The Complications of Elon Musk
You might be forgiven for forgetting that, just over a week ago, Trump’s spox, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement affirming that Trump — and not Elon Musk — leads the Republican party.
As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.
She was trying to sustain the illusion that Trump really did only learn about the contents of the Continuing Resolution that Elon Musk tanked after Elon did, rather than that Elon vetoed a bill Trump had already acquiesced to.
Read Robert Kuttner on the ways that Elon outplayed Trump in the CR negotiations (though I think Elon had several goals, not just to continue doing business in China unimpeded, but also defeating a measure that would have limited his ability to post Deep Fakes of AOC on Xitter).
You might be forgiven for forgetting Leavitt’s thin denial because Trump’s own comments, at Turning Point USA’s latest shindig, were even more striking.
Elon is going to have his DOGE [sic], Trump recommitted. But he’s not going to be President, Trump continued, because he is Constitutionally prohibited.
But I will order federal workers to get back to the office in person or be terminated from the job immediately. And we will create the new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk.
And no, he’s not taking the presidency. I like having smart people. You know, the — they’re on a new kick — Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, all the different hoaxes. And the new one is, President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk. No, no, that’s not happening. But Elon’s done an amazing job. Isn’t it nice to have smart people that we can rely on, okay? Don’t we want that?
[snip]
But no, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you. And I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country. But the fake news knows that. No, he’s a great guy, and we want to have him, everybody.
Pretty rich [cough] for a guy like Trump to seek refuge in the Constitution.
The next day, Trump put Stephen Miller’s spouse, Katie on DOGE [sic], right alongside naming another billionaire, Stephen Feinberg, to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense.
We learned during the campaign that the relationship between Stephen Miller and Musk is chummier than we knew, though we still can’t say whether Miller was the one who counseled Musk on bringing “the boss himself, if you’re up for that!” back onto Xitter.
But by picking even the spokesperson for DOGE [sic] — presumably a spox who would like to get paid — Trump provides NGOs like CREW a lever to demand transparency into DOGE [sic] that it is otherwise designed to evade.
It also puts a trusted insider inside.
All that was before the hilarious fight between Laura Loomer and Elon Musk (and Vivek Ramaswamy, who suggested American children don’t have the same work ethic that children of South Asian immigrants do) over H1Bs yesterday. After Loomer called Musk out for pushing immigration, Elon started shutting down her Xitter privileges.
Which led to Elon “censoring” Loomer’s account, after which she herself adopted the “President Musk” moniker.
Then someone with a manic South African accent using the name Adrian Dittman went into an Owen Shroyer chatroom and further antagonized Loomer.
Perhaps this is all some light-hearted amusement — something to do between the Beyoncé hafltime show and the New Years Eve ball drop.
But I do think it’s a testament to the complexity of the relationship between Trump and Elon. And that’s true for more reasons than the fundamental incompatibility of Trump’s populist nativism and Elon’s supranational aspirations. As it happened, the CR disappointed almost three dozen Republicans, who took Trump’s promise of backing Elon’s plans to cut government seriously. But it also disappointed Trump, who didn’t get Republicans to eliminate the debt ceiling. And those two incompatible stances — cutting government spending versus eliminating all limits to it — are simply two unpopular ways of giving the richest man in the world more tax cuts.
Many people predict, with good reason, that the two Malignant Narcissist problem will soon lead to a break between the men — that Trump will tire of questions about his own authority and lash out, cut off Elon, maybe even retaliate. The more people call Elon the President, the more likely that will happen.
But I’m not convinced that fully accounts for the complexity of this relationship. I don’t know whether that’s because Trump is awed by Elon’s shiny rockets and endless money. Or if there’s further complexity to the way Trump won the election.
It should be the case that Trump, through no more than inaction, a failure to order subordinates to shut down the various investigations and regulatory reviews that threaten Musk, could eliminate the problem Elon poses to his authority.
But Trump has already allowed Elon to chip away at the viability of his coalition.
The move to pause the debt ceiling as part of the first continuing funding resolution, albeit for only 2 years, certainly came from Trump. For GOP politicians the endlessly recurring fight over the debt is a circle jerk they never want to miss. It was an odd idea for Trump to try and scuttle it and any analysis of why leads one to think Trump is a strategic thinker because it’s difficult to think what the strategy could be so it must be Grand Strategic Thinking. If a reason for a strategy isn’t known it must be grand.
What isn’t appreciated about the debt ceiling is that the Treasury is prevented from auctioning new Bills, Notes and Bonds, except to replace redeemed issues. That removes the now approx $150 billion of monthly supply from the bond market. That means Treasury securities buyers must buy something else and stocks always get part of it. The debt issuance vacations are bullish for bonds too because again, less supply so other debt instruments must be bought. The bad part comes when every debt ceiling impasse is ended and Treasury floods the market to rebuild it’s balance and thus is a drag on the markets.
If Trump knew that, which would mean a tendency for bullish markets this january as the ceiling hit’s on the 2nd, why wouldn’t he love that? That suggests some deeper strategy. But come on this is Donald Trump. I suppose it comes from a Trump whisperer or two. Let me suggest Wall Street boys. They hate uncertainty and the dynamics of massive Treasury issuance has counter intuitively become a source of liquidity because of the burgeoning repo market. No room to explain. Well I run on too long, to little purpose but can you guess or find how much money is in the Treasuries bank account at the Fed as of Wednesday night? I’ll provide an answer later.
“No room to explain….I’ll provide an answer later?” LOL. Let me suggest that that’s comparable to the scriptwriter’s cheat that the protagonist couldn’t make a vital call because his cell phone’s battery went dead.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musks-neuralink-has-implanted-its-first-chip-in-a-human-brain-whats-next/
The SA item is silent, but it was Trump.
wowza! on a real level this spirochetic pseudo-syncretic sadistic shittification synapsing is happened. loserlinkers unite to dulling efx.
Jean-Louis Kérouac is dead. ‘Monk’s Insomnia” says all that needs said in these fucked up times, HB. His poetic love child, Denis Johnson, dead too, sad to say
Peter Hegseth is a drunken womanizing clown from Fox News. His “deputy”, Stephen Feinberg, is the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Cerberus Capital Management. When they meet in the Pentagon, Hegseth is the named authority, but while Hegseth has absolute dependency on Trump for any status, prestige, and connections in the world going forward, Feinberg has the billionaire reality distortion field that turns normal people into sycophants everywhere he goes, and always will. It’s hard to imagine Hegseth having any authority in the relationship, anyway, because someone like Feinberg always commands, and someone like Hegseth never does.
Muskeg
Always there, dawn to dusk,
Who bears fruit and who’s the husk
Who’s long-winded, who is brusque
In the funhouse with muskeg Musk
President Musk just gives him money. It is a cheap buyout for PM. Better than gold shoes, coins, trading cards, and jailhouse t-shirts, no muss no fuss. No back stock, no run on the marketing.
I don’t see it ending so quickly. Does VP DJT care more for money or power? TBD.
that is correct, we have years of these lame losers being needled in hi-def for their nasty LCD screen focus spotlight addiction.
pure fetid narcissistic squatting and primping for the shitubes and rubes and lubed bed buddies like we have never seen, overperformed. won’t save them, won’t distract anyone who has a purpose in life, immediately files these two and their ilk into the cortex as petulant noisy obstacles to be trampled underneath as humanity and its desires march us forward into a future that has no more capacity for bloated corrupt corpses and their political donors and smut licking voters, donors and mob.
these 2 turds atop the shit-mountain king stool. its that unsophisticated and their end will be the sophistication. their lazy greedy nihilism will become a roasted scapegoat in fiber-optic warp speed once they cross the line in the conning shell game fraud. their performance perch has only the purpose of elevating them above the fecal floodline and give them stature. those petulant below, once the shit flow from above matches the shit-subterfuge from below, will kick them in the teeth and let gravity and the re-calibrating of retirement savings investitures do the dirty work until a more grounded leader figure/puppet can be dangled on the throne these weak-a$$ fascist salivate towards. powermoneyshitfuck royale brewing indeed…
I understand you’re very angry and frustrated as nearly everyone of our commenters are, but the 197-word screed following the first 22 words is overkill.
Working JD into the equation, science has not yet solved the three body problem. The Hegseth – Feinberg comment is interesting. Hegseth – If I can’t grab it, carry it, fire it, then cancel the weapon system. Feinberg is the second level of waste management. Saving some, letting others go. In four years what will be left? Nukes and weapons systems useful to the Israelis?
If this were the usual Trump relationship, Musk would have been gone a long time ago. Trump is getting something from Musk that he doesn’t think he can easily get from someone else. Most likely it is money but I wonder what blackmail material Musk might have on Trump. Which makes me wonder what blackmail material on Trump would even look like. So far he seems pretty impervious to the usual kinds of things people don’t want revealed about them.
Musk gives Trump the validation he has craved from The Rich and Powerful all his life. For a long time, this was acceptance from the NYC high society folks, and it was always elusive. He feared that they were laughing at him behind his back, which likely was true.
But now he has the world’s richest man bowing and scraping, and acknowledging his brilliance.
That is worth a great deal to Trump, and if he ever loses that, it will make a hardcore junkie going cold turkey look like a walk in the park.
So the day Musk lets it slip in public that he thinks Trump is a gullible idiot?
Trump uses the typical language with Musk that he does with other powerful figures whose approval he craves (Putin, for example), describing him as “smart” and “brilliant” in that transactional way intended to send those same descriptors back in his own direction. With Musk it reads almost like a twisted version (a child’s interpretation) of the Prosperity Gospel: Musk would not be that rich without God’s great favor.
Also worth remembering: Putin was once reputed to be the world’s richest man. It is never *just* about money, although Musk’s money surely helped get Trump elected. Money means something almost mystical to this man raised on Norman Vincent Peale’s positivity gospel and Fred Trump’s sociopathy. Money is the closest thing Trump knows to love.
Not an original thought, yet Musk and Vivek give Trump cover.
Trump wants credit for the good stuff, such as the Biden economy he inherits, and wants to deflect blame for the austerity threat. But, really, if DOGE is only a cover, then it boils down to trying to thread the needle on deportation and tariffs, neither of which is a promising moneymaker from the perspective of the techbro oligarchs.
Two unknowns are what the performance of retribution unleashes, and, what the brass of the military is willing to get behind.
Could the missing element be Peter Thiel? Specifically, his money promised under the table but in only-the-Supreme-Court “legal” ways, of course, that Trump is counting on. Musk excites the tech-bois and draws attention away from Thiel’s technoanarchist bent.
I’d also wonder if the bargain isn’t that Musk has promised to do the “heavy lifting” of pursuing Trump’s priorities to allow Trump to focus on petty graft, Tweeting, and calling in to Fox shows.
I suspect the missing element(s) are Musk’s and Vance’s sponsors. In Musk’s case specifically, it’s Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the techbroligarchy which funded his acquisition of the dead bird app. It’s also Putin indirectly because of Starlink via SpaceX.
Transmission lines here will be interesting to see. If it’s Thiel and the others in the “Apartheid Mafia,” he’ll quit or grudgingly give ground on DOGE’s transparency lawsuits. If it’s Qatar, “Bonesaw” Prince MBS, and indirectly Putin, he’ll ignore the lawsuits and dare Pam Bondi to enforce whatever court orders come his way.
Nice reminder that even the richest man in the world — you don’t get that way spending only your own money — has patrons to keep happy. Motivations might be lopsided in one direction, but there are usually many of them and they often conflict.
“the complexity of this relationship” will fully manifest during the response to the first major crisis Trump 2.0 faces
4 years of Biden’s admin have insulated people from the compound effects of disaster followed by ineffectual governance. We will miss Buttigieg et alios.
Bush the younger’s Katrina response was just a warmup.
It won’t be fun.
What are the chances that President Elon Musk has a large trove of X posts from Donald Trump that Musk’s moderators prevented from being published because they were so crazy/moronic? He’s just using these as leverage to keep the upper hand in his relationship with the pretend billionaire.
I believe chances are slim. Your suggestion regarding leverage is predicated on the notion that Trump can be shamed. There is no evidence that he can.
Musk likely has access to or has been reminded of many sensitive posts because of Saudi Arabia.
I swear people have forgotten this which preceded all the squawking about the former bird app’s throttling free speech because US government.
Trump says, “Isn’t it nice to have smart people that we can rely on, okay? Don’t we want that?”
Yes, we all want that. Someone has to remind him that the scientific community is almost completely filled with smart people. They invented working vaccines, computers, televisions, smart phones, the data processing that enables climate predictions…
The scientific method is laborious, time consuming, difficult and full of pitfalls. Science doesn’t always give us the answers we want, but it does provide the best way to ascertain truth in the whole wide world. If he actually had smart people around him, he would know that you can’t just cherry pick the truths that you like and disregard the ones you don’t. How do we teach these people who reject learning?
Trump and his GOP reject all methods of finding/knowing the truth, such as the scientific method, double sourced journalism, fact checking, research, education, books, and libraries, on purpose because they would be in jail otherwise, or wouldn’t be able to plunder our resources for personal wealth, or collapse democracy and the economy to hinder our objections to their aims. They knowingly reject the truth to enrich themselves and escape their deserved punishments. They don’t want to learn to love the truth.
I’m actually becoming more certain that Elon might be trumps new Russian handler and dare not cross his boss
Nit picking, but Elon isn’t a narcissist – he is a antisocial personality disorder (socio/psycho path). The two are completely incompatible, although they lead to many of the same behaviours.
All narcissists have some degree of the seven subdivisions (malignant, sexual, etc.) but are often dominated by one or two. In Trumps case, he expresses all of them to a high degree. Labelling him as a Malignant Narcissist isn’t incorrect, but incomplete.
Psycho/socio-path distinguishes Elmo from the average American CEO how?
Elmo (and Bezos and Steve Jobs when alive) are socio/psychopaths, and the most obvious trait is that they’ve never achieved enough. They are always pushing to accomplish more to fill the hole at the centre of themselves. Without empathy, it won’t even register that they are running over anyone in there path to reach that next achievement.
Gates is normal. He achieved great success, and spent his effort to protect what he had built, not accomplish more.
The board structure and profit motive of standard boards/c-suites encourage more normal people to behave like socio/psychopaths so company behaviours are often similar – but normal folk in positions of power will slow their roll a bit. Group run companies tend to suffer from procedure overload more, and the board as a whole is missing that unfillable hole inside them that leads socio/psychopaths to always crave more.
The truely dickish stuff companies do is mostly done by single decision makers.
Truly dickish stuff, like rot, starts at the top, which determines the business culture that harbors and supports being a dick as a way to get ahead.
Beware of geeks bearing grifts.
that’s awesome
Per many comments in this thread and in particular Rayne suggesting “I suspect the missing element(s) are Musk’s and Vance’s sponsors.” and after reading at DK of a DJT Truth Social post re: ‘Where are you?’ added to Leon’s admitted use of a (prescription) psychoactive plus my own personal experience with substance abusers – I wish to speculate.
Perhaps Occam applies: while money, greed and power are most definitely in play here it strikes me there may be a more base and common leash on the Felon Guy – has Leon got him hooked on or at least given him a taste of Ketamine? That very thought is alarming – while I am nowhere near a mental health professional from here it looks like addictive behavior.
Maybe Khrushchev et al may have been right regarding the eventual fulcrum point of a US downfall: if the POTUS is as easy to manipulate as Jar Jar Binks from within the Executive circle then the heavy lifting has already been done. Will unfettered Capitalism and rampant greed get so top heavy that we are going to rot from within while the American oligarch class mops up?
Muck and Vances ‘sponsors’ seem to fit the oligarch mold.
Well…Jar Jar post dates Nikita by a bit.
And Jar Jar wasn’t in (pre dates) Empire so a Trump Strikes Back analogy fails me though a Trump – Star Wars analogy is probably a no brainer for deep fans.
But your point is WELL TAKEN.
Outsmarting Donald Trump is a rather small accomplishment, in my estimation. A savvy 8th grader could do that. Elon Musk is an overrated spreadsheet jock, who is probably on the autism spectrum and made a few lucky investments (most notably, PayPal), which propelled him into billionaire status. He is not Thomas Edison. He is also going to find out that many U.S. governmental agencies operate in a very lean manner, administratively speaking, because they don’t pay their top executives seven and eight figure salaries and massive equity bonuses to boot.
Thomas Edison certainly had traits common with nowadays CEOs. The battle between AC and DC, where Edison used as much propaganda as possible to protect DC against Tesla looks a lot like a Musk behavior, or the theft of IP from Méliès, are good examples.
“Don’t want to brag but … I’m the best at humility”
― Elon Musk
Barack Obama at the Al Smith dinner in 2008:
“If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it’s possible that I’m a little too awesome.”
There the similarities between a Statesman and a megalomaniac fool are laid bare.
Need a citation for this one:
“Only my tremendous humility prevents me from saying more about myself.”
‘Bueller….Bueller….? Anyone?
I just watched that dinner. Non-stop jokes, much self-deprecation—that remark was received with laughter, even Obama smiled as he said it.
Good times, back when the powerful were one big, happy club, the one George Carlin said “And you ain’t in it”. Still better than today though.
You can find the whole dinner on youtube.
While we are crystal-ball gazing and hoping to divine outcomes these conflicts:
Japanese martial arts, Greek myth, and Æsop give us as much insight of means and outcomes as more scientific prognostication.
(Duess i am dating myself.)
For Trump, everything is for sale; for Musk, money is no object. And they both stand to make multiple millions if not billions using their inside-government influence.
So I expect no falling out between them unless and until the money stops flowing into their pockets.
At this point, I’m just kicking back and watching the show. You don’t bring a knife to a circular firing squad.
Jumping in again, https://newrepublic.com/post/189694/steve-bannon-maga-war-elon-musk-immigration That link is about the H-1B visas high tech uses to brain drain less prosperous nations.
It is complicated. US doctorates in computer science often are from other nations. Computer science undergraduates often seek jobs rather than advanced degrees. CEOs at Google and Microsoft are of Indian backgrounds. High tech – Silicon valley are dependent on smart trained people. And the H-1B people work for less. That opening link, Bannon points out the “work for less” and Musk emphasizes the “top 0.1% talent-wise” view of brain draining skilled (cheaper) labor, world wide.
It is not about picking melons. That’s Stephen Miller’s and Homan’s end of things. It is high skilled vs. unskilled labor, with MAGA white distressed people not being highly trained minds. They may be smart, but not trained at specialized work areas.
It is like the blind men describing the elephant, each feeling a different part – here, of the labor market.
Packing plants provide super market meat cuts cheaper than if their labor pool were shrunk by Homan and Miller. Price inflation bothering the same people who want the labor pool shrunk is comical, but happening. As with tariffs affecting supply chain costs, deportation of low end workers will affect labor costs, and when costs go up, pricing adjusts, new supply demand balances happen, and much moaning ensues. Trump does not want to disadvantage U.S. high tech vs China, while Chinese merchantilism – not being a world economy team player – is causing an equilibrium adjustment Europe does not particularly like either. Levels and sectors of the labor market differ, and Musk’s segment, like Vivek’s, differs from Southern border traffic. H-1B visas is a separate question from that.
Musk is right that if we want to gain/maintain technological hegemony we need those visas. Bannon and Loomer are right, MAGA base voters are not Musk’s H-1B players. Bannon is right, that H-1B should not be used to pay less to people who cannot swap jobs via visa terms and conditions, and can be paid to work for less. What is happening is that MAGA absolutists were courted by Trump where even Trump and Vance know that governing is a balancing act where absolutes are gum in the machine.
Elmo (and Vivek) complaining that Americans are too stupid to hire so he needs H1Bs is…kind of funny, given that he’s an immigrant who hates the US and democracy. (He came in on a student visa, not as an H1B. Vivek was *born* here.)
Elmo doesn’t hate America enough to leave. He wants to live, work, and run his businesses from here. He just doesn’t want to pay US wages and taxes, which are what pay for the American political, social, economic, legal, and educational systems, and which vigorously protect his businesses and wealth. Like Trump, he wants everything for free.