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NYTimes is reporting that aides to Trump are urging him to "cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations into [him]" Bannon is quoted as saying “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.” The Investigations would look at Musk's alleged drug use and immigration status, and his security clearance would be revoked.
Quote from NYT megathread: „House Democrats are jumping on Elon Musk’s allegation that President Trump’s name is in the supposedly secret documents the federal government has on powerful men who were in the orbit of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They immediately called for the release of the Epstein files.
„Elon Musk’s friends and associates on Thursday are in a state of disbelief. Several said they, like the rest of Washington, are glued to their computers as they watched their friend joust with President Trump, unsure what exactly his plan is.“
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State of disbelief? Me too, me too… What the fuck is happening?
On the personal level everyone knows that two galaxy sized egos will sooner or later clash, on the cultural level the MAGA jocks and the grey tribe nerds are not natural allies: As soon as Musk was out of the door Jared Isaacman‘s nomination for NASA director was revoked.
I am still shocked about the sudden implosion. The coming Moon landing and Artemis missions with SpaceX lander … not happening. Mars mission? Not happening with a hostile administration. Musk supported MAGA because Biden ignored him? Boy, will that be a rude awakening. On the other side: Trump has now an enemy with 200 million followers and who owns the dominant conservative online corner.
Seems like E having some mental health problems. Not otherwise sure why you’d alienate a large portion of your EV customer base by going so aggressively right/Trumpist, and then burn that bridge 4 months in.
He has successfully made himself the center of attention though! 4D gigabrained play? I’m not really seeing it
Most likely Elon came in with incredible energy and his typical spirit of wanting radical change in a pace that leads to cities on mars with autonomous cars and humanoid robots in 10 years. He then comes into government and has to act with mainstream republicans that are tugging on Trump in the opposite direction.
The pace that gave us actual autonomous cars, you mean?
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Maybe he can bring some of that spirit to his own companies, and actually deliver on some of the insane things he's been promising.
He was given quite a bit of power and room to play with DOGE, promised to find billions in waste and fraud, and came back with essentially nothing. The only reason he was even given this, is that he helped out by buying Twitter, and that debt needed repaying, but with time it became obvious he's a liability, so they had to cut him loose.
This whole thing where Trump's inner circle is pretending they believed Musk's promises is utterly unconvincing.
Musk is a known overpromiser. Any idiot can look at a pie chart of government spending and know obvious fraud is a rounding error. The DOGE cuts need to happen because they caught the open-secret financial life blood of artificial leftist movements.
What's left is stuff that feels like fraud but isn't. Veteran disability, disability in general, cost disease in the MI complex, and the straight up bad math of social security.
Musk is being ejected for some other reason. The cuts not being deep enough is just window dressing.
In my opinion, it's not about believing him, or not. The point is they gave him power, and what he did with it was thoroughly unimpressive, he can't blame that on the rest of the administration.
If it's because he was doing "typical Musk overpromising", maybe he should have thought twice before overpromising so much.
Yeah, because he's causing chaos for absolutely no political benefit. Rubio at least brought some scalps when he was given charge of USAID.
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The "save a trillion dollars by rooting out fraud" overpromise wasn't one of Musk's usual sort, though. Sometimes he disappoints by fulfilling a promise in a half-assed weasel-worded way ("full" self-driving?), and usually he disappoints by presenting an improbable if-nothing-at-all-goes-wrong timeline for progress that eventually takes at least twice as long, but this time the promise was something that obviously was never going to be possible at all. Many voters were dumb enough to believe it, though, so it's not entirely unlikely that Trump's inner circle believed it too, and even Musk consistently kept acting like he was drinking his own
ketaminekoolaid.I disagree. All of his promises have turned out to be untrue. Someone with a reasonable understanding of all the problem sets he's worked on knows them.
You're correct that the level of each broken promise is different. What I'm saying is that nobody should have believed him. The electorate doesn't matter - they also believe that we can keep welfare and have lower taxes. They're too stupid to consider.
The administration has no such excuse. Arjin has it right - this blow up is garden variety power struggle and interpersonal dislike, it's not related to underperformance.
And there's hypocrisy in Elon demanding performance from Trump on the budget when he could not deliver. I think that leaves a bad taste in the Trump camp's mouth. But it also seems like he didn't even really try. Elon took major risks - Trump has played it very safe.
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