I spent $300 million to tilt an election and all I got was this lousy T-shirt
Elon Musk doesn’t have much to show for donating hundreds of millions of dollars and his time to Donald Trump.
The Donald Trump-Elon Musk levee finally broke, and the fallout is pretty epic.
In a move that is shocking, totally unexpected, and certainly unprecedented, the bromance between President Trump and Elon Musk detonated in spectacular fashion on Thursday. The pot had been boiling for a while, but now it’s spilling over. Trump publicly lambasted Musk for criticizing his “big, beautiful bill.” Musk fired back.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he posted on X. “Such ingratitude.” It was eerily reminiscent of JD Vance’s recent line, “Have you said thank you once?”
Trump, on his rival social network (it should be fun to watch THAT play out over the next several months, by the way), responded, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Musk then said Trump’s name was in the Epstein files. Yikes.
Grab your popcorn, folks. Neither Trump nor Musk is famous for reconciling or being particularly graceful, so it doesn’t seem like this relationship is coming back from the dead.
It’s time to ask ourselves: what does Elon Musk have to show for his nearly $300 million of Trump-related donations and less-than-yearlong dalliance into Trumpian politics?
He has alienated his very liberal Tesla customer base, causing sales to plunge.
He has now also probably alienated many of the conservatives who had started to come around on Tesla because of his involvement with Trump.
He has fallen far out of favor with many Americans because of his DOGE involvement.
Tesla’s stock, of which Musk owns… a lot, is down 17% today and has fallen 43% from its all-time high. (If you’re keeping score, it’s still up about 9% since Election Day last year, compared to a roughly 7% gain for the Nasdaq 100 over that time.)
He made friends and then enemies with a guy who constantly dumped on his industry and publicly planned to eliminate the $7,500 tax credit that was helping buoy Tesla sales.
Trump’s legislation already threatens a significant portion of Tesla’s profits, and now the president is threatening to end his government contracts. Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, make boatloads off government deals — The Washington Post pegged the number at at least $38 billion over the years.
A report from The Wall Street Journal said that Musk spent so much time away from his companies in pursuit of DOGE goals that Tesla’s board purportedly started looking for his successor.
A fractured relationship with Trump also potentially endangers the more open regulatory environment Tesla was expected to operate under during the Trump administration, which has been viewed as key to the company achieving its autonomous driving goals.
Tesla’s stock price has long soared on Musk’s distraction tactics, but it’s taking it on the chin now. We’ll see how things recover. But in the meantime, we’ll always have $10 trillion of demand for humanoid robots, right?
