Elon Musk is twenty-five years Donald Trump’s junior. Musk was emotionally abused and traumatized by his father as a child. He learned to repress his anger and aggression and to survive by trying to appease a furious father. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was emotionally abandoned by his mother at age two and kicked out of home and school by his father at age thirteen. He has a violent nature. He incites others to violence and enjoys it vicariously, as he during the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. Trump’s scripted body-slamming of Vince McMahon and having his head shaved by musclemen in the boxing ring at WrestleMania 2007 was a “sublimated” expression of his violence.
The Trump-Musk relationship involves unconscious idealizing and mirroring transference. Both men are very ambitious but are also damaged individuals who harbor within themselves rage at parental figures from their early lives. Musk, however, may unconsciously provoke Trump into the same kind of rage at him that he suffered from his father. This is known as the “repetition compulsion.” The trauma inflicted by the father on Elon and suffered passively and helplessly is actively repeated with a father figure like Trump in a vain unconscious attempt to master the traumatic situation. Both Trump and Musk are narcissistic and each sees himself in the other as in a mirror.
Trump is said to be annoyed with Musk’s public feuds and with the public perception that Musk is the “real power” behind his presidency. At some point Trump may have a fit of rage at Musk, who has declared himself Trump’s “first buddy” and who takes liberties with Trump. Musk and Trump may clash on issues such as the H-1B visa program and China policy, which could strain their alliance. Trump is said to be privately complaining about Musk being “clingy” and frequently dropping by unannounced. Musk’s aggressive critiques of allied leaders and his involvement in international politics may test Trump’s patience. While their partnership was founded on mutual interests, particularly in defeating the Democrats, their differing views on future priorities and power sharing (and their emotional problems) may lead to a souring of the relationship, if not to an explosive rupture. Trump will only keep Musk as long as he can use him and his money for his own ends.
Let us recall the tortuous development of the Trump-Musk relationship. After Twitter was created in 2006, Donald Trump became an inveterate “tweeter.” In 2016, when Trump first ran for President, Musk was an opponent of Trump, pronouncing him unfit to be President. By 2022 Musk was a key Trump ally, whose money helped Trump get re-elected.[1] Trump “tweeted” endlessly, until he was suspended from Twitter in early 2021 for having incited the U.S. Capitol riot. Trump then created his own “Truth Social” website, where he continued to “tweet” on a daily basis. In 2022 Trump’s new ally, Elon Musk, the founder and owner of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man, bought Twitter, renaming it X, and let Trump “tweet” on it again.
Musk turned X into “a far- right radicalization machine.”[2] Musk was one of Trump’s emotionally-damaged fans, a deeply traumatized man. In his native South Africa he had been emotionally abused by his father, who constantly berated Elon and told him he was worthless. At school, Elon had been severely beaten by other students. His brother recalled an incident where “four or five guys” attacked Elon, “beating him senseless” to the point where he was nearly unrecognizable. At home, Elon’s father, Errol Musk, himself an obviously disturbed individual, made Elon the scapegoat for all his problems. Elon’s brother described it as “torture,” stating that their father made both of them stand up for two to three hours while verbally upbraiding them.[3] In the same way Donald Trump and his father had constantly berated Donald’s elder brother Freddy, who became an alcoholic and did at a young age.
Growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, Elon Musk had witnessed murderous violence, seeing a man fatally stabbed on a train, which further traumatized him. To “toughen him up” (or to get him killed), Elon’s father sent him to a wilderness survival camp, where bullying was encouraged and children were forced to fight over food and water. Some children died. Elon Musk was a “paramilitary Lord of the Flies.” The abuse Musk experienced as a child has had a lifelong effect on him. Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, thought that these experiences left Musk with a lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder.[4] Some mental health experts have diagnosed Musk’s symptoms as “complex post-traumatic stress disorder” due to the prolonged and varied nature of the abuse he had endured. These traumatic experiences shaped Musk’s personality and his drive. Both Elon and his brother have said that their difficult upbringing instilled in them a fear of failure and a determination to succeed.[5]
Back in 2015, at an election rally, Trump had sadistically mocked the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski,[6] a Pulitzer Prize winner who suffered from congenital arthrogryposis that contracted his right arm. Trump publicly imitated Kovaleski’s “funny” posture, [7] falsely claiming that Kovaleski had accused the people of New Jersey of cheering at the fall of the World Trade Center in 2001. Kovaleski vehemently denied it.[8] Trump’s unconscious mind, however, was saying, “If this guy is so distorted, disabled, and damaged, then I am strong, healthy, and omnipotent.”
Like other tyrants, Donald Trump receives narcissistic pleasure from putting others down. In his unconscious mind, if he can shame and humiliate other people, then he cannot be shamed and humiliated himself. At the Golden Globe Awards ceremony in 2017, the eminent actress Meryl Streep[9] expressed the horror and the outrage of many millions of Americans at Trump’s outrageous cruelty.[10] In response, Trump viciously attacked Streep on Twitter, calling her “an overrated actress.”[11] Four years later his Twitter account was “permanently” suspended[12] but was restored by Elon Musk after he bought Twitter and renamed it X.
Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos was another billionaire who at first opposed Trump. In retaliation, Trump falsely attacked Amazon for “ripping off the U.S. Postal Service” by paying it rock-bottom bulk postal rates. Fact checkers found that the U.S. Postal Service’s business arrangement with Amazon was no different from its deals with any other bulk shipper, and that the USPS was actually making money on its Amazon shipments.[13] Jeff Bezos himself responded wittily, referring to his own spacecraft, Blue Origin, and saying, “Finally trashed by Trump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket.” Bezos added a link to a Twitter account named “Send Donald to Space.”[14] By 2024 both Musk and Bezos had become Trump supporters.
Trump’s relationship with Musk has had its ups and downs. In late 2016 Musk had said that Trump “did not have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States” and that Trump’s election was “not the finest moment in our democracy.”[15] Unlike Jeff Bezos, however, Elon Musk joined several economic panels advising Trump, saying “The more voices of reason that the President hears, the better.”[16] In 2017 Musk resigned from Trump’s councils in protest after Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change.[17] In 2022, however, Musk became a key Trump ally, creating a Super PAC in 2024 to help Trump’s re-election campaign.
Unlike Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the third member of their “private space club,” Richard Branson,[18] the owner of Virgin Galactic, was not an American. In 2016 Branson recalled that Trump had invited him to a bizarre face-to-face meeting at which Trump told Branson that he was going to “spend the rest of his life destroying” five people who had refused to lend him money after his latest bankruptcy.[19] Branson had told Trump that being consumed with vengeance “was going to eat him up, and do more damage to him than to them,” but Trump’s vindictiveness was too powerful. Branson did not name the five individuals whom Trump had vowed to destroy.[20]
Constant lying was a symptom of Trump’s perversion of truth and reality. Tucker Carlson was a fast-talking far-right Trump fan who lied almost as frequently as Trump himself. Carlson’s talk show on Fox News was canceled and Carlson himself was fired. After Trump’s fan Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, Carlson’s show was revived as Tucker on X. On August 23, 2023, the day of the first Republican presidential nomination debate for the 2024 election, Carlson hosted Trump on his show. The idea was to tell Trump’s Republican rivals that he was the only candidate with any chances of being nominated.
On September 6, 2023, Carlson interviewed a shady character named Larry Sinclair, who had a criminal record, and who falsely claimed that he had “had a night of crack cocaine-fueled sex with Barack Obama” 24 years earlier. The interview was criticized by many viewers, including Elon Musk. In February 2024 Carlson traveled to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin, the murderous autocrat who had invaded Ukraine and caused over a million casualties, let alone killing all his opponents, the latest one being Alexei Navalny. On October 27, 2024, Carlson was one of the warm-up speakers at Trump’s racist election rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where Carlson delivered a vulgar, hateful and arrogant speech. Elon Musk also spoke at that meeting. He was in a hypomanic mood and waved his arms above his head as he jumped up and down euphorically.
Back in 2021 Trump had seethed with rage at his humiliation by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had permanently suspended his accounts on their media. Cutting off his access to Twitter was a kind of political castration for Trump.[21] Trump appealed his ban to Facebook’s Oversight Board, which turned him down. That summer Trump filed class-action lawsuits against Twitter, Meta, Google, and their owners, complaining that they “discriminated against conservatives.”[22]
In the fall of 2021 Trump filed another court motion asking a federal judge to order Twitter to reinstate his account,[23] saying nothing about his incitement to violence in the Capitol insurrection early that year. His lawsuits faced a formidable judicial precedent. In 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that newspapers could not be forced to publish replies from politicians they had criticized.[24] In the end Elon Musk came to Trump’s rescue. He bought Twitter, renamed it X, and reinstated Trump’s account. In 2024 Musk became a major Trump ally, moving into Mar-a-Lago and calling himself Trump’s “first buddy.”
On the day Trump was re-elected, November 5, 2024, the racist far-right activist Nick Fuentes posted a misogynist video on Musk’s X website in which he confronted abortion-rights activists outside his home. The video was titled “Your Body. My choice. Forever.”[25] This phrase became “viral.” During the 24 hours between November 7 and November 8, 2024 the posting of misogynist phrases like “Your body, my choice” and “Get back to the kitchen” on X increased forty-six-fold.[26] Trump did not denounce the misogynist messages. They reflected his own feelings.
On November 8, 2024 Trump delivered a victory speech at which he praised Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire whose money had helped Trump win the election. Trump called Musk a “new star in the Republican Party” and said, “He’s an amazing guy. We love you, Elon!” To the chagrin of Trump’s other aides and advisers, Musk assumed a key role in Trump’s inner circle and in the Republican Party without ever having been elected to any political office.
On August 13, 2024, with Kamala Harris threatening to defeat Donald Trump, Elon Musk had audio-interviewed Trump for a full two hours on X. Musk had become a major Trump supporter. He had set up a Super PAC named America PAC in order to win eight hundred thousand voters for Trump in the “swing states.” His political beginning was inauspicious. Musk had overhauled the leadership of his Super PAC less than three months after launching it. The Wall Street Journal thought that “Musk is tackling the election effort in his signature hands-on, chaos-be-damned style, echoing his 2022 takeover of Twitter and early efforts to meet Tesla’s production goals. Whether he and the team he has assembled succeed could be an important part of the election puzzle, and some Republican political operatives said they fear the early stumbles could be costly for the Trump campaign.”[27]
Like Donald Trump, and like many of his associates who had criminal records, Elon Musk had his own problems with the law. His companies’ shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2018 Musk had been charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with falsely promoting his company with a “tweet” saying that he had secured enough funding for making Tesla private (removing its shares from the stock exchange and buying out its shareholders).
The SEC lawsuit characterized Elon Musk’s “tweet” as false, misleading, and damaging to shareholders, and sought to bar Musk from serving as the CEO of any publicly traded company. Musk’s lawyers settled the lawsuit with the SEC without admitting guilt. Musk himself and his Tesla Corporation were fined $20 million each. Musk was forced to step down for three years as Tesla’s board chairman but remained its CEO. In 2019 Musk once again falsely “tweeted” a promotional message for his company, saying that Tesla would build half a million electric cars that year. The SEC sued him again. Tesla’s shareholders also sued Musk over this “tweet.“ Musk had good lawyers, however, and in 2023 a jury found him not liable for damages.
Elon Musk seems to share with Donald Trump a penchant for volatility, instability and unpredictability. Both men are damaged individuals with what look like borderline personalities. Trump has been married three times. Musk has been married and divorced three times, the last two with the same woman. In his rambling two-hour audio interview with Musk on August 12, 2024 Trump re-hashed his old lies and his venomous invective. A BBC fact check found most of his statements false.[28]
Trump attacked the “twenty million illegal immigrants” in the U.S. (a vastly exaggerated figure) as the world’s worst criminals and denounced Kamala Harris as the “border czar” who had let them in.[29] The Musk-Trump interview began inauspiciously with a technical glitch that prevented many users from hearing the conversation for forty-one minutes. In the end some 1.1 million people listened to the interview. Trump’s campaign managers falsely claimed that a billion people [sic] had tuned in to his interview.[30] Some 25 million people may have listened to the recording of the interview, but the one billion figure for those who tuned in was outlandish.
Musk claimed that the 41-minute delay in beginning the interview had been caused by a “massive cyber-attack” on X, but X insiders said that there was a “99% likelihood” that this claim was false. Internet security firms monitoring global hacking threats did not record unusual levels of traffic to X during the time of the alleged attack, and other parts of X were functioning normally during the interview, which is atypical for a large-scale cyber-attack. The real causes of the glitch were probably server overload, reduced staff and unforced errors. Moreover, this was not the first time X had experienced technical difficulties and glitches during a high-profile political event. A similar incident had occurred during Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign announcement in May 2023, which also faced live stream problems on the X platform.[31]
During the interview, at Musk’s request, Trump recounted the failed assassination attempt against him a month earlier. Trump had announced that he would only share the story once, at the Republican convention the previous month, yet during his interview with Musk on August 12, 2024 he again discussed it in detail, saying he would revisit the site in October. Trump was convinced that God had saved his life so that he could save America. “It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” Trump told Musk.
Trump then returned to his current obsession, Kamala Harris. Trump said that Harris was “a terrible woman” and that “she was getting a free ride.” However, he said he had just seen the picture of Harris on the cover of TIME magazine, and “she looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing [sic], and actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania. She didn’t look like Kamala, but of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that.”[32] By calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman” Trump had alleviated his fear of her as the female prosecutor who would bring him down and put him in jail (and his unconscious fear that she would devour or castrate him). He knew how to deal with beautiful women — put them in beauty pageants, flatter them, abuse them sexually — but had no idea how to deal with a political opponent like Kamala Harris.
During his audio interview with Musk, Trump sounded like a man who lisped and slurred his words. Was this due to his anxiety and to his regressed emotional state, caused by the “terrible” Kamala Harris, who unconsciously represented the mother-witch of his infancy? Trump acknowledged that his voice had sounded “strange and different” during the interview but attributed this to technical problems. He later posted on X a clearer version of the interview which his technical aides had recorded at his end, and wrote on his “Truth Social” website, “Unfortunately, because of the complexity of modern day equipment, and cellphone technology, my voice was, in certain areas, somewhat different and strange. Therefore, we have put out an actual, and perfect, recording of the conversation. ENJOY!!!”[33] Few people bothered to listen to the entire two-hour interview.
Philip Elliott thought that Kamala Harris had made Donald Trump panic: “He has yet to figure out how to run against a Black woman two decades his junior who is matching him if not lapping him in crowds and fundraising. Instead of pushing for traditional on-the-ground campaign infrastructure, he clings to bogus claims that Harris’ campaign photo-shopped a crowd of 15,000 in Detroit and blames Democrats for the bullet that nicked his ear. In private, according to reporting from The New York Times, Trump has used a sexist pejorative to describe Harris, an allegation Trump’s allies deny.”[34] The “sexist pejorative” alluded to by Elliott was “bitch.” Calling Harris a bitch allayed Trump’s fear of her.
Elon Musk repeatedly clashed with authorities and father figures. In Brazil, the fascist government of Jair Bolsonaro had been replaced by the leftist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In late August 2024 Musk refused the Brazilian supreme court’s orders to suspend certain far-right Brazilian X accounts. Musk closed X’s Brazilian offices and fired all its Brazilian employees. In retaliation, the Brazilian supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, ordered the “immediate, complete and total suspension of X’s operations” in Brazil “until all [Brazilian] court orders […] are complied with, fines are duly paid, and a new legal representative for the company is appointed in the country.” The judge froze the assets of Musk’s companies in Brazil to collect the fines he had levied on X.[35]
After weeks of resistance and a total Brazilian ban on X, Musk appeared to have submitted to Moraes’s demands. He blocked the required far-right Brazilian X accounts. Musk appointed the Brazilian lawyer Rachel de Oliveira Conceicao X’s his legal representative in Brazil. Musk paid the imposed fines, with Brazilian banks deducting a total of $3.3 million from the bank accounts of X and Starlink. On September 21, 2024, however, the Court demanded that Musk’s X present documents validating the identity and appointment of its Brazilian representative within five days. On September 26 Musk’s X filed a petition with the Court requesting that its service be reinstated in Brazil, and confirming its compliance with the court’s orders. Justice Alexandre de Moraes was not satisfied, imposing a new fine on Musk.[36] The eccentric billionaire was once more fighting a father figure.
In the U.S. presidential election of 2024, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat who became a far-right Trump fan, and who supported Putin’s war on Ukraine, helped Trump win the vote of far-right, white supremacist and other disgruntled voters on the political fringe.[37] He received big donations to his campaign chest from Miriam Farbstein Adelson, the widow of the multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021), as well as from the billionaires Tim Mellon, Elon Musk, Dick and Liz Uihlein, and Linda McMahon. Kamala Harris’s donors included Reid Hoffman, George and Alex Soros, Mike Bloomberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. By early September 2024 Harris had raised $540 million while Trump’s campaign reported having raised $327 million.[38]
On Saturday evening, October 5, 2024, Trump held an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the first attempt on his life had been made that summer. Elon Musk, who had become one of Trump’s key advisers, made a surprise appearance at the rally, in what seemed to be a hypomanic state. “He hopped onstage. He bounced. He jumped like a Pixy Stix-enhanced toddler who was up well past his bedtime.”[39] Musk had been abused and traumatized by his father as a child. Was he unconsciously repeating the same kind of abusive relationship with Trump, who would be sure to fire Musk as soon the latter gained enough power to threaten him? Musk’s hypomanic behavior, including jumping on stage in an ecstatic state, persisted through Trump’s final rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
On October 18, 2024, the American Lincoln scholar Sidney Blumenthal predicted that Trump, like Hitler, would “channel the aesthetics of the Nazis, their Führer cult, and their violent world view to his own attempt to take total control of America and make himself its dictator.”[40] Nine days later, on Sunday evening, October 27, 2024, during the warm-up speeches preceding Trump’s at his Madison Square Garden rally, Tucker Carlson, who had been fired from Fox News for his far-right extremism and personal arrogance, repeated his vulgar act where he thanked Trump for enabling him “to tell the truth about the world around us.” Carlson falsely called the Jamaican-Indian born U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris “your first Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” [sic].[41] Elon Musk jumped onstage in a hypomanic state, as he had during Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, three weeks earlier. After Trump won the election on November 5, the value of Musk’s Tesla company rose by 39% or about $70 billion.[42]
For an inveterate liar like Tucker Carlson to publicly thank a greater liar like Trump for enabling him to tell the truth to the world was mind boggling. It was a looking-glass world where fair was foul and foul was fair. The other warm-up speakers at the Madison Square Garden rally hurled racist barbs at Harris and her Democrats.[43] Elon Musk jumped wildly and exuberantly on the stage in what looked like a hypomanic state. A vulgar forty-year-old comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe made lewd and racist jokes about Latinos, Jews and African Americans and insulted the almost six million Puerto Rican Americans by calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” Trump’s campaign spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” but the damage had been done. Trump risked losing the votes not only of Puerto Rican voters but of all Latino voters.
On November 10, 2024 Trump posted a message on X which read like a royal decree. He ordered the Republican Senators who were running for Senate Majority Leader to endorse “recess appointments” for his nominees to federal positions, beginning with his cabinet secretaries. His message read, “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner. Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY! Additionally, no Judges should be approved during this period of time because the Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. THANK YOU!” [44]
In an obvious attempt to do away with federal agencies and officials who stood in his way, the autocratic Trump named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who had run against Trump in the Republican presidential primaries) to head a new federal “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that would make “drastic changes” in the federal government to make it more efficient. It was an Orwellian name. The right name for Musk and Ramaswamy’s new agency would have been “Department of Axing Trump’s Opponents”(DATO). Trump wanted the odd couple to do the dirty work of eliminating from the federal goverment all agencies and employees who opposed his dictatorial way of governing.
Referring to the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb during the Second World War, Trump said this new Department would be “the Manhattan Project” of this era, driving drastic change throughout the government with major cuts and new efficiencies in bloated federal agencies by July 4, 2026. “A smaller government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Mr. Trump wrote in a public statement. “I am confident they will succeed!” Behind the “efficiency” lay Trump’s wish to rid himself of tens of thousands of federal officials who opposed his fascist plans by eliminating their agencies and their positions and replacing them with his loyalists.
Trump’s nominations made it clear that he was going the fascist way, picking criminal, questionable and corrupt figures loyal to him for his key appointments so he could personally take over the federal government and become its sole ruler. Robert Kennedy Jr., his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, had made unfounded statements about COVID-19, claiming that the virus was designed to affect Caucasians and Black people disproportionately, and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people were more immune to the virus. Kennedy had also opposed COVID-19 vaccinations, the only serious way of dealing with the pandemic. The eccentric billionaire Elon Musk would head Trump’s Orwellian named “Department of Government Efficiency,” better known as DOGE, whose real task was to kill democracy.
On November 25, 2024, Donald Trump gave an interview in his Mar-a-Lago fortress to the editors of TIME magazine, who had chosen him their Person of the Year for the second time since 2016 and splashed his photograph on the magazine’s cover for the 36th time since he first made that cover in early 1989. In his interview with the TIME magazine editors, published on December 12, Trump made light of the obvious conflicts of interest for Elon Musk, whose companies had received over $15 billion in federal contracts over ten years, and who stood to have billions more in federal funds funneled his way in the years to come. In 2023 alone Musk’s companies were promised $3 billion from almost 100 different contracts across 17 different U.S. agencies.[45]
Seventy-two days had passed from August 24, 2024, when Trump was endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to November 5, when he was re-elected. In a possible allusion to Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, and in an unconscious expression of his own fury, Trump called his “flawless” election campaign of 2024 “72 Days of Fury.”[46] During his first presidency Trump had threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” His TIME magazine interview, like everything else he said publicly, was riddled with lies and falsehoods.[47]
During the 2024 election campaign Trump had used the three most prominent people who had joined him, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard, to advance his campaign and to run his transition team. After his re-election, Trump’s transition team was co-chaired by Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, and by Linda McMahon, his nominee for Education Secretary.
Elon Musk appointed himself Trump’s “First Buddy,” an allusion to the First Lady, and began to throw his weight around Trump’s transition team. Musk had moved into a $2,000-per-night cottage at Mar-a-Lago. At a Mar-a-Lago dinner with outside guests, Musk clashed with Trump’s Russian-born lawyer and adviser Boris Epshteyn, accusing Epshteyn of leaking information to reporters about Trump’s transition team, including his Cabinet picks. Two weeks later the world discovered that Epshteyn stood accused of soliciting payments from potential Trump appointees in exchange for promoting them for jobs in the new Trump administration. Trump reportedly ordered his legal team to investigate the allegations.[48] Epshteyn was yet another Trump aide tainted with a criminal record. There were many others.
The Musk-Epshteyn altercation came during dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club on November 13, 2024, and reportedly produced a “massive blowup” and a “huge explosion.” Musk, whose father had repeatedly berated him as a child, criticized Epshteyn’s advice about nominations for the Justice Department, especially that of the far-right Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Gaetz later withdrew his name from the nomination. Musk questioned the qualifications of the people Epshteyn had recommended for positions in the Justice Department and for White House Counsel. Musk also accused Epshteyn of leaking information about Trump’s personnel decisions to the media. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Epshteyn reportedly shouted at Musk, who had also pushed for the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, a billionaire Wall Street executive, to be named Treasury Secretary, over the favored candidate, Wall Street veteran Scott Bessent.
Musk praised the Argentinian president Javier Milei’s decision to cut tariffs on imports — the very tariffs that Trump wanted to raise by 25% for Canada and Mexico in the U.S. “Bessent is a business-as-usual choice [for Treasury Secretary], whereas [Lutnick] will actually enact change,” Musk posted on his X website. “Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt.”[49] As if to put Musk in his place, Trump picked Bessent over Lutnick for Treasury Secretary.[50]
Reportedly irritated by Lutnick’s constant presence at Mar-a-Lago (as well as by Musk’s), Trump nominated Lutnick for his Commerce Secretary rather than for his Treasury Secretary.[51] Trump could only officially nominate his Cabinet secretaries after he came into office again, however, and they would have to be confirmed by the Senate after Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. The perverse purpose of his early nomination announcements in November 2024 was to get the American public and politicians used to the idea of unconventional, unsavory and criminal characters serving in his cabinet. It was a political strategy right out of the fascist playbook.
Elon Musk, a man deeply traumatized by an abusive childhood, began to learn “the cutthroat politics of Donald Trump’s inner circle.” Musk was an outsider and a newcomer to Trump’s politics. One journalist pointed out that “for the first 53 years of his life, Elon Musk barely spent any time with Donald J. Trump. Then, beginning on the night of Nov. 5, he spent basically no time without him […] Most of the people who now surround Mr. Trump in the transition are battle-tested aides from his past fights, or decades-long personal friends. Mr. Musk is neither. What he brings instead are his 200 million followers on X and the roughly $200 million he spent to help elect Mr. Trump. Both of those have greatly impressed the president-elect. Mr. Trump, gobsmacked by Mr. Musk’s willingness to lay off 80 percent of the staff at X, has said the tech billionaire will help lead a Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy.”[52] Placing two men, rather than one, at the helm of this new Department would ensure that neither of them became too powerful.
Musk and Ramaswamy published an article in the conservative Wall Street Journal about their plan for the new Department of Government Efficiency. “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs. We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget.”[53]
Musk and Ramaswamy proudly “tweeted” on Musk’s X about their cost-cutting plan, which, they said, would cut two trillion dollars from the U.S. federal budget of 6.1 trillion dollars, eliminating the U.S. federal budget deficit and, eventually, the U.S. national debt (the cumulative total of all past budget deficits minus any surpluses), which stood at 35.8 trillion dollars. However, their plan was based primarily on cutting vital services to Americans public rather than on increasing the revenue of the U.S. treasury. If enacted, their plan would bring about a “significant disruption in services that Americans have come to expect.”[54] Trump had chosen two billionaires who, like him, had no empathy for the needs and wishes of common people.
On November 19, 2024, Donald Trump attended the launch of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship in Brownsville, Texas. Just as the far-right militias supporting Trump, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, were paramilitary forces, Elon Musk was a “paramonetary force,” described as “unofficial forces, operating outside the government and skirting the boundaries of legality, willing to do what the legitimate forces will not.”[55]
Ruth Ben-Ghiat called Musk “a new and sinister force in government.”[56] In February 2023 a disgruntled Musk had ordered his engineers to tweak the X algorithm after his “tweet” during the Super Bowl (the annual championship game of the U.S. National Football League) failed to achieve as much notice as a “tweet” from Joe Biden.[57] Without being elected or confirmed by anyone, Musk holds a position of great power in Trump’s government. On December 7, 2024 Musk joined Trump at the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris as if he were the equal of President Macron and all the other dignitaries and heads of state who attended.
Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and a key figure in Trump’s return to power, was “far from a neutral player in the deep-pocketed intersection of government and private partners.”[58] Unless Musk divested himself of his companies, any funding or cost-cutting decision he made at DOGE could be in his own interest. The Democratic U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren urged Trump to make Musk either divest his interests or ensure that his advice to the president stays clear of areas where he has financial conflicts. This would mean complying with stringent conflict of interest rules that federal employees follow.[59] Trump laughed such rules to scorn.
On January 20, 2025, during a speech at the post-inauguration celebration for President Donald Trump at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. Elon Musk twice waved his arm to the crowd — first to the crowd in front of him, he then turned around and waved it to the crowd behind him — in a gesture that looked very much like the Nazi-style salute. The incident occurred while Musk was addressing a crowd of approximately 20,000 Trump supporters. To many, this incident reaffirmed the fascist character of Trump’s new government.
The Trump-Musk love fest (or bromance, as it is called by some journalists) is not likely to end happily. At some point, due to his massive traumatization and to his compulsive unconscious need to repeat it, Musk may unconsciously provoke Trump’s ire, either by clinging to him, or by meddling in his affairs, or by fighting with Trump’s closest aides, or in other, more subtle ways, without intending to do so. If Trump’s rage is provoked, he may either fire Musk or punish him in some other way, probably humiliating Musk in the process. Musk may react to such a humiliation with a great fury of his own, unconsciously displace (or transfer) his early rage ta his father to Trump, and denounce Trump publicly. With two such complex and emotionally damaged people, it is impossible to predict the outcome.
ENDNOTES
[1] Gideon Lichfield, “The Trumpification of Elon Musk,” Wired, December 13, 2022
[2] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Elon Musk: A New and Sinister Force in Government,“ Lucid, December 20, 2024
[3] Erin Prater, “Does Elon Musk have PTSD? Biographer Walter Isaacson says the billionaire’s turbulent childhood with an abusive father left him scarred,” Fortune, September 17, 2023
[4] Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2023
[5] Erin Prater, ibid.
[6] Serge Frank Kovaleski (born 1961), South-African-born American investigative reporter, a member of the team of that won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of the prostitution scandal of the former New York governor Eliot Spitzer (born 1959)
[7] Glenn Kessler, “Donald Trump’s revisionist history of mocking a disabled reporter,” The Washington Post, August 2, 2016
[8] D’Angelo Gore, “Trump’s Revised 9/11 Claim,” Fact Check, August 5, 2016
[9] Mary Louise (Meryl) Streep (born 1949), American actress who was nominated for twenty-one Academy Awards, won three, received thirty-two Golden Globe nominations, and won eight
[10] Hilary Weaver, “Meryl Streep’s Powerful, Anti-Trump Golden Globes Speech: Read the Whole Thing Here,” Vanity Fair, January 8, 2017
[11] @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, January 9, 2017
[12] Callum Borchers, “Meryl Streep was right. Donald Trump did mock a disabled reporter,” The Washington Post, January 9, 2017
[13] Jen Kirby, “Trump thinks Amazon’s destroying the post office. Here’s what’s really happening,” Vox, March 30, 2018
[14] Jeff Bezos, Twitter, March 31, 2018
[15] Robert Ferris, “Donald Trump’s character reflects poorly on the United States,” CNBC, November 4, 2016
[16] Lee Dave, “Elon Musk: I’m Trump’s voice of reason,” BBC News, January 26, 2017
[17] Elon Musk on Twitter, June 1, 2017
[18] Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 1950), British investor, author and commercial astronaut, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group, which controls more than 400 companies in various fields; in 2021 he traveled to space for a few minutes aboard his Virgin Galactic spacecraft
[19] Nolan C. McCaskill, “Richard Branson: Trump vowed to destroy 5 people who refused to help him,” Politico, October 21, 2016
[20] Max J. Rosenthal, “Richard Branson Describes ‘Bizarre’ Lunch in Which Donald Trump Waxed About Vengeance,” Mother Jones, October 21, 2016
[21] David Smith, “The silence of Donald Trump: how Twitter’s ban is cramping his style,” The Guardian, October 9, 2021
[22] Cat Zakrzewski & Rachel Lerman, “Trump files class action lawsuits targeting Facebook, Google and Twitter over ‘censorship’ of conservatives,” The Washington Post, July 7, 2021
[23] Reuters, “Donald Trump asks Florida judge to force Twitter to reinstate account,” The Guardian, October 2, 2021
[24] Adam Liptak, “Trump Suits Against Tech Giants Face Steep First Amendment Hurdles,” The New York Times, July 12, 2021
[25] Clare Duffy, “‘Your body, my choice’: Attacks on women surge on social media following election,” CNN Business, November 12, 2024
[26] Isabelle Frances Wright & Moustafa Ayad, “‘Your body, my choice:’ Hate and harassment towards women spreads online,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, November 8, 2024
[27] Dana Mattioli, Joe Palazzolo & Emily Glazer, “Inside Elon Musk’s Hands-On Push to Win 800,000 Voters for Trump,” The Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2024
[28] Jake Horton, Mark Poynting & Lucy Gilder, “Trump’s chat with Musk on X fact-checked,” BBC News, August 13, 2024
[29] Joan E. Greve, “Trump revisits most divisive talking points in rambling interview with Musk,” The Guardian, August 13, 2024
[30] Palm Playbook, August 13, 2024; Maya Mehrara, “Trump Campaign Claims A Billion People Listened to His Elon Musk Interview,” Newsweek, August 14, 2024
[31] Brittany Gibson, “Trump’s interview with Musk devolves into yet another X catastrophe,” Politico, August 12, 2024
[32] Philipp Elliott, “Musk Interview Showed Trump Doesn’t Know How to Run Against Harris,” Time, August 13, 2024
[33] Alia Shoaib, “Donald Trump Reveals Why He Sounded ‘Strange’ During Elon Musk Interview,” Newsweek, August 14, 2024
[34] ibid.
[35] Tiago Rogero, “Brazilian court orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it missed deadline,” The Guardian, August 31, 2024
[36] Reuters, “Brazil’s top court imposes new fine before allowing X to resume service,” Reuters, September 28, 2024
[37] Jess Bidgood, “Why Trump’s Unity Picks Are Not Very Unifying,” The New York Times, September 4, 2024
[38] Theodore Schleifer, “Who Are the Biggest Donors to Trump and Harris?” The New York Times, September 1, 2024
[39] Jacob Gallagher, “Elon Musk’s Giant Leap,” The New York Times, October 7, 2024
[40] Sidney Blumenthal, “A week before the election, Trump will hold his most unsettling spectacle yet,” The Guardian, October 18, 2024
[41] Holly Patrick, “Tucker Carlson falsely brands Kamala Harris ‘Samoan-Malaysian’ during bizarre Donald Trump rally warmup,” The Independent, October 28, 2024
[42] Ari Levy & Lora Kolodny, “Elon Musk is $70 billion richer since Trump victory due to Tesla stock surge,” CNBC, November 11, 2024
[43] Gregory Krieg, “Trump loyalists spew racist, vulgar attacks at Harris and Democrats at New York City rally,” CNN Politics, October 27, 2024
[44] Donald J. Trump on X, November 10, 2024; Kate Sulivan, Manu Raju & Sam Fossum, “Trump calls on GOP senators vying to be majority leader to agree to recess appointments,” CNN Politics, November 10, 2024
[45] Eric Lipton, David A. Fahrenthold, Aaron Krolik and Kirsten Grind, “U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them.” The New York Times, October 20, 2024
[46] Donald J. Trump, Person of the Year interview with Eric Cortellessa, Alex Altman, Massimo Calabresi and Sam Jacobs, Time, December 12, 2024
[47] Simmone Shah & Leslie Dickstein, “Fact-Checking What Donald Trump Said in His 2024 Person of the Year Interview With TIME,” Time, December 12, 2024
[48] Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan, “Top Trump Aide Accused of Asking for Money to ‘Promote’ Potential Appointees,” The New York Times, November 26, 2024
[49] Alex Woodward, “Musk is fighting with top Trump adviser on cabinet picks as Tesla CEO’s influence grows,” The Independent, November 18, 2024
[50] Alan Rappeport & Maggie Habermann, “Trump taps investor Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary,” The New York Times, November 22, 2024
[51] Ana Swanson & Alan Rappeport, “Trump Taps Wall St. Executive Howard Lutnick for Commerce Secretary,” ,” The New York Times, November 19, 2024
[52] Theodore Schleifer, “Elon Musk Gets a Crash Course in How Trumpworld Works,” The New York Times, November 22, 2024
[53] Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy, “The DOGE Plan to Reform Government,” The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2024
[54] Glenn Kessler, “‘DOGE’ tweets illustrate an almost impossible budget-cutting agenda,” The Washington Post, November 26, 2024
[55] Anand Giridharadas, “Trump’s paramonetary forces,” The.Ink, November 29, 2024
[56] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Elon Musk: A New and Sinister Force in Government,“ Lucid, December 20, 2024
[57] Kari Paul, “Elon Musk reportedly forced Twitter algorithm to boost his tweets after Super Bowl flop,” The Guardian, February 15, 2023
[58] Philip Elliott, “What Trump Said About Elon Musk in his TIME Person of the Year Interview,” Time, December 12, 2024
[59] Michel Martin, Janaya Williams & Milton Guevara, “Sen. Warren urges Trump to hold Musk accountable for conflicts of interest,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, December 20, 2024