The rift between the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and the tycoon Elon Musk, who at one point became the second most important figure in the White House, should not represent more than another episode of the “musical chairs” game that is the norm in the Trump Administration, where employee turnover is the exception rather than the rule.
But this case poses particular problems for the American president: he has currently made an enemy of the richest man in the world, the main financier of his campaign, and the undisputed spokesperson of one of the pillars of his mandate, the American tech right.
The polls favor Trump over Musk
Surveys are in favor of the president: a quick poll by YouGov declares that a whopping 71% of Republican voters have sided with Trump in this fight.
Musk is the worst off in this disagreement. He leaves the White House with a feeling of resounding failure: the initial approval in Congress of Trump’s “big and beautiful” budget legislation, and the monumental increase in public spending it entails, invalidates all his efforts to reduce the size of the American bureaucracy.
For the South African, his time in the White House has been wasted time that has resulted in a sharp drop in Tesla’s stocks, and in the erosion of his public image among traditional Republicans. Musk, who bought the then social network Twitter in 2022 with the intention of breaking out of the “niche,” has lost value in the majority of the conservative community.
In general terms, the conflict between Trump and Musk has been a structural, ideological, and character conflict, and the latter matters when both control two social platforms such as TruthSocial in the case of Trump and X in the case of the magnate, two pillars of communication of the far-right movement MAGA (Make America Great Again), the ideological backbone of Trumpism, whose influencers have been forced in the last hours to declare their loyalty to one of the two sides and to call for peace between them.
Musk’s incorporation into the White House as a presidential advisor threatened to fracture the MAGA movement since the end of last year, when Trump and the magnate jointly supported an initiative to enhance the granting of visas to skilled foreign workers, an intolerable perspective for the “nativist” and anti-immigration wing of the movement.
At that time, however, Musk was practically invulnerable to criticism, as a financial stronghold of the Trump campaign, to which he contributed 277 million dollars, a record in the 2024 elections, through the fundraising body Political Action Committee America, which had the participation of prominent figures from the American tech right, such as the co-founder of the data analysis company Palantir, Joe Lonsdale.
Rubio vs Musk: the first fight
Musk dedicated the first weeks to promoting his work in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, in English), a shadowy advisory commission responsible for reducing the size of the American administration through the elimination of federal agencies, starting with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a competitor of Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
This decision was the catalyst for the first crisis in March: a torrent of denials from the Administration against a report from the New York Times that detailed a discussion between Musk and Rubio in the Oval Office, in which the Secretary of State accused the magnate of interfering in his work. Sources close to Trump confirmed that the dispute had occurred but in much less heated terms than those described by the newspaper.
Wisconsin: the beginning of Musk’s downfall
But if there is a turning point in the relationship between Musk and the White House, it occurred in March of this year, during the elections for the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. The court, in the hands of liberal judges, is the highest judicial body of a state traditionally divided between Democrats and Republicans, and the elections for its composition represented a golden opportunity to install a conservative judge.
Musk decided at that moment to demonstrate his strength by launching a new fundraising campaign in support of Trump’s candidate, Judge Brad Schimel, in what ended up becoming a referendum on the political impact of the South African magnate within the broader current of American conservatism. Musk presented himself as a radical actor with supremacist undertones, declaring judicial elections as a battle for “the future of Western civilization.” A month earlier, he had already publicly endorsed the far-right German party Alternative for Germany.
Schimel lost the elections in a victory for the Democratic Party in need of wins after their catastrophic performance in the presidential elections. They took advantage of this to dig the knife in by declaring Musk “a politically toxic figure, a huge anchor that will drag the Republicans to the bottom of the ocean,” as stated by the president of the Democratic Party in the state, Ben Wikler.
By then, Tesla’s shares had fallen by 13% amid investor criticism of Musk’s distancing from the company’s leadership, a target of activists against the magnate, who carried out attacks against the company’s electric vehicle dealerships.
Musk’s definitive break with the White House came when he denounced Trump’s tax plan as an “abomination,” referring to it as his “big and beautiful” law, which includes tax cuts and increased military spending, and is expected to result in a $2.41 trillion increase in the fiscal deficit by 2034, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. Musk described it as pure “slavery” to his 240 million followers on X, and warned that it would be a catalyst for a “recession” in the second half of the year.
On Thursday, Musk’s outrage turned into a frenzy, through a barrage of messages, both his own and reposted, in which Musk surveyed the possibility of creating a third political party, echoed requests from influencers like Ian Miles Cheong to overthrow Trump, and accused the President of the United States of being on the “list” of child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump and his inner circle have ironically become the voice of reason. Sources from Politico point to efforts in the last hours towards reconciliation, or at the very least, non-aggression with Musk, downplaying the disagreement.