Bill Maher explains how Trump and Musk went from ‘Brangelina' to ‘Godzilla vs. King Kong'
The fiery feud between President Trump and Elon Musk is the most exciting public breakup since the days of Brangelina, according to Bill Maher.
The late-night comedian compared the public warfare and vitriol to that of 'Godzilla vs. King Kong if Godzilla was on ketamine and King Kong had a combover.'
The big beautiful break-up is even more shocking because Trump and Musk were 'so close,' like celebrity couples Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie, and Ben Affleck and Jen Lopez, whose seemingly strong but ultimately whirlwind romances gripped tabloids for decades.
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3 Bill Maher compared President Trump to King Kong if he 'had a combover.'
AFP via Getty Images
'They had their own couple name: E-lump,' Maher said.
But like the actor pairings, the Musk and Trump demise was a long time coming, he continued.
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'I can't really think of anything other than the Trump-Elon [fight],' Maher said in his opening monologue Frday for HBO's 'Real Time.'
The talk host did a brief rundown of the pair's political breakdown, pinpointing the potential beginning of the end to Trump's meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office last week when Musk showed up sporting a black eye.
3 The feud started when Elon Musk declined Trump's offer to borrow makeup, according to Maher.
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The President claimed he offered makeup to the former Department of Government Efficiency head, but was turned down, which he found 'interesting.'
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'Yeah, weird, Elon, what sort of man turns down makeup?' Maher chided.
The feud slowly simmered as the pair lobbed further accusations against one another, including Musk claiming Trump's tariffs would cause a recession and the President responding that no one wants to buy Tesla's electric vehicles — but 's–t got real' when Musk claimed he was the reason Trump won the election.
3 Trump and Musk had their own couple name, Maher aid: 'E-lump.'
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'And Trump said, 'Well, you know what Mars is a s–thole planet.' And Musk said, 'Oh my god, you are not the same man I used to heil,'' Maher said.
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The fighting has only grown worse in recent days, with Musk shockingly claiming on X that Trump's involvement in the Epstein files is the reason they haven't been released. Musk has since deleted the X post.
Trump, on the other hand, has tried to play it cool, saying he hasn't given much thought to his former 'First Buddy.'
'The stakes are so high because the winner faces Blake Lively,' Maher joked, referencing the recent public downfall of the actress's previously beloved image.
Any good feeling between the two men is likely gone after Musk stepped up his criticism of the Trump-backed 'Big, Beautiful Bill' — and then called for the impeachment of the president and a new political party to challenge the GOP.
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Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Meanwhile, Musk poses little threat to MAGA. He's not a natural politician — he's not even comfortable in his own skin. He controls X and has a huge following, but Trump has his own following and social media platform that attracts as much media attention. And Trump can hit him where it hurts — his pocketbook. Musk is the world's richest man, but mostly on paper. It could diminish fast given how much of it is built on government work. Recall Musk smoking a joint on Joe Rogan, which is a no-no when you do defense contracting as SpaceX does. I reported how it sparked scrutiny by the feds that went nowhere. Maybe now it goes somewhere. Musk's accounting at Tesla has drawn regulatory attention in the past; it now might get some more. 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That remained the basic picture even as Musk's politics changed drastically. Piqued by his daughter Vivian Wilson's coming out as transgender, and seemingly aided by the brain-pickling effect of his favourite social network, he shifted rightward — from self-proclaimed "socialist" and centrist to redpilled crusader — and ultimately underwent a full-fat far-right radicalization. As recently as December 2022, Musk's net approval rating among American voters was narrowly positive, with many simply not knowing enough about him to have an opinion. By mid-2024, when Musk's political shift finally brought him into alliance with Trump, his popularity was dropping slowly. Still, it stayed close to neutral through the election in November and for weeks afterwards as citizens waited to see what Trump 2.0 would bring. All of which is to say that Musk might be right when he claims that he won Trump the election. While it's impossible to know what happened in the alternate universe (or, perhaps, the parallel simulation) where the tycoon did not intervene, there's every reason to think he made a big difference. Obviously his money helped; with a total contribution of $291m, he was both the biggest individual donor of the 2024 election cycle and the biggest of any election since at least 2010. Yet money isn't everything. Musk's endorsement gave permission to other tech barons to swallow their doubts or fears about Trump. Technocratic businessfolk who fancied themselves as hard-headed intellectuals, focused on excellence and competence above ordinary partisan politics — not a natural fit with Trump's governing style, to put it generously — now had one of their own tribe to help them imagine that Trump would build, build, build rather than burn, burn, burn. It's also possible that Musk had a hand in Trump's significant gains among young men, among whom he was especially popular. His reputation as a forward-thinking intellectual and an entrepreneurial mastermind — backed up by being the literal richest person on Earth — seemed to mitigate the fear that Trump really might be an atavistic troglodyte who's bad for business as well as merely bad at it. The strongest alliances, of course, are founded on mutual advantage. And at first it did seem like Trump had plenty to offer Musk in return: favorable regulatory treatment for his businesses, billions of dollars in government contracts, and even an influential position in government — along with, allegedly, access to millions of Americans' sensitive data. We don't yet know exactly why their relationship soured so quickly. Although both men have offered their own explanations, they are also historically unreliable narrators. Still, early reporting suggests that Musk was progressively disgruntled by a series of decisions made by Trump that were not in his favor. Chief among them: refusing to install his pal Jared Isaacman as head of NASA, which regularly awards lucrative contracts to Musk's company SpaceX. According to The New York Times, Trump objected to Isaacson's past donations to Democrats. However, it's hard to imagine that disqualifying him if Trump was really, truly committed. So why might Trump have been having second thoughts about his obligations to Musk? That brings us back to Wisconsin. Beginning in January, Musk's polling began to plummet, and by the eve of the judicial election it had hit -14 percent. It turns out that while voters broadly supported the idea of DOGE, many disagreed that indiscriminately bulldozing research and aid programs practically overnight — possibly causing hundreds of thousands of extra deaths around the world — is the best way to do it. Musk and Trump had worked so well together because they share many traits. Both have a deep-seated instinct to pick fights, and an uncanny knack for exploiting such conflicts to grow their personal brand. Both have an affinity for "big, beautiful" projects with implausibly ambitious goals. Both peddle falsehoods fluently and incessantly. Now those same qualities were coming back to bite them. Worse, accepting the DOGE job — let alone treating it as a license to abolish government agencies by fiat rather than a mere advisory role — was always inherently dangerous. Throughout human history, leaders have protected themselves from the consequences of their actions by scapegoating then sacrificing their subordinates. Opponents too may feel safer criticising the grand vizier than the sultan. Strangely, the smartest and wisest man on the planet seems not to have anticipated this risk. So whereas in 2024 Musk's strengths helped mitigate Trump's weaknesses, in 2025 Trump may have come to feel that Musk was dragging him down. If so, that feeling seems to have been mutual. "DOGE has just becoming the whipping boy for everything," Musk told The Washington Post last week. 'So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it." That's without even mentioning the impact on Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle maker. Rather than delivering new riches, working with Trump has earned him the hatred of car customers across the world, prompting mass protests and a steep drop in sales. You can imagine him feeling like he'd got the raw end of the deal. Musk, a business veteran but a political neophyte, has repeatedly claimed that his views and policies are overwhelmingly popular, often suggesting that appearance to the contrary is actually a mirage confected by the woke-industrial complex. Assuming he really believes this, Wisconsin must have been an awful shock. Just as hardship or tragedy can expose the cracks in a marriage, electoral failure widens the contradictions of an awkward political partnership. Suddenly all those little frustrations and ideological mismatches, which have always been there but were overlooked as long as the wins kept coming, become potential dealbreakers. So if Musk or Trump didn't have concerns before, that probably began to change at around 9:16pm local time on April 1, when the Associated Press called Wisconsin for the liberal-leaning Judge Susan Crawford. Now here we are. One can't help suspect that this partnership could still be intact if either man had properly factored into their calculations that Elon Musk might act like Elon Musk and Donald Trump might act like Donald Trump. But perhaps that's just proof that you and I lack the intellectual competence, the raw reasoning capability, to comprehend the complex five-dimensional chess moves that Musk has been executing all along. Masterful gambit, sir! 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