US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were always destined to be star-crossed billionaire buddies, but like bickering lovers locked in a toxic relationship they just can’t help coming back for more.
The world’s most powerful man has a long history of savaging “friends”, family, advisers and porn stars who dare challenge him, while the globe’s richest man has a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness.
This is perhaps linked to his Asperger’s diagnosis, part of the broader autism spectrum disorder noted as much for sufferers’ narrow brilliance as their struggle to empathise.
That made for a potentially explosive, and destructive, combination when they teamed up to “Make America Great Again” at the start of the second Trump administration. And explode and destroy it certainly has, followed by a spectacular implosion of their relationship that has had White House watchers reaching for the popcorn over the past week.
Ostensibly triggered by Musk’s disgust with Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill, which will add about $2.4-trillion to the US national debt while cutting both taxes on the rich and benefits for the poor, the quarrel escalated rapidly as the pair took to their respective social media platforms, X and Truth Social, to trade insults, threats and accusations.
Trump should be impeached for lying about wanting to bring down the budget deficit and nixing Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) efforts to cut state spending, Musk insisted, saying he won’t release the “Epstein files” because he’s in them and he would never have been re-elected without Musk’s campaign funding.
Musk had “lost his mind”, yet another victim of “Trump derangement syndrome”, retorted the US president. His companies would be nothing without US government subsidies; and he would face “very serious consequences” if he financed Maga opponents in next year’s midterm elections.
As is usual in messy break-ups, it is the children who have suffered most. Forgotten in the finger-pointing and bitter recriminations are the thousands of federal employees and foreign aid workers whose livelihoods have been taken away at the stroke of a pen through Doge’s crude, often ill-considered, efforts to cut government spending, not to mention the millions of USAID beneficiaries around the world whose very survival is now in question due to the abrupt loss of US funding.
And for what? Part of the reason for Musk’s initial criticism was the pressure he was put under by members of Trump’s cabinet for failing to deliver the trillions of dollars in savings he promised when Doge was created.
By most reliable accounts, the actual figure so far is $180bn, and that could well be reduced substantially through court challenges and reversals of job cuts that turned out to be crucial to the functioning of the state.
For all his bravado and flurry of executive orders he insisted would fix his predecessor’s supposed chronic misgovernance, stop the Russia-Ukraine war within days and resolve the Palestinian question once and for all, Trump has been similarly unsuccessful. America is not “great again”.
On the contrary, it is at the centre of a global trade war he instigated and from which there will be no winners; both of the major military conflicts he promised to resolve rage on unabated; the basic human rights of foreigners and US citizens alike are being openly abused; and public protest against heavy-handed action against undocumented immigrants has left Los Angeles in flames.
There has been widespread speculation that the vehemence of Musk’s X outburst was at least in part a product of drug use that had spun out of control in recent months, a position that has been supported by his subsequent contrition.
He responded with a heart emoji to a video of Trump telling reporters on Monday that he wished Musk well and that they had a “good relationship”.
On Wednesday he posted that he regretted “some of my posts” about Trump, as “they went too far”.
Does this mean a big, beautiful reconciliation is on the cards, complete with unabashed mutual ego stroking and public makeup texts?
We can but hope not — for the sake of the children.
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