(Batya Ungar-Sargon’s post from the FREE PRESS on 06 June 2025.)
The Elon-Trump Bromance Crashes and Burns: A series
of conflicts of interest cut to the core of the delicate tech bro-MAGA alliance.
Elon Musk is First Buddy no longer. The epic bromance between Musk and President Donald
Trump, between the richest man on the planet and the most powerful one, has
come to an end, not with a bang but with a tweet:
Just days after Trump granted
Musk a golden key in an Oval Office send-off from his role as head of DOGE and
adviser to the White House, Musk unleashed on the president’s Big Beautiful
Bill: “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” he wrote on his social
media platform, X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional
spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you
know you did wrong. You know it.”
On Thursday, Musk amplified his attacks, directing them at the President, saying Trump would have lost the election without him. “Such ingratitude,” Musk said. President Trump retorted that he was "very disappointed with Elon."
It was a shocking reversal from the intimacy of
just a few days ago—certainly from the jovial joint interviews of February, and
many bought the outrage in Musk’s tweet as genuine disillusionment with the
difficulty of the job DOGE assigned itself and the difficulty of cutting
spending. “Elon Musk Leaves Job of Making Government More Efficient for Much
Easier Job of Sending Humans to Mars,” summarized the satirists at TheBabylon
Bee.
Certainly, cutting waste and fraud is a noble goal.
But Musk’s efforts regularly came into conflict with Trump’s cabinet
secretaries, resulting in shouting matches over firings, while the waste,
fraud, and abuse he promised to ferret out never materialized to the extent
promised. “You’re a fraud!” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shouted at Musk at
one point, according to Axios’s Marc Caputo. “You promised $2 trillion in cuts.
Then it was $1 trillion. Then $500 billion. Now it’s $150 million. You’re a fraud.”
Musk’s “disappointment” with the Big Beautiful Bill
and the GOP’s enthusiasm for DOGE, it turns out, is a distraction from the real
story, which is of a series of conflicts of interest that gets at the heart of
the delicate tech bro-MAGA marriage. Indeed, Musk leaving the White House in a
flame war shouldn’t be surprising, for Musk’s agenda has—from DOGE’s
inception—been at odds with the MAGA platform. On immigration, foreign policy,
and economic policy, Musk’s interests, which we have reason to believe he pursued
behind the scenes, were always on a collision course with what President Trump
viewed as the interests of the United States.
“Elon, I want to thank you,” President Trump said
in a cabinet meeting in March. “What he is, is a patriot. He’s become a friend
of mine . . . He has never asked me for a thing.”
Yet just days earlier, the president had learned something that reportedly discomfited him deeply: The New York Times reported that the Pentagon was scheduled to brief Musk on a military plan relating to a “potential war” with China. The president learned of the meeting via the Times report, which infuriated him.
“What the fuck is Elon doing there? Make sure he
doesn’t go,” Trump said, according to an Axios report. “POTUS still very much
loves Elon, but there are some red lines,” an official explained to Axios.
“Elon has a lot of business in China and he has good relations there, and this
briefing just wasn’t the right thing.”
As Trump himself explained to reporters, “Certainly
you wouldn’t show [military plans] to a businessman,” adding, “Elon has
businesses in China, and he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that.”
The snafu ended not with the firing of those who
set up the meeting, but with those who presumably leaked it. Yet the episode
changed how Trump saw Musk; the Times called it “a rupture” between the
president and the tech mogul over Musk’s potential conflicts of interest.
Of course, the president was right: While Teslas
made in the U.S. are by and large produced here, many of the Teslas Musk sells
across the globe are produced in China, as is some 40 percent of its battery
supply chain, meaning his fortune, to some degree, rests on being in the good
graces of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. It would have been a
monumental conflict of interest for Musk to have been in that meeting.
This was not the only interest Musk reportedly
sought to exploit behind the scenes. The Wall Street Journal reported that
during the president’s much ballyhooed trip to the Middle East, Musk worked
hard to try to derail a deal between the United Arab Emirates and his
competitor Sam Altman’s OpenAI, if the deal didn’t include his own AI start-up.
Musk reportedly went so far as to warn a firm belonging to the brother of the
president of the UAE that their plan to build the world’s largest AI data
center in Abu Dhabi with OpenAI “had no chance of President Trump signing off
on it unless Musk’s xAI was included in the deal,” reported the WSJ.
This, it turned out, was nonsense, and the OpenAI
deal went through, angering Musk.
Musk was apparently milking his proximity to Trump
in other ways, too, Caputo reported for Axios. Musk seemed upset that Trump’s
Big Beautiful Bill cut electric vehicle tax credits, a government subsidy upon
which Tesla relies. Musk also lobbied to extend his role in the White House,
according to Caputo; the White House declined, and he wanted the Federal
Aviation Administration to use Starlink, Musk’s satellite system, for its air
traffic control—something the administration also opposed due to the obvious
conflict of interest. Musk’s attempts to use his friendship with Trump to win
taxpayer dollars must have represented a deep betrayal to the president, who
was once so proud of Musk, his friend, who as Trump put it, “has never asked me
for a thing.”
Turns out, Musk didn’t ask because he didn’t think
he needed to.
But the Musk-MAGA love affair was doomed on
ideological grounds, too. Trump and his base love tariffs—while Musk tweeted
against them. Trump and his base want much less immigration—while Musk wants
much more and is willing to torch anyone who opposes expanding the H-1B visa
program. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war
on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” he wrote on X
in December. Trump and the MAGA base view China as our greatest foreign adversary—while
Musk built a showroom for Tesla in Xinjiang, where the CCP has been credibly
accused of genocide in regard to its Muslim Uyghur population.
For all the allegations of corruption due to the
president’s meme coin, the Qatari plane, and his family’s business dealings,
what emerges from the breakup of the year is a president keenly aware of
conflicts of interest and meticulously committed to preventing them in the case
of his biggest financial backer, who seems to have, on a few occasions,
attempted to leverage their friendship for economic gain.
By Thursday, the two men were attacking each other
outright. Trump said he was very disappointed in Musk, and Musk has amped up
his X posting in mockery of Trump. The marriage between the MAGA movement and
the tech-bro right was doomed to fail. The interests of these groups are not
just different but at cross-purposes.
