Other than every interaction either of them has had with another living being in their entire lives, as well as every single thing that is true about either of their personalities, and everything that either of them believes about themselves and each other and all others and life and the world, and their being the absolute two worst people presently alive, there was no reason to think, or even to fear, that Donald Trump and Elon Musk would not remain loyal allies and strategic partners forever. Alas, the dream of lifelong friendship died on Thursday, in a cascade of insults and threats posted to their respective embarrassing social media platforms. I don’t know about you, but I’ll never trust again.
Things had been getting testier between the two for some time, as the Trump administration pursues certain policies—the ridiculous tariffs, for one thing, and “I am not going to dignify this shit by digging too deep into what else it might be” for another—at odds with Musk’s business interests. Musk’s reckless DOGE hacking spree both failed on its own terms and also left the administration at risk of actually delivering the crippled administrative state its supporters pretend to want or think they want but definitely do not want. Musk is known to be an opponent of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (sigh); he thinks it doesn’t do enough to shred the federal government, or anyway that’s been his public-facing complaint about it. More credibly he is upset that the bill eliminates certain tax deductions and credits associated with electric vehicle (EV) purchases. Anything that is bad for Tesla, his car company, is bad for Musk personally, as a huge portion of his wealth is tied up in company stock, and he used that stock as collateral when he borrowed tens of billions of dollars for his foolish purchase of Twitter in 2022.
Listen. Recounting the, like, political or financial reasons why Donald Trump and Elon Musk fell out is among the more absurd things I can imagine doing; for one thing it grants a conceivable alternative reality in which they were not always going to become enemies at some point. The ultimate and most salient reason Donald Trump and Elon Musk fell out is that they are, respectively, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Sure, yes: There may be proximate triggers for their having fallen out on Thursday, June 5, 2025, as opposed to some other time; there inevitably would be specific triggers whenever they eventually turned on each other. But they never were not going to turn on each other, because they are Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Anyway they did! At a Thursday Oval Office press availability pegged to his meeting with German chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump sniped when a reporter asked him about Musk’s criticism of the bill. First he referred to their “great relationship” in the past tense, then blithely suggested Musk is upset about the loss of EV subsidies his company depends on. Then he did the classic Trump thing where he insults someone by listing the favors they did for him—in Trump’s view, you are by definition a sucker from the very moment you do anything for him that he didn’t pay for in advance, and he is 100-percent right about that—while simultaneously dismissing those favors as worthless:
Elon endorsed me very strongly … he actually went up and campaigned for me—I think I would have won, Susie [Wiles, White House chief of staff] would say I would have won Pennsylvania easily anyway. … And if you saw the statements he made about me, which I’m sure you can get very easily, it’s very fresh, on tape, he said the most beautiful things about me. And he hasn’t said bad about me personally but I’m sure that’ll be next. But I’m very disappointed in Elon, I’ve helped Elon a lot.
I particularly like the bit at the end, when he suggests that Elon Musk is actually in debt to him.
That set off Musk. Soon after, on Twitter, he derided the bill as containing a “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK” and made a classic Elon Musk Fake-Smart History Gibberish claim that “in the entire history of civilization, there has never been legislation that [is] both big and beautiful. Everyone knows this!”
Typically, if someone said That’s hitting him where it hurts about remarks as dumb and toothless as these, that would be an example of sarcasm. Not in this case! Calling his bill ugly and disgusting is exactly the kind of thing that actually would bother Donald Trump, much more than some sober analysis of its probably disastrous effects on American society, about which he does not and will never give a frig.
The bickering continued from there; I will make no effort to recount all of it, nor to put it in proper chronological order, because I only have one life. Here are some highlights. Musk asserted on Twitter that without his help, “Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.” At some point Nazi-Saluting Great Replacement Theory Guy posted a poll on Twitter, asking whether the time had come to “create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Trump, on Truth Social, claimed that he’d asked Musk to leave the White House and that Musk “went CRAZY!” when he learned the big bill would remove the “EV mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted.” He also threatened to eliminate “Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” to save the federal government “Billions and Billions of Dollars.” That last bit is sort of fun to contemplate, even though it’ll never happen, as it likely would ruin just about every one of Musk’s companies, all of which to varying degrees are tax-dollar grifts.
Shortly thereafter, Musk posted on Twitter that Trump “is in the [Jeffrey] Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” This would register as a blockbuster revelation if Gawker had not reported on it in 2015, and if Trump had not been photographed with the infamous financier roughly eleventy zillion times. Still! It’s really quite something for the world’s richest man to be calling the president of the U.S. a sex criminal like 90 hours or whatever after the two of them were chilling together in the Oval Office. Like just as a How We Live Now moment.
You might wonder, at this point, about Musk’s decision to spend (according to him) hundreds of millions of dollars securing the election to the presidency of a guy he’s now, by implication, calling a child rapist. The explanation is that Musk simply does not care about that at all. He just figures it might damage Trump, or at least make him very angry.
What else? At some point after Trump’s post threatening to cut off the government money hose that keeps all of Musk’s sham companies afloat, Musk posted on Twitter that SpaceX, his spaceflight company, would “begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.” (Later, after a Twitter user with like 80 total followers pleaded with him to calm down, he evidently changed his mind about that.) He quote-tweeted with “Yes” a post calling for Trump to be impeached, removed from office, and replaced with JD Vance, which is fun because I bet it has made things super duper awkward for Vance around the White House. He posted a claim that Trump’s tariffs “will cause a recession in the second half of this year,” a claim that Kamala Harris repeated dozens if not hundreds of times in the months during which Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Trump’s bid for the opportunity to enact those very same tariffs.
Somewhere in there, or maybe I’m imagining it, Trump said some catty stuff about Musk’s weird black eye during a recent Oval Office photo-op. Nothing on earth can make me lift a finger to confirm this.
By the end of the day, or by the time I moved on with my life, onetime Trump Svengali moron Steve Bannon had leapt into the fray, calling for an investigation into Musk’s immigration status and suggesting he should be deported. Also, Tesla’s stock had dropped around 14 percent of its value; according to the New York Times, this “wiped out about $150 billion from Tesla’s market valuation.” That last bit, I think, put the kibosh on silly speculation that this whole thing was some kind of planned stunt by what people still, even now, like to imagine are two Masters of the Distracting Arts.
Enough! I will recap this feud no further. This is what happens when butter-soft inheritance babies with fragile egos get mad at each other. Neither can conceive of taking the L; neither has or can conceive of any move other than clumsy conflict escalation, imprinted into them from a life of throwing tantrums until mommy gave them a lolly. Either would vaporize the entire planet before conceding defeat or seeking conciliation. The big chickens couldn’t even bear to insult each other face-to-face, or even on the same social media platform.
I leave you with this, posted by [whatever the fuck he is] Jack Posobiec, as various right-wing figures shifted into the mode of explaining this embarrassing shit away as exemplifying masculinity or mastery or whatever:
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are communicating by high-agencyfully slapping their dicks against each other and sobbing; some of y’all can’t handle it. OK man.