Trump vs Musk
The union between two of the world's biggest egos was always going to end in acrimony, but it's all fallen apart surprisingly quickly
Pretty much everyone’s already had their say on the massive public spat between Donald Trump and Elon Musk because it’s hard not to have an opinion on two of the most powerful narcissists on the planet suddenly turning on each other. I don’t want to bore anyone by repeating loads of what’s already been said just for clicks, but it is worth taking a bit of a deeper look at few of the main points from their social media war of words.
Things between the pair had already soured before Elon Musk publicly derided Trump’s so-called "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" as "a disgusting abomination", that runs contrary to all of Musk’s DOGE cuts, and risks bankrupting the United States.
Musk is right that Trump’s policy of lavishing unfunded tax cuts on the mega-rich is an abomination, because it’s the same kind of unfunded economic insanity as Kamikaze Kwarteng’s bonkers mini-budget that collapsed Liz Truss’s government in a matter of weeks.
Musk’s right that it’s reckless, but he’s wrong to say that extreme deficit spending by lavishing handouts on the mega-rich is a bankruptcy risk to the United States, because it’s impossible for a sovereign state that issues its own currency to go bankrupt, especially if that currency happens to be the reserve currency of the entire global economy!
Excessive spending can trigger economic crises and recessions (especially when it’s wasted on handouts, rather than wisely invested in services, infrastructure, poverty alleviation) and it can severely exacerbate the cost of borrowing, but the idea that the US economy could be forced to declare bankruptcy and default on all of its debts is arrant nonsense.
National economies do not function like households or businesses, and it severely damages anyone’s claims to be some kind of mega-genius if they pretend that they do.
The recession risk is real though, because it’s particularly reckless to launch such a vast array of unfunded handouts to the mega-rich when the US economy is already struggling under the weight of Trump’s extraordinarily dumb tariff regime, which Musk has also criticised.
It makes you wonder what on earth Musk was thinking as he continued participating in Trump’s regime for at least a month after Trump announced his comically calculated, and universally ridiculed tariff agenda.
If Musk now accepts that Trump’s tariffs are the economically illiterate recession risk that the rest of the world understood immediately, why did he have nothing to say for so long?
Trump’s response to Musk’s criticism was to threaten to scrap tens of $billions in state subsidies to Musk companies like Tesla and SpaceX, which sent share prices tumbling by over $150 billion in a single day. This comes on top of the Tesla sales slump that’s coincided with Musk’s Nazi-salutes, DOGE cuts, and support for extreme-right political parties across the world.
As many have already pointed out, it’s impossible to have any sympathy for Musk as Trump threatens to tear up his companies’ contracts with the US government, after Musk spent months unilaterally scrapping £billions in pledged funding for universities, humanitarian schemes, research, infrastructure projects … and forced thousands of public sector workers out of their contracted jobs.
If Trump were to follow through on his threats against Musk’s companies, it wouldn’t just be a taste of his own medicine for Musk, it would be yet another demonstration that the US has descended into pure gangsterism, where opportunity and success are defined by personal loyalty to the cult of Donald Trump, not by any kind of legal or economic logic.
Trump further reinforced the perception that he’s running the US government as a personal fiefdom by harking on about Musk’s "ingratitude" for all of the favours he’s done him.
Musk escalated the war of words even further by accusing Trump of hiding his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein child-sex trafficking scandal. It’s not unusual for Musk to resort to accusations of paedophilia against people he’s fallen out with, but it is quite remarkable to see him going from pumping £275 million into Trump’s election campaign and saying he loves him "as much as a straight man can love another man" to accusing him of involvement in Epstein’s depraved sex crimes.
If Trump is one tenth as bad as Musk is portraying him as now (he absolutely is) it casts a huge amount of doubt on Musk’s prior judgement, doesn’t it?
Why would Musk spend such extraordinary amounts of money boosting Trump into power, and declare his love for him in such a cringeworthy manner, if the man’s actually an economically incompetent sex criminal?
And given the hundreds of $billions Musk’s companies have depreciated by since November, doesn’t the $275 million that he spent boosting Trump into power now look like one of the worst investments in history?
Musk’s enormous band of online acolytes are demanding that Trump is impeached and replaced as President by JD Vance, while Trump’s cult are demanding that Trump punish Musk for his disloyalty by deporting him from the US!
Other right-wingers are finding it hard to pick a side between "the most powerful man in the world" and "the richest man in the world", especially the Republican Senators that Musk has called on to stop Trump’s unfunded handouts. They know that if they don’t vote in favour of it, they’ll face severe repercussions from Trump and his cult, and if they vote it through, they know that despite his financial losses, Musk still has $billions to spend on election-buying, and that there’s a strong chance that he’ll go after them.
It always seemed inevitable that two such massive egos would end up falling out eventually, but the speed at which it’s happened, and the viciousness from both camps are surprising.
The playground threats and insults make both of them look like absolute losers, but in reality they’re both still immensely powerful. Trump is still the President, and leads a Republican Party that’s become nothing more than a hollowed out personality cult, while, despite his losses, Musk is still extraordinarily wealthy, and the owner of one of the biggest propaganda platforms on the Internet. So if he bores of meddling in US politics, there’s little to stop him seeking to buy election results elsewhere, and bringing his brand of chaos to other countries (especially the UK).
It's good to see you state that "National economies do not function like households or businesses". This is a common myth that you rightly debunk. However, in that link you then perpetuate another damaging myth when you state "A national economy relies upon taxes imposed upon its citizens for income". This is simply not true. When the government spends on anything it creates new money. It is not reliant on taxes to fund public spending. Taxes are required for a number of other important reasons (eg to remove money from the economy to prevent inflation) but funding of our public services is not one of them. It's really important that this is understood as it moves the terms of the debate about public expenditure from "can we afford it" to "will spending the money cause other issues eg inflation". A government that issues it own currency does not have any financial constraints. Does this mean that they can spend like a drunken sailor? Of course not. Real resources (labour, skills, expertise, land, machinery etc) need to be available or you face the prospect of inflation. It exposes that austerity, and the pain and suffering it inflics on large parts of the population, was and is a political choice. The government is able to invest in the NHS, education, welfare etc if they have the political desire, improving the lives and standard of living of millions of people.
More like two narcissists who couldn't deserve each other more.