Elon Musk may still be the world’s richest man, but it’s not for lack of trying.
He has wrecked his friendship with Donald Trump and may have set his own far-flung enterprise on the road to ruin. Consider the consequences of his relationship with Trump.
Start with his cars. If you bought a Tesla six months ago, you were the coolest guy on the block. You owned a high-performance, environmentally friendly, electric vehicle that looked good and felt like the future.
Sales have since plummeted. The stock has dropped over 25%, and you are lucky if some left-wing grandma hasn’t keyed your vehicle, set it on fire, or spray-painted it in the Walmart parking lot.
Teslas are targets because they now represent Trump, the arch enemy of the very green crowd that coveted the cars in the first place.
Almost as bad, Trump’s newly proposed Big Beautiful Budget bill eliminates the government subsidies that made EVs reasonably competitive in price with gas guzzlers. Substantively, that had to be the big reason Musk called the BBB a “disgusting abomination.” Then he called Trump a liar.
TRUMP: “I’m very disappointed with Elon. I’ve helped him a lot. He knew the inner workings of the bill better than anybody sitting here.”
MUSK: “False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it.”
Trump’s big, bad bill probably accelerated the catastrophic breakup, but Musk took it into the sewer. Don’t forget what a bust he was as head of DOGE.
His attempts to trim the federal government were disorganized, insensitive, chaotic and haphazard.
Remember the wasteful end of USAID, where humanitarian cargoes already loaded and ready to ship were abruptly canceled?
Then, the dismantling of the Department of Education and other agencies down the line led to angry anti-DOGE, anti-Trump demonstrations. How about the dumb proposal to cut air traffic controllers just as that vital service was coming under stress from breakdowns in its antiquated systems?
Musk was always kind of kooky, but not in a bad way. He rallied to the President after the first failed assassination attempt, becoming by far his biggest donor. And he really did not seem self-interested. Likewise, he didn’t use his Starlink system to take sides in the world’s conflicts.
His SpaceX rockets make NASA feel obsolete, and though he wants humanity to move to Mars, he is or has been an otherwise clever, once-in-a-lifetime visionary who wants mostly to improve life on Earth.
But he stunk up whatever he and the president accomplished when he implied that Trump was part of a purported pedophilia ring run by the late Jeffrey Epstein. By opening that can of worms, it is not an exaggeration to say that Musk has awakened a sleeping MAGA monster.
Despite Trump’s efforts late in the week to cool the controversy, ruthless Trump allies in and out of government, like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, will be probing Musk and pricking him and maybe bringing him down on some obscure accounting issue, allegation of drug use, or flaw with his naturalized citizenship.
Who knows, he may end up in El Salvador.
