Musk and Trump's Social-Media Fight Reveals How Power Works Today
The fact that Elon Musk kicked off this week's emo bloodbath with the words 'I'm sorry, but' has got to be the realest-housewives part of it.
'I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore,' Musk posted to X on Tuesday. Bless his heart — he sounded really contrite. Then he consulted a 'Downton Abbey' phrasebook and found 'disgusting abomination' to poshly trash Donald Trump's 'big beautiful bill.' He kept huffing his own X fumes through Wednesday until, on Thursday at 2:30 p.m., Trump all-capped him on Truth Social: 'CRAZY!'
Off to the races.
Everyone has their favorite part of Thursday's cage match. I was instantly startled by the non-pettiness: Musk gunning for Trump's impeachment, Trump gunning for Musk's financial ruin. All amid a cacophonous peanut gallery that included Ye, MAGA billionaire Bill Ackman and Musk ex Ashley St. Clair.
But the Trump-Musk feud is not just a clash of two madmen; it is a clash between the two fiercest social-media influencers of all time. Trump and Musk are human memes, forged on Twitter and its spinoffs, X and Truth Social. Their rise, their public personas, their marriage of convenience and their falling out took place in short-form posts and the freestyle cultivation of likes and engagement. Their feud is in many ways a story of our times: It reveals how online power struggles work now — with rivals leveraging online fanbases, battling for authority across platforms and aiming for the ultimate flex: starving the opponent of any attention at all.
Long before most, both Trump and Musk understood that traditional PR handlers would sterilize their personas, blunt the trolling potential of their best material and interfere with their relationships with fans. Trump built his political identity on Twitter, beating his chest and savaging his foes with a rawness that used to make his every utterance on Twitter unmissable. Musk built his celebrity through it, too, with runic tweets, like 'laws are on one side, poets on the other.' In late 2021, he was so proud of his philosopher-king status that he considered going pro: 'thinking of quitting my jobs & becoming an influencer full-time wdyt,' he tweeted, to 371,000 likes.
The Musk-Trump bond, but also the tension in it, has also been defined by these platforms. It heated up in the fall of 2022, when Trump was in exile from Twitter and out of the White House. Metabolizing pandemic redpills, Musk was still half-heartedly striking a neoliberal pose, only recently having supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But he was also slagging Twitter for having banished groypers, conspiracy-mongers and especially Trump, its star, for insurrectioning.
That's when Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He claims now he knew he was vastly overpaying — and in February he said X is worth 'like, eight cents' — but the expense was for a noble cause: to restore freedom of speech and welcome @realDonaldTrump back to the green pastures of his social-media homeland.
In November of that year, Musk polled X, and a slight majority said Trump should be reinstated. 'The people have spoken,' Musk posted. 'Vox Populi, Vox Dei.' The voice of people is the voice of God. Right.
But then, if we're just talking about the course of human events, something extremely cruel happened, a monumental act of Trumpian ingratitude. After his account was reinstated, Trump didn't come back. For nine long months, @realDonaldTrump met Musk's devastatingly expensive largesse with stony silence. Trump, of course, had built his own dopey Twitter dupe, Truth Social, and he probably liked no longer being someone else's tenant, vulnerable to eviction. He also probably liked looking down at the world's richest man from his own social-media castle. When asked when he'd go home to Musk-owned, Trump-friendly Twitter, Trump said, coldly, 'I don't see any reason for it.'
Trump was betting that he had made Twitter powerful, not the other way around. If Musk had hoped to spend his days evading the fun police with Trump on Twitter, he might have been hurt that Trump didn't even bother to visit Musk's platform, which he renamed X in July 2023, until he had a mugshot to post in August of that year, after his indictment for a scheme to overturn election results in Georgia.
The next summer, on July 13, 2024, Musk endorsed Trump, and soon started whooping and jumping and dancing like 2005 Tom Cruise. He tilted hard right for his hero, and he mostly did it on X, amplifying Dark MAGA posts, from Covid denial to QAnon praise. Tesla's stock tanked. Musk muted his environmentalist leanings. He lost his close friends, including Sam Harris and Philip Low.
A month after the endorsement, Trump graced X with his presence with a campaign video. It was only the second time he'd posted to X since Musk rolled out the red carpet for him. In the last months of his campaign, while Musk's money and adulation surged his way, Trump finally managed to show Musk the occasional courtesy of using the platform Musk had bought, furnished and upholstered in part for him.
Flash forward to last week. On Monday, June 2, three days before the Trump-Musk affair came utterly undone, @realDonaldTrump posted to X for what looks like the last time: a manly boast video about his steel tariffs. It was scored with what sounded like pounding Christian rock. These tariffs, which Trump increased to fully 50 percent last week, will raise the cost of imported car components, including at Tesla, and further imperil Musk's fortune.
For Trump to crow about this insult to Tesla in Musk's own house when they were still acting like pals and Musk was mostly keeping mum about the 'big beautiful bill' (which if it passes will also injure Tesla) — this seems like the unkindest cut of the whole match made in hell.
The end of last week's social-media spat reveals that the heavyweight champ of social-media influence is still Trump. At the news that Musk's net worth fell by $34 billion during the spat, while Tesla's market value sank by $153 billion, Musk waved a white flag. He deleted or retracted his incendiary X posts — the innuendo about Trump and the Epstein files and the threat to decommission a spacecraft. Trump, for his part, took back nothing. He now says he rejects a make-up call. He's selling the pretty red Tesla Musk presented to him. And most importantly, he's back to ghosting X. No posts there since Monday.
By Friday he was on Truth Social praising Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent, one of Musk's most aggressive rivals for Trump's favor and the one whose April shouting match with Musk came to blows, according to Steve Bannon.
On Sunday, Musk gave perhaps the clearest sign that he is tapping out: He screenshotted a Truth Social post by Trump in which the president called Gavin Newsom 'Governor Gavin Newscum' — and posted it admiringly to X. No commentary, no irony, no comeback. Just a tribute. In the posting wars, this is what bending the knee looks like: one man obsequiously signal-boosting the other, on the platform he couldn't lure him back to.
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