It’s not easy to get Rachel Maddow and Donald J. Trump on the same page. But Elon Musk has managed the feat.
Just before last November’s presidential election, Maddow said on her MSNBC show that due to Musk’s partisan activities and flaky behavior, an incoming “President Harris” should unwind all federal contracts with SpaceX and other companies controlled by Musk. “The Defense Department and NASA are going to need a new arrangement for all their rockets,” she said. It’s a crazy idea, of course. By relying on reliable, reusable SpaceX rockets, NASA and the Defense Department save taxpayers billions of dollars. In fact, since NASA does not have a rocket approved to carry humans on routine flights, the U.S. manned space program would be essentially shut down without SpaceX. No serious person would pursue such a folly, would she?
On June 5, President Trump threatened to execute the Maddow plan: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Government Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote on Truth Social. Musk fired back that, if Trump was going to be that way, maybe Musk would just decommission the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft immediately, leaving NASA’s astronauts grounded. Never one to miss out on a fight, the populist torch-tosser Steve Bannon then urged the president to “sign an executive order calling up the Defense Production Act, and seize SpaceX tonight, before midnight.” (You know you’ve reached peak horseshoe theory when right-wing activists start arguing to nationalize industries.)
Musk and Trump both eventually calmed down and backed away from their threats to shut down the U.S. space program. (As for Bannon, I’m not sure he ever calms down.) Their exercise in brinksmanship came in the midst of the already-legendary War of Tweets between the two thin-skinned potentates days after Musk left his temporary post in the White House. And it wasn’t even the most insane dustup between the two men during that ridiculous week. But it hinged on the awkward fact that Musk’s businesses are deeply intertwined with vital government functions. And it showcased how the brilliant, mercurial entrepreneur continually dances on—and sometimes over—the manic edge of disaster. Anyone who has followed Musk’s daredevil career knew that his relationship with Trump would eventually blow up. But few would have predicted the bromance would end with an all-out nuclear exchange.
The signs were there. For weeks before Musk’s departure, Trump had been growing weary of the anarchic deputy who had once described himself as “First Buddy.” Trump has a high tolerance for conflicts between his subordinates. (Some say he encourages such beefs.) But even he has limits. At the start of his administration, Trump granted Musk extraordinary power in his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency. From that day forward, White House staffers and Cabinet secretaries fought like honey badgers to claw that power back. Musk didn’t keep his contempt for them secret—for example, calling trade adviser Peter Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks.” In one meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Musk “a total fraud,” according to reports, and the DOGE head allegedly responded with a shove. The president himself stepped in to block Musk from attending an ultra-sensitive Pentagon briefing. Trump was particularly annoyed when Musk began publicly criticizing the “big, beautiful” budget bill. As Musk headed for the exits, the New York Times described him as “disillusioned” and “distanced from Trump.”
But when Musk joined the president in the Oval Office for a send-off press conference on May 30, the event didn’t feel like a chilly breakup. To the contrary, the two men behaved like tween besties on the last day of summer camp, vowing to stay in touch and visit often. “Elon’s really not leaving; he’ll be back and forth,” the president said. When Musk promised “to provide advice whenever the president would like advice,” Trump shot back, “I hope so!” He called Musk “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced,” and described DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts as “the most sweeping and consequential government reform program in generations.”
Trump is usually seen as a man who wears his emotions on his sleeve. So give him credit for his acting chops in radiating good cheer throughout the farewell press event. According to the New York Times, just minutes before the meeting, a White House aide slipped the president a folder detailing the awkward political history of Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee to become NASA administrator. The timing was no accident. Isaacman, a billionaire tech entrepreneur, has flown two self-funded missions on SpaceX spacecraft and was recommended for the post by Musk. Now that Musk was leaving, his enemies in the White House saw the chance to claim a scalp.
The folder outlined various times Isaacman had contributed to Democratic candidates, including as recently as 2024. It’s not unusual for leading businesspeople to contribute to both parties; Trump himself used to brag about doing so. And it is hard to believe Trump’s transition team hadn’t vetted the proposed nominee thoroughly and informed the president-elect about his record of donations. Perhaps some new details came to light. Or maybe the file highlighted the troublesome donations more vividly. Or perhaps the president was simply no longer inclined to trust Musk’s assurances about the nominee’s loyalty.
Whatever the reason, Isaacman got the call later that day. He’d been dropped. It was naked political revenge. But there was nothing Musk could do. His influence in the White House had expired.
A few days later, the tweets started. Musk ramped up his criticisms of the budget bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination” and telling followers they should lobby their senators to “KILL THE BILL.” At first Trump responded more in bemused regret than anger. “I’m disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped him a lot,” he told reporters. But things got ugly fast. It was only a matter of time before Jeffrey Epstein got dragged in as Musk hurled unsupported claims about the notorious sexual predator’s relationship with Trump. As a sign of just how crazy things got, Kanye West (or Ye, as he now calls himself) finally stepped in to mediate: “Broooos please noooooo,” he tweeted. “We love you both so much.”
The wild episode didn’t tell us much we didn’t already know about the president. He has long bragged about his love of being a “counterpuncher.” But Trump is the president; politics is his full-time job. Musk is new to the political stage. His influence during the campaign was considerable, even beyond the enormous sums he committed to the effort. But once Musk took on an official role in the administration, his overconfidence and political naiveté became fatal problems. He disdained to notice that the political winds were shifting against him. Moreover, Musk has other jobs. His lightning-rod role in the campaign, chaotic performance as head of DOGE, and explosive breakup with Trump have put his companies at enormous risk. First, he alienated his mostly liberal Tesla customers; then he went to war with the president and his party. Who’s left in his corner?
This isn’t the first time Musk has gambled with his businesses. He has always combined his entrepreneurial genius with what his biographer Walter Isaacson called his “attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama.” In several previous columns, I have described how Musk sets near-impossible goals for his companies, makes wild promises to investors and customers, and then pushes his teams (and himself) to the breaking point trying to realize them. In 2023, I wrote that Musk reminds me of high-altitude mountaineers I have known: “As soon as he escapes one near-death experience, he’s planning an even harder climb.”
What Megan McArdle calls Musk’s “Tasmanian devil” approach often works, especially when it comes to SpaceX, a truly world-changing company. But often it doesn’t. For nearly a decade Musk has been promising that Tesla would achieve fully autonomous driving “next year.” Only now does that goal appear in sight. Maybe. His solar-panel and tunnel-boring ventures have been overhyped nothingburgers. And, while X appears to have mostly recovered from its plunge in value after Musk’s purchase, the social media site—now crawling with bots and spam—is hardly the welcoming town square he said he wanted. Users are drifting away.
Even when Musk succeeds, his chaotic style leaves a lot of wreckage behind. His efforts helped elect Trump. But his political grandstanding and online trolling simultaneously freaked out investors and drove away customers. And Musk can’t resist taunting regulators at home and abroad, all but begging them to target his high-flying businesses. A future Democratic White House, combined with vindictive EU leadership, could easily throttle his companies out of spite.
The entrepreneur’s shambolic foray into government featured all the Musk hallmarks: He promised DOGE would find $1 trillion—no, wait, maybe $2 trillion!—in government waste and fraud. (But at his White House press conference Musk was able to claim only $160 billion in savings, and even that number seems inflated.) His overly empowered, under-supervised DOGE staffers uncovered some legitimate abuses, but they made countless embarrassing errors along the way. And, even as he was feeding federal agencies “into the woodchipper,” the hyper-multitasker was staying up all night playing video games, allegedly gobbling scary amounts of ketamine and other drugs, and juggling paternity disputes involving so many children, with so many different women, it would make a sultan blush.
Musk suffers from a particular psychological trait that is common among highly successful people: He assumes that because he is a winner in his own field, he must be equally talented in all fields. Like some other accomplished people, he combines this quirk with the conviction that the problems he sees in other arenas must be simple to solve. Only an idiot would fail to see the easy solutions he envisions. Sometimes this arrogance works for him. In 2001, when Musk wanted to launch a spaceflight company, he decided he could build his own rockets that would be better and cheaper than anything available on the aerospace market. The learning curve was brutal, but SpaceX eventually proved Musk right. Still, in most fields, historical knowledge is a plus. It pays to understand both the successes and the failures of the past. (Even SpaceX wound up hiring top experts from NASA and legacy aerospace companies.)
Musk plunged into his DOGE role with typical confidence that he could sort out the government’s problems in a few intense weeks squeezed between his other commitments. In fact, DOGE was doomed to failure from the start. First, Musk and his anonymous DOGE staffers wildly underestimated the complexity of the challenge. Worse, they emphasized the wrong targets. It was politically useful for Musk to claim that the federal deficit is mostly due to waste, fraud, and abuse. (Reducing such drains on the treasury is a noble endeavor, and I hope a more disciplined version of DOGE continues this work.) But anyone who has spent 10 minutes studying the deficit knows that the major drivers of spending are popular entitlement programs including Social Security and Medicare. The DOGE team found modest savings in some agencies and did unnecessary damage in others. But it barely touched those spending behemoths. Instead, Musk’s promises of easy savings gave the White House and Congress cover to keep ignoring the towering crisis in entitlements. I believe Musk is sincere in his passion to reduce the deficit. But sadly, in his brief tenure as the White House budget hawk, he mostly helped kick the can down the road.
The worst fallout from the Musk affair may land on NASA. That’s a bit ironic, given that Musk, despite all his personal and business interests in space, didn’t spend much time on space policy (aside from backing Isaacman). On the day of Musk’s departure, the White House released a brutal budget plan that slashes NASA’s funding by a quarter, dooming many current and future missions. NASA does have programs that deserve to be slashed (like the bloated Space Launch System rocket). But space advocates hoped that Isaacman would use his managerial chops to help keep the agency on track and fight for its key goals. The current plan “is just a going-out-of-business mode without Jared there to innovate,” one former NASA official told veteran space reporter Eric Berger.
The Trump-Musk flame war subsided after a few days. There were signs both men wanted to turn down the heat. But the damage from Musk’s foray into politics will linger. If anything, Musk’s big D.C. adventure set back the political goals he espouses. His over-the-top behavior generated unnecessary blowback and used up political capital that might have been useful for a more effective cost-cutting effort. I largely agree with Musk’s stated priorities—reducing deficits, preserving free trade, promoting innovation—so I think that’s a real loss. But the most proximate victim is Musk himself. In the past people could shrug off his erratic behavior by pointing to his stunning accomplishments. That won’t be so easy now. If Musk’s reputation as a chaos agent persists, and I think it will, that will make it harder for him to find investors, recruit talent, and inspire other innovators.
And that’s a real shame. The world still needs Elon Musk.
Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
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