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The widely predicted breakup of Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump has finally and inevitably come to pass. Having recently departed his role as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the tech billionaire began to criticize Trump\u2019s subsidy-filled budget bill, kicking off a war of words on social media and a resulting political firestorm.<\/p>\n
What follows is likely to be a messy and vengeful separation that will do damage to the reputations of both men and the United States as a whole. But ultimately, this will be a lopsided fight in which the billionaire and his business empire, not Trump\u2019s administration, will suffer most.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
The widely predicted breakup of Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump has finally and inevitably come to pass. Having recently departed his role as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the tech billionaire began to criticize Trump\u2019s subsidy-filled budget bill, kicking off a war of words on social media and a resulting political firestorm.<\/p>\n
What follows is likely to be a messy and vengeful separation that will do damage to the reputations of both men and the United States as a whole. But ultimately, this will be a lopsided fight in which the billionaire and his business empire, not Trump\u2019s administration, will suffer most.<\/p>\n
Musk is about to learn a broader lesson that extends far beyond U.S. politics. Corporate interests often wield unhealthy and outsized influence in global autocracies. Yet from China under President Xi Jinping, to Russia under President Vladimir Putin, to India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a common pattern emerges: When business titans and political leaders fall out, it is the former who\u00a0lose. Put another way, Musk has just picked a fight that he almost certainly cannot win.<\/p>\n
At the start of the year,\u00a0I argued in Foreign Policy<\/em> that speculation about a likely split between Trump and Musk<\/a> missed a wider point about what they might achieve by working together. In the end, their partnership lasted longer and had greater influence than many detractors predicted.<\/p>\n The vandalism that DOGE meted out to the U.S. Agency for International Development alone would have been enough to cement Musk\u2019s dubious legacy in the annals of government reform. More troubling\u2014even in his relatively brief tenure\u2014was the\u00a0alarming precedent that he set by undermining the basic functions of many U.S. institutions, sending teams into government departments, almost certainly illegally<\/a>, without appropriate oversight.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s actions during his time in government reflected a brand of tech-bro Maoism, in which existing institutions are viewed as so fundamentally inefficient and corrupted that regular reform is impossible; only purging and rebuilding can work, echoing Chinese leader Mao Zedong\u2019s concept of \u201ccontinuous revolution.\u201d Much like the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, the Musk upheaval was often led by\u00a0youthful zealots<\/a>, delivering reforms that were designed largely to remove ideological resistance to Trump rather than anything resembling\u00a0actual government efficiency.<\/p>\n In the long run, though, a messy divorce seemed inevitable between two men afflicted by near-megalomania\u2014a state characterized by fantasies of power and omnipotence. Such delusions are not uncommon among the global billionaire class, of course. But it is at least worth pondering how this unedifying spectacle will appear when viewed from Beijing, Moscow, or Riyadh.<\/p>\n Most likely, the Trump-Musk split will reinforce the conviction among global authoritarians that business elites must be kept tightly under state control. Seen this way, Trump\u2019s error was not bickering with Musk but rather handing him a prominent and powerful role as a \u201cspecial government employee\u201d in the first place.<\/p>\n Trump has long expressed admiration for Xi, but in allowing Musk to get so close to power, the U.S. president certainly failed to learn from the Chinese leader\u2019s handling of tech mogul Jack Ma. In 2020, Xi moved brutally and swiftly against the Alibaba founder after he dared to criticize<\/a> Chinese financial regulators, canceling his Ant Group\u2019s $37 billion initial public offering and effectively ending Ma\u2019s public influence.<\/p>\n Other global autocrats follow similar anti-tycoon patterns. In Putin\u2019s Russia, the birthplace of modern oligarchic capitalism, moguls are deeply deferential to state power\u2014and understandably so, given the fate of those who dare to challenge the Kremlin. Jailed or exiled billionaires, such as Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky<\/a>, serve as permanent reminders of the costs of defiance.<\/p>\n In India, the so-called\u00a0Bollygarch class<\/a>\u00a0has grown enormously in power in recent years, embodied by figures such as Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani\u2014now the two richest people<\/a> in Asia. Yet both remain meekly supportive of Modi and his government, careful never to go anywhere close to the lines that might invite state retribution.<\/p>\n