How long will the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk last? When, and how bad, will the fallout be?
Here’s my prediction: it will happen after a pharmacological Musk tweet from the toilet at 1.30am.
“I guess you could call this a joint presidency,” the addled post will read, in reply to a crypto bro who tweeted: “All hail the Musk presidency of 2024.”
The reply will get five million likes, a higher score than Trump gets. Things will then unfurl.
Marjorie Taylor Greene will call Musk a “retard”.
Joe Rogan will call Taylor Greene a “skank”.
A reporter will then ask Trump about his joint presidency with Musk — and the president will say the South African was no more than a minor help and is nothing without Maga, and that he is now bringing in subsidies for gasoline cars made by real Americans in Michigan.
For now, Trump is still happy with Musk’s $130m campaign funding and his pro-Maga algorithm-tweaks on X. He has appointed him joint head of a new cuts-focused Department Of Government Efficiency, which is literally named after Musk’s favourite joke cryptocurrency, Doge.
The love is reciprocated.
Musk calls Trump’s election a “civilisational” achievement, predicting a new era of US growth.
But there are already cracks. Musk is hanging around Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home a bit too long, according to NBC, citing people “familiar with” Trump’s core transition team.
“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” said a person credited by NBC as one of Trump’s inner transition-team circle.
“And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory, bragging about the America Pac and X to anyone who’ll listen. He’s trying to make Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one.”
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Where the wheels might fall off for Musk is if Trump fails to quickly lower US safety standards on driverless cars. Musk needs this for his giant Tesla robo-taxi bet to pay off.
Right now, Tesla cars aren’t allowed to be driverless, because their on-board technology isn’t considered safe enough by any regulatory authority in the world.
Only Google’s Waymo driverless cars are considered to be up to scratch by civil authorities in US cities like San Francisco, because of the extra (and pricier) equipment.
Musk wants Trump to lower the standard, so he can deliver a promise to Tesla shareholders in exchange for their giving him a $56bn share package.
So far, so good. Musk is currently on the inside track with Trump. But he may be using up too much credit too quickly.
He has already shifted Trump’s position both on crypto and electric cars, two subjects the president-elect instinctively dislikes (he used to call crypto a “scam” and EVs “useless”).
And Musk is now getting a bucket of publicity for Doge, which could be an agency which holds considerable power in ways Trump isn’t yet acknowledging, such as “educational redistricting” in Republican areas.
That’s a lot of limelight, a lot of credit and a lot of power. Musk is now getting ratings. Trump isn’t well known for sharing credit or power — or appreciating anyone else’s high ratings.
The question, then, is on the nature of the decoupling: will it be containable or catastrophic?
When it happens, Musk may not want to walk away from the trappings of executive political power.
Though he can’t become president himself (as he wasn’t born in the US), might he consider backing rival candidates to Trump’s chosen successor?
Does a man who sees his mission as saving Earth by moving people to Mars give up control, having had a taste of it? Or will he be satisfied merely to become the world’s first trillionaire, presuming Trump rewards him with lower safety standards for autonomous taxis?
In one sense, this is a horror show of unchecked egos that could lead to something very dangerous. But if not, there isn’t a bucket of popcorn big enough for what’s in store.
One of the fallouts from Elon Musk’s alignment with Trump is a further slump in users on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
According to SimilarWeb, which tracks metrics such as X’s deactivation page, at least 115,000 people left X the day after Trump won.
While the platform saw higher traffic than usual around election day, the past 12 months has seen its overall user base decline, according to tracking figures from SimilarWeb, Pew Research and even X’s own figures in the EU (where it’s down one million users in 2024).
Last week, this exodus was punctuated by The Guardian announcing it would no longer post on X due to the “disturbing content” promoted or distributed there. In Ireland, this was joined by Silicon Republic, our longest-running tech news site.
The big winners are Threads and Bluesky.
Threads, owned by Meta, now stands at 275 million users and was adding one million per day in November.
Bluesky, run by former Twitter engineer Jay Graber, remains much smaller, at around 16 million users, but it has shot up by several million in the past month.
X remains a core news platform, but it’s had a bad year, with advertisers fleeing and now users too. It’s possible that this time next year, a reader of this column will be checking Threads or Bluesky for news rather than X.