have had to embrace aggressive stimulus to stave off recessions, and then have endeavored to moderate spending while raising taxes on higher earners and businesses. The filibuster has rendered increasing revenues nigh impossible, so it becomes a one-way door. Democratic spending priorities are also more inherently stimulating, given the programs and beneficiaries they target, and thus exacerbate deficits less than GOP actions.