Taking the Trump-Musk War Seriously
Special emergency Triad: In chaos there is opportunity.
1. Strategery
We’ll get to the schadenfreude in a minute, but let’s start with two big-picture thoughts:
This could all go away tomorrow. It is possible that by the time you read this, Musk and Trump will have brokered a peace. Then they say, “Ha-ha, you shitlibs fell for it. We were trolling you for the lulz. That was all kayfabe.”
There are a lot of stakeholders who desperately need Trump and Musk to end hostilities. Their incentives are strong enough to expend resources making it worth both parties’ whiles to sign a ceasefire.1
If it doesn’t go away tomorrow, the Trump-Musk rift creates peril for both Trump’s authoritarian project and the tech oligarchy.
Let’s walk through the strategic implications for all of the players.
Donald Trump. There is a scenario in which he emerges from this fight stronger than he is now. If Trump is able to break the richest man in the world, he will have demonstrated a new level of power.
There are reasons to think Trump will subjugate Musk. For starters, Trump may be addled and doddering, but Musk is a man going through a multi-year, drug-fueled nervous breakdown. He is not a canny adversary. He isn’t even all that smart about power. Musk’s singular genius is for leveraging his public-market chip stack in a ZIRP environment—not an applicable skillset for this battlespace.
Also: Trump has tremendous leverage over Musk.
Musk made his primary source of wealth—Tesla stock—hostage to Trump by destroying the company as a consumer product brand. If Trump unpersons Musk, the available consumer market for Tesla goes from terrible to zero.
Trump also has all of the levers of the federal government at his disposal to hurt Tesla: He can rig tax credits against the company; cancel government contracts; reward competitors. This chart might as well be the battleplan of Operation Barbarossa:
There’s more. Musk’s second largest source of wealth is the private market valuation of SpaceX. SpaceX is heavily dependent on state-level international customers. Musk has been using his relationship with Trump to strong-arm governments into contracting with SpaceX. That dynamic could now run in the opposite direction, with Trump threatening countries who do business with SpaceX.
Even more dangerous: SpaceX should not be a private company. Under multiple administrations, the U.S. government essentially privatized the aerospace industry, which runs counter to our national interest. A sovereign government cannot allow a private company to own the top of a gravity well.2
By all rights, SpaceX should be nationalized. The next Democratic administration was going to have to grapple with that problem.
Trump might do it for them.
If Tesla’s stock price implodes and SpaceX gets nationalized, Elon Musk goes from Tony Stark to Kim Dotcom.
Mind you, Trump has skin in the game, too. His project is supported by the tech oligarchy. He is (theoretically) term limited. He knows he cannot trust anyone outside his own family.
If he is unable to subjugate Musk, and Musk succeeds in creating an independent power base around which MAGA can rally, then Trump’s entire project could unravel. And quickly.
Elon Musk. He has made the mistake of believing that he can target Trump the same way he targeted Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: With utter impunity.
He’s a little like John Daggett, thinking that his money gives him control—but not realizing that money only gives him control in a liberal system.
In the illiberal context, his money is much less useful than he understands.
Musk stands to lose everything in this fight, which is why the rational version of him would sue for peace and eat whatever shit-sandwich was required. But Musk isn’t rational. He’s a middle-aged man with an alleged drug problem and a personal life that has spiraled into depravity.
Maybe that makes him dangerous? Maybe Musk goes full-Nazi and is able to paint Trump as the RINO? I don’t know.
What I do know is that over the next 72 hours Musk is going to find out what his peer set thinks and where they’re placing their bets.
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JD Vance. No one has more to lose than the VC Hillbilly. Even in the worst-case scenario, Musk is worth a few billi. If Vance falls off the tiger he spends the rest of his days hustling to keep a roof over his head.
Vance’s patron has long been Peter Thiel, who made him into the darling of the techno-feudalism set. But today Vance lives in Donald Trump’s house. In order to remain viable after 2028, he has to please not just his president, but Donald Trump Jr., too.
Vance will do everything possible to avoid taking sides here, but that won’t be possible in the long run. Which is why Vance is incentivized—more than anyone else—to broker a peace.
His challenge, though, is that even if he can make it happen, how he accomplishes it will be important, too. He’ll have to get Trump and Musk to yes while
not alienating his Silicon Valley patrons,
but also convincing Trump that he is totally and completely on the team.
Right before I pressed send on this newsletter, Vance tweeted out a statement.
This is pretty weak stuff. Vance could have defended Trump by knifing Musk—you show loyalty by exposing yourself to consequences.
Instead, Vance waited until the retreat was underway and then put out a no-context “I support the king” pander.
Trump is smart enough to understand that this is a confession.
Peter Thiel. He succeeded in enmeshing his worldview with Trump’s and is now reaping the rewards as Trump toys with using Palantir to build the American version of China’s Social Credit System.
Unlike Vance, though, Thiel could sit this one out. His goal is simply to avoid being forced to take a side so that he can ally with the winner and continue to press his quest to overturn democracy.
Congressional Republicans. Honestly? I feel bad for them.
They don’t want to get primaried by MAGA. But they also don’t want to get primaried by a Musk money bomb.
The good news is that they just have to hide for 12 months and hope that the fight is settled before the spring of 2026. At which point they “only” have to worry about the size of a potential Democratic wave.
2. Peace
Sarah and I taped a show an hour ago (it’s here) and while we were live we watched the outlines of a ceasefire take shape in real time. The White House press sec issued a statement basically saying that Musk was just being a good “businessman” and Musk walked back many (but not all) of his accusations and threats.
Maybe this peace can hold?
I’d trust Trump to keep up his end—he’s a transactional guy. But Musk? It is not clear that he is in control of his faculties. Maybe during his next episode he spins off and starts taking shots again.
The bigger problem is the foot soldiers. During the last 12 hours a bunch of mid-level MAGA influencers took sides. Catturd. Alex Jones. You know the type.
These guys are now exposed and unlike Trump and Musk, they don’t have independent power bases. Their entire lives are dependent on being on the right side of the MAGA ecosystem. Meaning that it’s much harder for them to pretend that nothing happened. They need to make sure that they’re on the winning side and so will keep fighting.
Meaning that the Trump-Musk conflict can extend itself independent of Trump and Musk.
Now maybe it peters out. But maybe not. Maybe it’s a low-grade conflict that simmers and occasionally spikes. Maybe Republicans lose the House in 2026 and these factions try to blame each other.
All of which is to say: Once a war like this starts, no one can control it. These things can develop a logic of their own.
3. Shameful
In a way, I’m glad that the bloom is off the schadenfreude because it lets us concentrate on the substance of what happened today.
A movement composed of money, technological infrastructure, government power, and popular support fractured.
Not entirely. Not irreparably. But meaningfully.
It’s an opportunity. It’s a reminder that these guys are not ten feet tall. And that they just might create the conditions for their own defeat.
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In fact, by the time I finished writing this, Musk and the White House were already trying to de-escalate. But in gangland wars, the fighting doesn’t always stop just because the principals lay down their arms.
We’ll talk more about this in a minute.
Imagine the U.S. government contracting out the nuclear triad to Amazon or GE. Unthinkable, right?
Control of the top of a gravity well is as strategically important to a nation as control of its nuclear arsenal.
Two thoughts:
1. For a while, Putin’s oligarchs thought they had power independent of Putin. Putin put them in their place. The account in M. Gessen’s book on Putin’s rise suggests to me that discovering this power opened up a new and dangerous world for Putin. If Trump wins, he may also feel his Wheaties, and that’s not good for any of us.
2. The thing about a gravity well is that it’s a gradient around an entire planet. Of course we should nationalize any private business that tries to control it. But China won’t be thrilled about American government control of *its* gravity well (the same one the U.S. of A. is at the bottom of); neither will anyone else.
Great discussion on the Secret Pod, it was kind of fun watching the Trump-Musk fight unfold in real time. My two cents: I don’t think Musk has the impulse control to just back away. Someone will bleet something negative about the budget bill and he’ll remember that he hates it and he’ll ramp up again. Trump could easily walk away but I don’t think Elon can do the same.