We’ve clearly clarified that the Elon-Trump feud is real. I assume you’ve seen or heard about the back-and-forth social media salvos in which Trump has threatened to terminate Musk’s companies’ contracts. Musk has claimed responsibility for Trump’s election and claims Trump is in the “Epstein Files.”
Musk has now at least shown that he’s serious about this, not just whining about the “Big, Beautiful Bill” which the White House and the Hill mainly didn’t care about. This is a truly sui generis situation in the sweep of American history, in large part because we’ve never had a U.S. President who is governing in the way Donald Trump is or willing to do the things he’s willing to do. We’ve also not really — though here history’s analogs are less certain — had a plutocrat with Musk’s scale of wealth and hold over multiple critical industries. There are even fun side questions: who gets custody of Katie Miller? (Google it.)
So with all that said, I don’t pretend to know where this will go. But there are a few things that are clear. The first is that Trump’s threat to cancel Musk’s contracts is no joke. The irony of Musk’s libertarian anti-government song and dance has always been that his fortune and his empire are profoundly dependent on the U.S. government. Now that matters more than just a tweak from Dems saying he couldn’t have done it without U.S. government spending. An additional wrinkle to that part of the story is that the U.S. government is actually not in any position to cut off SpaceX. The U.S. government is now deeply, deeply dependent on SpaceX as its go-to near earth orbit launch service. There’s no alternative in the short and probably medium term. That’s precisely why the situation with SpaceX has always been such a dangerous one. There’s no alternative. The options the U.S. government has are some kind of expropriation or nationalization. Where that goes I don’t know. But I’m on very strong ground when I say that the U.S. government does not have a current option for delivering things to orbit at the volume and regularity SpaceX provides.
My overall sense is that Trump just has more cards than Musk does, even with his vast wealth and the communications platform of Twitter (X). And a big part of that is Musk’s dependence on the U.S. government as a central customer, certainly for SpaceX. Tesla isn’t selling to the U.S. government mostly, but it’s heavily reliant on regulations giving preferment to electric vehicles. To the extent Musk has already destroyed his brand for its target market (affluent liberals) in the U.S., he’s also highly dependent on U.S. trade policy.
It’s not entirely clear to me that Musk has many cards to play, as I noted earlier. He’s stuck out on the rightward fringe of the U.S. political spectrum when the transgressive, racist-nationalist, give-all-the-money-to-the-billionaires lane is entirely occupied by Donald Trump. A TPM Reader mentioned to me earlier that he thought people were underestimating how badly that New York Times drug story had damaged Musk. And I think he was right. I think that’s a big part of why Musk has looked weak and hapless in recent days.
Everyone knew that Musk took drugs. It’s actually part of his brand, part of the transgressive bro-culture thing. But there’s drugs and there’s drugs. The Times piece was about a middle-aged guy on an out of control tear, one drug to the next, cycling between eating binges and Wegovy, doing so much ketamine he was causing himself possibly permanent bladder damage. That’s not the billionaire smoking a joint live on a podcast. That’s “behind the music,” final act of Goodfellas kind of stuff. It doesn’t look strong or in control at all.
And yet for all of this, while I don’t think Musk can beat Donald Trump, he could still make a lot of trouble for him if he’s smart about it (a very open question) and willing to sustain a ton of damage to himself — perhaps even existential damage — in the process. We want to remember that Musk was at the heart of a vast criminal enterprise — with more criminal conduct than we likely even can imagine — in the form of DOGE. Mobilizing that against Trump is obviously a pretty tall order since Musk is implicated and did all of it. But that’s a lot of dirty laundry, a lot of legal vulnerability. And it goes way beyond DOGE. Musk isn’t in any position to criticize Trump for many of the things Democrats despise him for. But there’s a lot of criminal conduct he can hit him on. And this may be Trump’s greatest vulnerability: there’s a lot of stuff Trump is doing, hidden and in plain sight, that is not at all popular. Musk has the ability to spotlight it. He could probably make Trump’s crypto-bribery system, now in the open and yet mostly ignored, into something everyone in the country knows about. In fact, these two guys could both do so much damage to each other that I would not rule out the possibility that sometime this weekend we hear they made up and the whole thing is over. I’m not predicting that. I’m simply saying that the possibility of mutual destruction, or massive damage, is so great I don’t think we can rule it out.
The simple fact is that having a crazy man in your house is never good if it’s your house. So the more fighting, the worse it is for Trump’s political power in the U.S., even if Musk suffers even more damage. In other words, enjoy the show. It’s all good for the purposes of the future of the American republic.
