Trump & Musk: A Love Affair Gone Sour

It was a perfect match, Donald Trump and Elon Musk—two rich, power-hungry, narcissistic and slightly delusional individuals sharing a common dream, coming together to Make America Great Again. However, after a whirlwind romance that landed the lovebirds at the Oval Office, the most coveted seat of power in the world, things have gone only downhill for the power couple, and fast. Of course, it has nothing to do with Melania Trump, the quite other in the equation.

It was not love at first sight for either Musk or Trump. Initially, Musk, being the younger and richer of the two, opposed Trump’s bid at the presidency for a second term in July of 2022. “Trump would be 82 at end of term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America,” he wrote on X, a social platform he owns. Musk can’t mask his emotions, nor can he sugarcoat his comments, which often lands him in trouble. In retaliation, Trump, in his inimitable style, while campaigning in Alaska, called the maverick soon-to-be-a-trillionaire a “bulls*** artist”. The rebuttal sort of led to the creation of a bond of attraction between the two similar poles, much against the principle of physics.

However, by November in the same year, Musk had started gravitating towards the magnetic persona of Trump and, in a friendly gesture, reinstated his account on the social platform X, which was banned after the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. Then again, when the world turned against Trump, Musk, like a knight in shining armour, riding on his billions, came to Goldilocks’ rescue. His overtures didn’t go unnoticed. After Trump took oath as the 47^th president of the US of A early this year, an overjoyed Musk cried, “My heart goes out to you,” and followed it with a gesture akin to the Nazi salute. That ensconced him in the Oval Office as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Alas! The affair turned out to be quite short-lived and ended on a rather bitter note. The first signs of trouble in the happy couple’s paradise were noted when Trump publicly put a restriction on Musk’s authority, fearing for his own safety in the White House as Musk brought in the corporate culture into governance.

The final nail in the coffin of this tumultuous relationship came as the Trump-led government introduced its Big Beautiful Bill, which aims to scale back many of the tax credits for clean energy dramatically, including ending the $7,500 credit for buying an electric car. Also, true to his whimsical self, Trump has imposed tariffs left, right and centre on America’s trading partners across the world, rubbing the entrepreneur the wrong way in the process. As the two hurl towards a messy public divorce, the drama seems to be far from over—with Russia having the last laugh.