Elon Musk is playing a very dangerous game with Donald Trump – and he’s likely to lose
There’s really no other way to put it: Elon Musk now thinks he’s the co-President of the United States. He’s spending his time in the real world glued to Donald Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago, and he’s spending his time on Twitter gleefully announcing which government agencies and specific employees he’s going to get rid of. Musk even appeared to vow that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman will receive the death penalty for having supposedly committed “treason.”
Musk is an incredibly dangerous individual, and he (for now) has a disturbing amount of power. We’re about to have a fully senile President who can seemingly be talked into anything – no matter how absurd – by his babysitters. Remember when they recently convinced Trump to cosplay as a garbage man? They’re that disrespectful of Trump’s dignity, and Trump is that pliable.
So yeah, Musk is going to be able to use Trump to get a lot of things. But here’s the problem: Musk has a social IQ of zero. He doesn’t know how to function within any reasonable or normal bounds. He had a social IQ of zero even before he devolved into the paranoid delusional psychopath he’s now become. Musk surely has no idea how to go about playing Trump. Nor does Musk seem to think that he needs to learn anything. So I have two words: Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon was the last deranged alt-right psychopath who managed to get his hooks fully into Trump. Bannon initially played this game so well that Trump named him the “CEO” of the White House or something to that effect. But it quickly went to Bannon’s head, and before long, Trump was tired of playing second banana to his own sidekick. Trump ended up forcing Bannon out of the regime entirely, in a move that also cost Bannon his publication and his wealthy backers. Now Bannon has fallen so far that he just got out of federal prison and he’s about to go to state prison.
Elon Musk seems to be on a very similar trajectory. He’s wormed his way into the seat right next to Trump, so to speak. But instead of behaving subserviently like Trump prefers, Musk is out there hogging the glory and portraying himself as all powerful. Trump is very senile at this point and may be slower to catch on. But once Trump does figure out that Musk is trying to overshadow him (presumably with a little help from the numerous Trump advisers who reportedly want Musk out of the way), Musk could be out on his ass rather unceremoniously.
At that point what would Musk even have left? He tied up his entire net worth in Twitter, which he’s run into the ground. While he’s been off cosplaying as President of the United States, Twitter has collapsed and its users are fleeing to Bluesky by the millions. Musk appears to have bet everything on the premise that he can manipulate Trump into giving him whatever governmental control and resources he wants. But if (perhaps we should say when) Trump turns on Musk, there may not be much for Musk to crawl back to.
It’s important to keep in mind that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both mentally incompetent. That’s an important distinction. Most villains are rational. Even unhinged villains often have a coherent logic and strategy to what they’re doing. But Trump is a dementia patient who thinks Hannibal Lecter is real, and Musk’s entire worldview consists of nothing but paranoid delusions. These are two people who can’t function, and aren’t functioning. As dangerous and jarring as this is for the rest of us, it’s likely to end badly for Trump and Musk both.
