3. WITHIN 12 MONTHS, THE TRUMP/MUSK “ALLIANCE” WILL BE NO MORE–AND WILL END BADLY
So who’s your selection for the Power Couple of 2024? Seems like everyone has an opinion on that, if for no other reason than we simply can’t resist both the appeal and the ability to envy two people of like mind and passion who have found both support and seemingly intense appreciation from each other.
GEEKS FOR GEEKS posted a Top 20 list in April that rattles off some of the obvs. They apparently were so excited about George and Amal Clooney that they got listed twice. A more recent compendium from ALL VIPP’s Tania Cameron focusing exclusively on actor/singer combo added the likes of Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, Sabrina Carpenter and Barry Keoghan and Callum Turner and Dua Lipa to those consideration sets. And since I watch a disproportionate amount of football and Saturday Night Live, I suppose Travis and Tay Tay and Colin and Scarlett can’t be ignored, despite all temptation to do so.
But when one strips away the element of sexual compatibility, you’d be hard pressed to find a relationship that has been moving at warp speed with the intensity of several photons faster than that of one Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk.
In the second half of 2024, and particularly since Election Night, you’d be hard pressed to find two people of any gender more joined at the hip and in mindset than these two billionaires, and you’d best believe an awful lot of more left-leaning publications have noticed. . In mid-November POYNTER’s Tom Jones took note:
Guess who’s hanging around Donald Trump closer than ever these days? X-man Elon Musk — the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and, more importantly when it comes to this election, X — has been a regular at Mar-a-Lago and is clearly pushing for influence inside the Trump administration.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported, “The tech billionaire has been seen at the resort in Palm Beach, Florida, almost every day since Trump won the election last week, dining with him on the patio some evenings and hanging out with his family Sunday at the golf course. Musk has been in the room when multiple world leaders have phoned Trump, and he’s weighed in on staffing decisions, with the SpaceX and Tesla CEO even making clear his preference for certain roles.” She added, “Sources have described Trump as enamored with Musk.”
And POLITICO has been having a field day in their own right. Soon after this dropped Meridith McGraw and Natalie Allison joined forces to update us on how this once unlikely alliance is being received by their respective worlds:
Donald Trump’s staff have privately grumbled about the new house guest at Mar-a-Lago who won’t seem to leave, while the company in question, Elon Musk, continues to step out ahead of Trump on matters of both policy and personnel.
But even as some Trump allies are stunned the new friendship has continued — and even as Musk’s influence proves to have real limitations — the incoming president still can’t seem to get enough of it.
Trump’s field trip with Musk on Tuesday to marvel at the billionaire’s SpaceX launch in Texas was just the latest display. Trump brought an entourage of aides and lawmakers, including Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), a top contender for Treasury secretary, to the launch. The president-elect was warmly greeted with a hug from Musk and a show-and-tell of his space base.
And exactly a month later, that gossip girl McGraw teamed this time with Holly Otterbeing to bring us up to speed on the latest:
As Elon Musk unleashed a volley of X posts demanding that Republicans back away from a deal to avert a government shutdown, Donald Trump was publicly silent.
Instead, the president-elect holed up in his office Wednesday in a ballroom above Mar-a-Lago. While Musk riled up the MAGA masses, Trump was holding a series of conversations with top aides — including Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller — as Vice President-elect JD Vance privately expressed Trump’s concerns about the bill on Capitol Hill, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely. The sequence highlighted the evolving dynamic with his high-profile benefactor-turned-adviser and raised an awkward question for Trump of whether he or Musk was running the show. As GOP lawmakers on Thursday floated the prospect of installing the billionaire businessman as House speaker, and Democrats taunted Trump by claiming Musk was the real leader of the Republican Party, Trump did a round of interviews with reporters seemingly meant to ensure they knew it was his idea to kill the bipartisan funding bill.
And this past week, once again Musk dominated American discourse, effectively lighting a match to a brewing powderkeg within Trump’s most ardent supporters. Per GIZMODO’s AJ Dellinger on Friday:
Here’s a heartwarming story that should bring you joy this holiday season: the worst people you know are all fighting. The MAGA v. Tech Right feud that kicked off over Christmas, spurred by a divide on allowing skilled immigrant workers to come stateside, was escalated by Elon Musk on Thursday. Trump’s “first buddy” declared far-right characters including former Trump orbiter Laura Loomer to be trolls and allegedly removed their verification status on Twitter.
Musk spent most of yesterday amplifying support for H-1B visa programs, which allow American companies to hire noncitizens for specialty occupations and have become a favorite tool in the tech industry to attract global talent. He also did it in the most 4chan-ish way possible, responding in agreement to a post from Autism Capital that posited the tech industry doesn’t hire Americans because “you guys are retarded.”
And yesterday, NEWSWEEK’s Rachel Dobkin tossed this briquette onto the dumpster fire:
On Friday night, Steven Mackey, an X user interested in politics with less than 12,000 followers, went viral for a post responding to a video of Musk talking about the operations of his company SpaceX, in which Musk said: “Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that shouldn’t exist.” “Stop trying to optimize something that shouldn’t exist,” Mackey wrote in response to the video pretending to be the voice of Musk, “Let’s optimize H-1B.” The post has received 1.5 million views as of Saturday morning.
Musk replied to Mackey’s post on Friday: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” The tech tycoon’s post, meanwhile, has received 5.8 million views as of Saturday morning.
Ooh, snap. But using adolescent rhetoric works better than ever these days. In a world where winning is the only thing that matters, 5.8 million vs. 1.5 million is a rout strong enough for even Trump to appreciate. And so he did, as THE ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Michelle L. Price reported yesterday afternoonL
President-elect Donald Trump appears to be siding with Elon Musk and his other backers in the tech industry as a dispute over immigration visas has divided his supporters. Trump, in an interview with the New York Post on Saturday, praised the use of visas to bring skilled foreign workers to the U.S. The topic has become a flashpoint within his conservative base. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said.
So at least as the New Year and the birth of 47 dawn, it would appear these two are as copacetic as, well, Travis and Tay Tay. But there are still skeptics. Jones wrote of two who draws their eye-rolling from historical perspectives both scholarly and personal:
David Nasaw — author of biographies of William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie and Joseph P. Kennedy — wrote a guest essay for The New York Times warning Musk that he should not expect his bromance with Trump to last.
Nasaw wrote, “As the president-elect has told us time and again, he is one smart fellow and a ‘very stable genius.’ He is not going to share his victory and center stage with anyone. And why should he? What more would you have to offer, having spent in excess of $100 million to help secure his election? Mr. Trump may be mercurial, but in this situation he is highly unlikely to break historical precedent. I predict that you will probably join the long list of genius businessmen donors who were casually discarded after they had served their purpose.”
CNN contributor and tech reporter Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk extensively and knows him well, said something similar. Speaking on CNN, Swisher said, “(Musk) is not going anywhere until Trump throws him out, which could happen because both have really strong personalities who like to be at the center of attention.”
Swisher added, “They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country and that’s Donald Trump, who just won the election.”
I’ll merely add my own one and a half cents. I’ve rarely seen even friendships that burn this bright and intense last all that long. One need only look at both the divorce rate and the lengthy list of Hollywood breakups for justification. Martin and Lewis. Sonny and Cher. Bennifer–twice.
What we’ve yet to see in the wake of all of this hanging out and defensiveness is an updated, credible poll that asks the basic question who do you like better–Trump or Musk–and how those figures may compare to recent benchmarks. Maybe it should be a tracking study. Plenty of us with too much time on our hands know how to do them well and cheap, BTW.
And if somehow DJT doesn’t emerge with the same margin of victory that Elon just did with his tweets, there will undoubtedly be plenty in his orbit who will be reminding him of it. As someone who knows how much disproportionate value he puts on being number one, and with an awful lot of smart and far less narcissistic sympaticos already in his orbit, it’s inevitable.
So count me among those who just think it’s impossible for something this intense to continue to burn as brighly and consistently as it is now. So I’m going on record that at some point in 2025 one of these lovebirds call it quits. But don’t necessarily count me among those who think that breakup will be permanent. After all, even Gaga herself puts it all into context:
I want your horror, I want your design
‘Cause you’re a criminal as long as you’re mine.
Ra-ra-ah-ah-ah. Roma-roma-ma
Until next time…