[Dictated to my phone late at night then proof read by ChatGPT. Apologies in advance.]
Pretty much every Musk watcher I know expected it to get ugly eventually. From the very first days of the administration, it was obvious that two vindictive narcissists with Messiah complexes would not make for a stable co-governing arrangement. We even expected things to fall apart fairly quickly when the cracks started to show, but damn...
Still, other than the speed, none of this is surprising. The first thing you have to remember is that both of these men have anger issues, but Elon's are far more extreme. Journalists who have followed him closely (setting aside those inclined to softball questions and puff pieces) have been telling stories of random rage firings and unpredictable tantrums going back for decades. I assume everyone here remembers how, in response to a mildly critical comment, Elon accused a heroic diver of pedophilia, and how, a few years later, he responded to a drop-off in advertising at his newly purchased Twitter by sitting on stage in a crowded auditorium and telling those businesses to “go f*** yourself.”
Musk is also, like Trump, notoriously thin-skinned, and the past couple of weeks have seen all sorts of insults and injuries—from the New York Times piece (with obvious WH sources) exposing his heavy drug use to the proposed budget virtually guaranteeing that Tesla will never again be a profitable car company. It was probably inevitable that he would lash out and that Trump and his allies would reply in kind, but the escalation has been something to see.
Other than the speed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this flame war is how exhaustive it has been. I’ve been following these stories way too closely for my own mental health, and I’m having trouble thinking of any major stone left unturned. In addition to calling for his deportation, Trump and his allies have threatened to destroy Musk’s business empire and turn the investigative force of the government against him. Musk has been even more thorough—in addition to calling for impeachment, he has gone after the budget, used Trump’s own language against him, suggested that the tariffs were about to cause a recession, and even briefly threatened to sut off the space station.
The part about impeachment is particularly interesting given JD Vance's role in the White House. Vance was always the princess in the arranged marriage, there to seal the alliance between Trump and the PayPal Mafia. Though it would be extremely difficult to force him out of office, it's hard to imagine him not being frozen out of the administration for the rest of the term.
[Quick question for the audience. While there have been cases of presidents and vice presidents being rivals and having ideological differences—think Reagan-Bush or Kennedy-LBJ, going all the way back to Adams and Jefferson—I'm trying to think of a situation quite this extreme. Does anyone have any suggestions?]
We will see how this plays out and whether or not things calm down over the weekend. It's difficult to imagine them maintaining this intensity, but it's also hard to see how some of these bridges can be unburned. If Musk loses his security clearance, if we are seeing the bubble finally pop with Tesla, or if the budget talks—which are already incredibly unpopular with voters—fall apart, things will not be going back to the way they were.
Ahem...
'Sore subject': White House confirms physical brawl between key Trump allies
A physical altercation between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent precipitated the Tesla founder's quick ouster from the Trump administration, according to a report.
The incident was previously reported as a "screaming match" between the two men, but the physical aspect has since been confirmed by The White House.
The U.K.'s Daily Mail interviewed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the DOGE-related scuffle.
"'Scott Bessent called [Musk] out and said, 'You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you're at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?'' Bannon recounted. "And that's when Elon got physical. It's a sore subject with him. It wasn't an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him."
The altercation was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the Mail reported.
Retribution: The final frontier.
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 10:30 AM
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Big balls showing up at work tomorrow:
— James (@gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 1:04 PM
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Matt Yglesias, Ro Khanna and the Abundance Boys better start hitting the books so they can figure out how holding billionaires accountable for blatant crimes is bad, actually.
— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 5, 2025 at 1:51 PM
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You can't make it up Congressman Scott Perry voted for Trump's "disgusting abomination" bill Now he's lambasting it and calling on the Senate to stop it How do MAGA Republicans live with their rank hypocrisy
— Adam Cohen (@axidentaliberal.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 8:21 PM
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MACO? (Musk always chickens out?) The SpaceX ceo softened his stance on decommissioning Dragon after a user on X told him to basically chillax… www.cnbc.com/2025/06/05/m...
— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 7:50 PM
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He is now calling for Trump to nationalize SpaceX lmao
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 3:12 PM
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I'm sure that's all the reassurance Trump will need.
Vance spox on Musk's tweet: “It’s insane for anyone to even remotely suggest this. America is blessed to have President Trump leading our nation. He has delivered on promise after promise to the American people, and he has no bigger supporter than Vice President Vance.”
— Jacob Gardenswartz (@reporterjacobg.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 5:58 PM
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If this ever happens, it will be due to Martin Eberhard, Tesla's founding CEO and inventor of core tech in Tesla EVs, raising the issue in his lawsuit after Musk ousted him from the co. iirc @plainsite.org made those legal records available + @washingtonpost.com did *outstanding* in-depth reporting.
— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 2:59 PM
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Tesla is a small and imploding car company, overvalued by at least a factor of 20. The only reasons to buy it, other than a stunning faith in the greater fool theory, are the belief that some combination of three things will happen: robo-taxis will largely replace driving and Tesla will dominate the market despite being far behind on the technology; people will spend trillions of dollars on humanoid robots, and once again, Tesla will dominate that market despite again being far behind on the technology; the Trump administration will dump unprecedented amounts of money into the company. Up until recently, the third possibility was the only halfway realistic one. Now there is no rational reason for buying the stock.
Musk was supposed to be "focused" on Tesla after his DOGE special government employee period ended. Today, the company shed $152 billion in market cap (its worst single day hit ever) after Musk feuded with Trump. www.cnbc.com/2025/06/05/t...
— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 2:17 PM
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I think I’ve recognized that I don’t like Matt Yglesias because it makes me anxious when I can’t tell whether someone is mocking themselves or not
— Uncovered The Human Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 3:43
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I'm not saying that Trump and Musk don't have real disagreements, but . . . is part of this just straight-up game theory, kind of like what happens when labor and management attack each other when there are contract negotiations? Strikes, lockouts, and lawsuits are not good for business--they're negative-sum actions--but sometimes the union needs to strike, management needs to lock out, and both sides need to sue, just to demonstrate their seriousness. Basic negotiation strategies.
ReplyDeleteSo, Musk can unleash the social-media attacks, not because it helps him but because it demonstrates his willingness to do so, which brings Trump to the negotiating table, and then Musk can walk it all back.
Another part of this is Musk's apparent confidence that, between he and his allies, and Trump and his allies, they control the news media discourse to the extent that if Musk says X, Y, and Z, and then he later unsays them, the original saying-of-it will be politically unimportant.
I'm not saying that this behavior is entirely strategic or that Trump and Musk don't have anger issues, just that this conflict fits in just fine into a negotiation pattern. Maybe Musk really felt the need to escalate to be taken seriously. And, as is often the case, emotional and rational behavior can go together; indeed, rational strategies can be most effective when they align with emotions.
Andrew
Andrew,
DeleteIt's true that these steps are entirely consistent with, and might be highly effective as, negotiating strategies. The problem is, there's no negotiation here. Unless we are talking about some sort of incredibly convoluted, 11th-dimensional chess where there's no way of knowing what the true objectives are, Musk had nothing to gain and virtually everything to lose by going rogue.
Musk was already getting about as much preferential treatment as the Trump administration could manage. They were throwing him government contracts and strong-arming other countries to adopt Starlink. They were killing investigations into his companies and letting him shut down regulatory departments that were supposed to keep him in line. The promise of even bigger graft to come had pumped his companies’ market cap above the trillion-dollar mark.
The only thing they hadn't given him was the continued EV subsidies, but he had to know those were going away—and even if he didn't, by focusing on the spending in the budget, he made it next to impossible to push for even more spending on electric vehicles. He even went so far as to explicitly rule out asking for them as part of his flame war.
Musk did have complaints, probably about the way he was shown the door (though even there, he absolutely had to leave in order to convince stockholders and investors he was focused on his companies). He didn't want to stay, but he might have felt upset over being encouraged to leave.
The key concept here is insult versus injury. Virtually nothing Trump and the administration had done had hurt Musk professionally or financially, but a great deal had been done to hurt his feelings—from passing over his guy for NASA to that humiliating exposé in The New York Times. You can't negotiate away insults. All you can do is get even.
As for the ability to make statements X, Y, and Z go away, some bells are very difficult to unring. Trump is currently trying to pass arguably the most unpopular budget in living memory. This is already a heavy lift, and having Musk attack it from the right does not make it any easier. Should this legislation fail, it would be an extraordinary blow, the ramifications of which would echo for a long time.
Though not of the same magnitude, bringing up Epstein and priming his followers to expect an economic downturn due to tariffs are two more genies that will be difficult to get back in their bottles. (It's worth noting that Musk has continued to double down on the Epstein thread.)
It is essential to remember that while Musk is, by most standards, the richest man in the world, that position is extremely precarious. Unlike Bezos or Gates or Buffett or any of the other men in the top five or ten, Elon’s fortune is almost entirely based on a bubble—the belief that companies, both over 20 years old, will, sometime in the near future, suddenly become massively profitable. If Tesla and SpaceX were valued based on even the most generous rational criteria, Musk's net worth would drop by a factor of at least 20 or 30. Balloon men, as a rule, should avoid knife fights—but that's exactly what Musk is engaged in.
(I'll probably rework this into a post next week.)
Mark
ps One other point I should have emphasized was just how insanely self-destructive the choice of targets was on Elon's part. Supposedly, this all started over excessive government spending, which is a strange place to plant your flag if your entire fortune is dependent on government money. At one point, in the heat of the exchange, Musk even basically came out and said, "I don't want your stupid old subsidies."
DeleteNow, as we enter the hangover stage of this whole ugly but amusing affair, Musk appears to have remembered—or been reminded—that he does, in fact, want those stupid old subsidies; that it was those taxpayer-funded checks that finally tipped Tesla into profitability and have barely kept it there.
As Patrick Boyle recently put it. "If you take the crony out of crony capitalism, what's the point?"
Just wanted to weigh in on "how could it escalate further?" Remember how TikTok was threat because it was owed by a foreign entity and hoovering up reams of data about Americans? Trump could claim that Musk owning X is a similar situation and therefore dangerous to national security. Shuttering X in the US would both harm and silence Musk and also drive social media to Truth Social. Just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteI was think about escalating rhetoric, but, yes, if they go down the security risk path, all sorts of dominoes start to fall -- Mark
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