Trump’s public breakup with Elon Musk is symptomatic of his failure to hold together the broad coalition to which he owes his re-election.
The ‘HUGEst’ political alliance of the century is breaking apart before the eyes of the world in suitably spectacular fashion.
For the last few months, the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, were a political item. Musk donated large sums to Trump’s campaign, lavished the newly re-elected president with praise on his social network, and neglected his companies to pursue his side quest at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In return, Trump gave Musk unprecedented powers over the federal bureaucracy, staged joint press conferences in the Oval Office, and allowed him to lecture the assembled cabinet before rolling cameras. Nothing better symbolised the supposed ‘vibe shift’ in America than the fact that Trump, practically a social pariah when first elected to the White House, could upon his return count on the outspoken support of the world’s most famous entrepreneur – and many other leading figures in Silicon Valley.
But it was also clear from the start that the match between Musk and Trump might prove stormy. The egos of both men are evidently outsized, their temperaments famously volatile. It did not take a genius to predict that their supposedly perfect match might prove short-lived – or even end in acrimony. And yet, the speed with which their epic bromance has turned into an explosive feud is astonishing.
A week ago, Musk announced his departure from Washington, with the pair giving a final press conference from the Oval Office. A few days later, a story in the New York Times, apparently drawing on sources in Trump’s circle, chronicled the extent of Musk’s alleged drug use. Then, on Tuesday, Musk publicly came out against Trump’s ‘big and beautiful’ budget bill, which would lead both to a large tax cut and a massive increase in public debt.
But it was yesterday that the fight truly escalated. At a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump responded to Musk’s criticisms of his budget bill, suggesting that ‘Elon is upset because we took [away] the EV mandate, which is a lot of money for electric vehicles… I know that disturbed him.’
Musk’s ire grew by the hour. First, he told his 220 million followers on X that America could choose between a ‘big and ugly bill’ and a ‘slim and beautiful bill’, urging Republican legislators to break ranks with Trump in pursuit of the latter. As the day wore on, Musk started to draw attention to Trump’s alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that these were the real reasons why files about Epstein’s misdeeds hadn’t yet been released. At present, his pinned post is a poll that asks users whether it is time for a ‘new political party in America that actually represents the 80 per cent in the middle’.
The breakup is likely to prove costly to both sides. Trump will lose his biggest financial backer (though both are billionaires, Musk is estimated to be over 50 times richer than him). He may find that X – which remains the most politically influential social media platform despite being much less central to the political conversation than it once was – suddenly becomes more hostile terrain. And the passage of his crucial budget bill is now in serious doubt.
Musk, whose approval ratings already lag behind those of his former boss, is now politically homeless. Having alienated much of the liberal customer base of Tesla, his most valuable company, he is now likely to alienate MAGA, his most fervent fanbase in politics. While a majority of Americans may indeed be unhappy with the choices currently on offer, the idea that somebody who is this unpopular can found a successful third party is highly unrealistic.
But the big, beautiful break between Trump and Musk is more significant for what it reveals about failed aspirations now consigned to the past than for what it predicts about events yet to come. When romances fail, it is often because each partner projected their hopes onto the other, only to discover belatedly that these had all along been misplaced. That is the true meaning lurking behind the political breakup of the century.
Musk thought that he could use Trump as a vehicle for refashioning the federal government in keeping with the values and ethos of the Silicon Valley elite. Trump thought that he could use his alliance with Musk to broaden his appeal beyond his traditional pitch. Both of these hopes were destined to be disappointed before the wedding vows had even been pronounced.
The Silicon Vision of Politics
Over recent years, some leading figures in Silicon Valley grew convinced that the federal government was so badly broken that they could no longer afford to ignore it – and coalesced around a particular set of views about how to fix it.
The kings of Silicon Valley succeeded by ‘moving fast and breaking shit’. The VC firms they lead don’t mind if many of the start-ups they support fail, so long as some go on to have outsized returns. They have grown accustomed to the idea that taking huge risks (as Musk did in founding Tesla and SpaceX) can simultaneously be personally rewarding and socially beneficial. If all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail; it is perhaps inevitable that a set of phenomenally successful people who transformed the world by these methods would come to believe that they can – to the mutual benefit of themselves and their country – apply the same playbook to the federal government.
There was also an ideological element to this. The leaders of Silicon Valley grew deeply frustrated with the left’s instinctive hostility to technological progress, taking particular umbrage at the way mainstream outlets such as the New York Times often covered significant innovations like breakthrough rocket launches by focusing on minor environmental impacts. They came to loathe the way in which woke ideology undermined meritocracy, worrying that it would make it harder to find the talent they needed to succeed. And they started to worry about the ballooning federal budget, which might sap the competitiveness of American companies in the near future.
Musk’s alliance with Trump was based on a bet: that the president’s destructive force would prove unstoppable, and his substantive views sufficiently thin, that he could become a political vehicle for putting the Silicon vision into practice. For the first hundred or so days of Trump’s presidency, some of Silicon Valley’s leaders retained the hope that their bet was paying off. In his inaugural address, Trump promised a new age of American innovation. The White House went on a full-frontal attack against everything it considered woke. Republicans were still talking a big game about shrinking the budget deficit. Musk and his band of young, inexperienced, high-agency recruits were given enormous power to reshape the federal bureaucracy.
DOGE failed because of the structural differences between tech and government
But the truth was always going to prove disappointing. Republicans are less likely than Democrats to oppose technological innovation on environmental or social justice grounds. But they are just as likely to oppose it on the basis that it threatens the jobs of key constituencies, could lead to lower property prices, or requires attracting the best and brightest from countries such as India and China. The tragedy of the ‘abundance agenda’ is that it has no natural home in either of the big political parties.
Similarly, Musk evidently hoped that the war against woke would unleash America’s productive powers, refocusing leading universities on impactful research and giving tech companies a freer hand in recruitment. Instead, the Trump administration made universities a prime enemy – weakening them by any means possible and significantly curtailing the inflow of talented students from around the world. In the debate over whether to expand or restrict H-1B visas, the restrictionists in the White House increasingly look to have the upper hand.
But perhaps surprisingly, it is Republican hypocrisy on the national debt that seems most to have alienated Musk. Mercurial and self-serving though he may be, Musk does appear to be a man of conviction. (After all, he was willing to lose friends and spend enormous sums purchasing a social media platform to advance his political beliefs.) It seems he believed Republicans when they spent years warning about the dangers of trillion-dollar deficits and promising to balance public finances. And so it was his revulsion at a budget bill that would increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion which occasioned his public split from Trump.
Musk has understandable reason to feel bitter. But if he retains the ability to be honest with himself, he should also recognise that the roots of his vision’s failure lie closer to home: in his unrealistic hope that DOGE could radically remake the country like a start-up pivoting from recognising hot dogs to powering artificial intelligence.
When Mr Musk went to Washington, he clearly believed he would find waste and fraud on a monumental scale. But while bureaucracies have a reputation for inefficiency, the kind of obvious failures Musk envisaged turned out, for the most part, to be figments of his imagination. In his first days on the job, he posted a number of ‘big wins’ – which amounted to a tiny fraction of the federal budget. In the following weeks, even these announcements slowed to a trickle, and then ceased altogether. Musk’s frustration with Trump’s budget stemmed in part from his recognition that DOGE’s savings are rounding errors compared to the giveaways championed by the president he helped elect.
Most fundamentally, DOGE failed because of the structural differences between tech and government. When a start-up fails, few people suffer and the public doesn’t care. But if you inadvertently cut key public services, the consequences for people’s lives are immediate. Moving fast and breaking shit works in tech; it does not work in government.
The American government could probably be improved by people who combine the ethos of the tech world with real political experience. But the idea that a tech leader could fix Washington by breaking stuff without even bothering to learn what it actually does – an idea not limited to conservative tech billionaires – was always naïve.
The End of the Vibe Shift
Over the last year, Musk let his vocal support for MAGA redefine him in the public eye. That makes this split perilous for his image. Trump knows better than to make himself too dependent on any one ally – and it is telling that he has so far responded to Musk’s barrage of social posts in a relatively restrained fashion. Yet the breakup with Musk also signifies the failure of the most ambitious vision for Trump’s second term.
Trump has again proven unwilling to do what it takes to consolidate a broad, forward-looking coalition
When Trump was first elected, he was widely seen as a man of the past – partly due to his reliance on a supposedly declining electoral base. But also because his economic policies harkened back to a lost golden age of coal mines and steel mills.
The much-hyped vibe shift behind his return was in part due to the expansion of that demographic coalition – including younger and more diverse voters – and in part due to Musk. For a brief moment, MAGA was as associated with colonising Mars as with reopening coal mines.
The tensions in this coalition were easy to see. Many MAGA supporters always viewed Musk with suspicion. Most would cheer a crackdown on universities, the end of H-1B visas, and don’t care about space exploration. But the alliance didn’t fail because their interests were irreconcilable – after all, Trump’s voters seem fine with handouts in the pending budget bill.
It failed because Trump has again proven unwilling to do what it takes to consolidate a broad, forward-looking coalition.
Most Americans wanted border enforcement – not deporting gay hairdressers to El Salvador. They wanted domestic manufacturing – not chaotic tariffs that risk global recession. And they wanted to curb woke excesses – not an all-out culture war backed by the force of the federal government.
Trump’s inability to sustain his alliance with Musk is merely the most visible sign of a broader failure: to turn his presidency into a more expansive, future-facing project. From here on, the White House is once again run by the MAGA faithful. The vibe shift – to the extent it ever existed – is over.
This article was originally published on Yascha Mounk’s Substack
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