Musk had never served in public office before. His ignorance of government organisation and procedures showed. Like generations of other vain, ignorant business tycoons, he thought the problem with government was that it was not run like a business. Musk set about using his ill-defined authority to try to downsize the federal government as though it were one of his own companies, Tesla or PayPal or SpaceX.
In 2022, when he bought control of Twitter, now known as X, Musk prepared for mass lay-offs of Twitter employees by sending the workforce an email asking what they had done last week.
Similarly, in February, the Office of Personnel Management, over which Musk had no authority, nevertheless on his behalf sent an email to about 2 million federal employees that demanded they send their managers a list of five accomplishments from last week. Later on X, Musk announced, on the basis of no authority whatsoever, that anyone who refused to answer would be fired; he subsequently said the millions of employees would get a second chance and finally reversed himself, saying it had just been a “pulse check”.
Elon Musk speaks at a cabinet meeting at the White House in February.Credit: AP
The Department of State, led by former senator Marco Rubio, along with the Defence Department and FBI, told their employees not to answer Musk’s email. The tensions between Musk, who according to the administration was not actually in charge of DOGE, and Trump’s constitutionally appointed, Senate-confirmed cabinet secretaries were on public display in a bizarre videotaped cabinet meeting in which Musk, dressed in black, babbled in front of stony-faced officials. According to reports, Musk on another occasion got into a shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Disloyal as he is to his own subordinates, Trump expects loyalty from others. It was one thing for Musk to fight with other Trump appointees behind the scenes, another to attack them in public. After Trump unveiled his half-baked tariff plan on April 2, Musk called Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks”.
Reportedly Musk further damaged his relationship with Trump by pouring $US20 million ($31 million) into a special Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, offering to pay a million dollars apiece to lucky individual voters. This crass attempt to buy an election backfired against the Republican candidate Musk favoured, and the backlash powered the Democrat to victory.
Elon Musk attacked Trump in posts on X on Thursday (Friday AEST).Credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images
The trigger for the final break between Musk and Trump was money. On X, Musk tried to rally Republicans in Congress to vote against the “big, beautiful bill” that would be the central achievement of Trump’s first year in his second term. “KILL the BILL,” Musk ranted in one of more than two dozen tweets criticising the legislation.
Some Republicans blamed Musk’s opposition to the bill on cuts to subsidies to consumers who bought electric cars from Tesla and other companies. Telling reporters that he was “very disappointed” in his donor and former DOGE czar, Trump said, “Look, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will any more.”
On X, Musk responded: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate. Such ingratitude.”
No stranger to social media, Trump replied on his own platform, Truth Social: “Elon was ‘wearing thin’; I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”
Donald Trump and Elon Musk show off a Tesla at the White House in March.Credit: AP
Trump followed this up with a threat: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Exit stage right-wing.
The end of the Trump-Musk relationship is a source of amusement to Democrats and a source of relief to Republican populists who dream of what Trump once called the “Republican workers’ party”, not a party subordinated to weird libertarian billionaires.
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But everyone can learn from the latest demonstration of the fact that celebrity outsiders who have never held office before – generals like Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower, businessmen like Herbert Hoover and Donald Trump and Elon Musk – tend to perform poorly when given authority over America’s complex government, compared with presidents who had worked their way up in politics like Washington, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
When Eisenhower was elected as president, his predecessor Harry Truman joked: “He’ll sit right there and he’ll say, do this, do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the army.”
Or Tesla or Twitter, either.
