I was wondering how long it would be until Musk called Trump a pedophile and I think it has already happened. Musk has tweeted (I think, no source handy yet) that the reason the Epstein files haven’t been released is because Trump is in there.
At this point I’m fully expecting to learn the whole feud was some kind of Hudsucker Proxy-esque stock manipulation ploy engineered by Stephen Miller.
They don’t have the Massey pre-nup?!
Putin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, his biggest oligarch, causing the others to behave as he wished. It’s true that Khodorkovsky is a better man than Musk. But the logic from Trump’s POV should be pretty similar.
2026 may be looked back on as the tariff year, with 2027 the year of the arrests. Don’t take the years in the last sentence literally, but that’s the direction.
Will Musk cave to Trump? I doubt it, I predict Musk will stay on Trump’s bad side, if only to shore up Tesla sales in anti-Trump markets.
I don’t understand, how did you all know they would eventually fall out?..
Well, color me wrong on this one.
Though I think there’s still a nonzero chance both of them hold enough cards to step back and say “haha, we’re just letting off some steam, like buds do”, I’m starting to think that Musk walked into DOGE holding no cards at all, and failed to develop any, and just got caught with his pants down.
Because that’s how things work in Trumpland. Just based on all the in-fighting among the Republicans during Trump’s last administration and even during Biden’s administration, it was a shoo-in that there was going to be some sort of conflict between Musk and Trump’s followers and odds were good it would spill over into a conflict with Trump. Trump has a habit of throwing his friends to the wolves when their usefulness is at an end.
Pretty much nothing has changed from his first term when the New Yorker published this cartoon:
As Menachem Begin said in response to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, “Good luck to both sides.”
Because autocrats don’t have friends and they don’t have equals - they have subordinates, and Elon was never going to think of himself as Trump’s subordinate.
I kind of think this whole blow up (bro-up?) between the two morons is just meant to be a distraction. The BBB is coming up for vote, new penalties proposed on states like CA, more anti-trans stuff… That matters more (to me) than these two. They could spontaneously combust on national TV and the sadmisnistration goes on.
Not everything is, or can be, a planned “distraction.” It’s way too clever and forward thinking for any of these people. We’re not dealing with some kind of Machiavellian thinker, and I don’t think it’s any better to pretend that he is.
The same way I know that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. I’m not 100% sure but it’s close
Gotta love it! Two colossal egos can’t occupy the same space for a long time. Love the Epstein accusation though I fully expect that a (redacted if need be) list will come out of the White House soon. Every right wing nutter believes with their heart and soul that if the list ever got released that Bill Clinton (perhaps Hillary as well) would be prominent and that because of that, nobody would ever vote for a Democrat again.
True all dat. But you can bet that bottom dollar that there’s nothing there that Trump wouldn’t be proud to have released. Accusations of a 16-year-old would stay; accusations of a 12-year-old–a hard sell even for dedicated MAGA–will have been redacted even before Elon could have had a chance to see them.
I’ll quote something I posted in a Pit thread as I know a lot of P&E readers don’t like to go to the Pit:
It seems to me that in this “feud” neither has posted anything actually damaging. (As if Donald cares that his old Tweets contradict his current policies…are you kidding???)
But I could be wrong.
So my test is: if Donald sends each and every one of the DOGE kids packing, that’s strong evidence that the feud is real. (Elon doesn’t really need them to stay where they are—he’s already installed all the back doors into the government computers—but it would be convenient in some ways to have them there.)
But if Donald leaves the DOGE kids in place, that’s strong evidence that the feud is pure theater—likely intended to distract us from something. The awfulness of the Big Ugly Bill, perhaps, or Melania filing for divorce, or some other story Donald would prefer get ignored.
We shall see.
Everything is a distraction. Don’t pay attention to anything.
Anything.
That’s very zen.
This is the Xitter post about Trump and Epstein:
I wouldn’t think Trump would agree to any kind of fake feud where he was criticized and accused of being a pedophile. He’s too thin skinned and image conscious for that. I could see him agreeing to a fake feud, but it have to be a scenario where he didn’t look bad at all. Maybe something where they were disagreeing on how deep the cuts should be. Musk pretends to be upset, but then admits Trump was right all along.
Agreed.
How long before Trump says something like “Elon who? Oh, we may have met once or twice, but rarely talked”?
Brian