Hildebrand: Trump and Elon’s punch-on was pretty predictable
Trump and Musk are both disruptors, perhaps the biggest disruptors of this century, so the most remarkable thing about their break up isn’t that it happened, it’s that it didn’t happen sooner, writes Joe Hildebrand
Opinion
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Aquatic aficionados have long been aware of the peculiar quality of the Siamese Fighting Fish.
Prized for its vibrant colouring and flowing fins, there is just one drawback of this spectacular species. If you put two of them in the same tank they will fight each other until one of them is dead.
The human species is not so different.
Put two alpha males together and logic would suggest you get double the benefit. But history reveals otherwise.
The ancient Romans famously devised a solution to tyranny by having two supreme consuls elected per year, the power of each being checked by the other.
At least, that was the theory.
Instead, they constantly sabotaged and plotted against each other until by the late republic the number of gargantuan competing egos led to so much bloody and chronic civil war that the people came to settle for the authoritarian stability of a single emperor.
And even in the later years of the empire, when it was so vast that it required an emperor in the west and an emperor in the east, they spent as much time fighting each other for supremacy as they did any foreign foe.
All of this ancient history and pescatarian pedigree is a long way of saying that the partnership between US President Donald Trump and former First Buddy Elon Musk was never going to end well.
You could see its implosion coming from space, which is particularly ironic given Elon is one of the few human beings with the capacity to literally do so.
There had even been a dress rehearsal for this very event. Just two months after Musk was announced as co-leader of Trump’s now infamous Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, Ramaswamy was unceremoniously kicked to the curb by the tech billionaire.
Now Musk has had Trump do the exact same thing to him.
Indeed, Trump did the exact same thing to everyone who deviated even slightly from him the last time he was president - from spin doctors to national security advisers and even, in his final days, his own vice-president.
This is the very nature of strongman politics. There can be, by definition, only one strong man. Sharing power is the very antithesis of Trump’s image and ethos.
Likewise, being contradicted or disagreed with is clearly intolerable to a Bond villain-esque genius narcissist like Musk, who famously branded a rescue cave diver a paedophile because he took exception to something he said.
And so the most remarkable thing about the Trump-Musk implosion isn’t that it happened, it’s that it didn’t happen sooner.
But now that it’s all here what does it all mean?
The sad truth is it means what it looks like
A great big mess.
Trump and Musk are both disruptors. Indeed they are arguably the biggest disruptors in politics and business, respectively, that the world has seen this century.
And disruption by its very nature is incompatible with collaboration, just as smashing a computer with a hammer is incompatible with increased battery life.
Indeed, the very ethos of disruption is predicated on the assumption that the existing order is wrong and must be destroyed, thus the mantra of the internet age: “Move fast and break things.”
All the old institutions and existing structures and systems must be levelled to the ground so that a new better society can emerge.
In Trump world, this means “draining the swamp” of Washington DC. In Musk world it means starting a new civilisation on Mars.
And so while two great disruptors might be united in agreeing what must be destroyed, agreeing on what replaces it is — in this case quite literally — worlds apart.
And that is why populist politics so often falls apart or leads to disaster.
It is easy to unite people against a common enemy. It is far harder to get them to agree on what they actually like.
And populist policies are notoriously hard to implement. What does “draining the swamp” actually look like?
Frankly, it looks like DOGE, which — as we are still bearing witness to — has been an unmitigated disaster from start to finish.
Only a tiny fraction of the promised savings have been identified and even then Trump seems to have completely disregarded it for political purposes in his Big Beautiful Bill, which sparked his nuclear fallout with Musk.
Little wonder the two are now engaged in a furious war of words.
Words, after all, come easy in politics.
It’s deeds that are the hard part.
Originally published as Hildebrand: Trump and Elon’s punch-on was pretty predictable
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