‘Clearly started to disintegrate’: White House is chaos as billionaires turn on Donald Trump

Elon Musk has gone to war with top Trump officials as the President’s inner circle of billionaires and tech moguls swiftly turn on him.

OPINION

Elon Musk has taught us a very important lesson this week – you can be the world’s richest person, able to buy and sell elections, countries, hair plugs, children and access to Donald Trump’s personal minifridge, but you can still be a deadset, rolled gold, incurable loser.

At a dark time when there is precious little cheery news, let me tell you about the best, actually the only, good thing to happen in MAGAland since someone decided to invest in an acronym and a container load of red hats.

Musk has just livestreamed himself rage quitting a video game after being brutally trolled live.

MORE: Elon Musk’s bizarre move with ex-partner Grimes exposed

In between mercilessly filleting the US government and fathering children like a DNA sprinkler system, Musk is also a huge fan of Path of Exile 2 and this week broadcast himself playing the game while on board his private jet.

Within minutes, he was being brutally taunted and ridiculed.

“Please j**k off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack” someone posted in the chat, before comments piled up like “YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND YOU WILL DIE ALONE” and “YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL INSECURE AND IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY”.

For 90 minutes he attempted to play, repeatedly dying, playing techno and not saying anything before unceremoniously bailing on the game.

This incident might turn out to be the high point of his week, with him now in open conflict with Trumpworld while the White House is self-destructing.

This is the moment billionaire Elon Musk livestreamed his own meltdown this week as the White House descends into pure chaos.

MORE:Where world’s richest men really hide their billions

The president’s top lieutenants and advisers are now “feuding with each other and the feuding is dominating what’s going on in DC,” the Daily Beast’s executive editor Hugh Dougherty told a podcast this week.

“There are rival camps and quite how they divide up, it’s like Squid Game.”

As Axios pointed out, if the first Trump administration was characterised by backstabbing, this time it’s all about “front-stabbing”.

The warring began when Donald Trump recently announced his catastrophic, “nuclear” global tariffs, which immediately sent the world’s economic markets into a death spiral and had economic forecasters squawking “1929!” at the top of their lungs as they ran in ever-decreasing circles like Chicken Littles with lapel mics.

The US is in crisis. Picture: Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP

Since then, the loose union of strange bedfellows that had flocked to MAGAworld, including Bro-TUS Elon Musk, Wall Street billionaires, Silicon Valley’s always-picked-last-for-T-ball-at-school techligarchs and the manosphere has clearly started to disintegrate.

In short, the White House is imploding. Welcome to the chaos, won’t you take a seat?

The easiest explanation for why this is happening now? $120 billion.

In less than 24 hours after Mr Trump announced his lunatic economic plan, his top 10 billionaire donors lost more than $120 billion in their personal wealth combined as the stock market tanked faster than that time Coke launched a Clear flavour.

The warring began when Donald Trump recently announced his catastrophic, “nuclear” global tariffs. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

These blokes might have turned up, forelock-tugging, to the president’s inauguration in a sickening display of genuflection but Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and French luxury goods supremo (and world’s richest man in 2024) Bernard Arnault had $20, $18.4 and $13.8 billion shaved off their personal wealth in the immediate aftermath of Mr Trump’s tariff Ragnarok.

They were not amused.

Leading the pack of squillionaires suddenly unhappy with Dear Leader’s careening off into utter bedlam and committing gross national economic harakiri was Musk, suddenly $14 billion poorer, who loudly split from his former bestie to out himself as a free-tradist.

He went further, getting into the internet equivalent of a slap fight with Mr Trump’s chief tariff cheerleader Pete Navarro, calling him “dumber than a sack of bricks” and a “moron”.

“He ain’t built sh*t,” he posted on X.

As the sheer derangement of the tariffs set in, as brokers reeled and Wall Street ran out of brown paper bags for staff to breathe into, the sorts of men who can blink and move the NASDAQ – and who had previously backed Mr Trump – started doing some energetic arm-waving.

Elon Musk publicly unleashed on Donald Trump’s chief tarriff cheerleader. Picture: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

After they repeatedly sucked up to Mr Trump in 2024 and 2025 and wrote him grotesquely large cheques, they have now turned on him, calling the tariffs “stupid, wrong, arrogantly extreme, ignorant”, a “huge policy mistake”, and generally started yelling about the likelihood of a recession.

As former Trump fanboy and GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen put it, the tariffs “are turning me into a dem”.

He later posted, “I can’t wait for my $10,000 made in the USA iPhone”.

The schadenfreude here is off the dial, all of these men having, only months ago, obsequiously fallen into line behind Mr Trump in a gross demonstration of naked self interest.

Meanwhile, 4500km west in the be-chipped, tech heartland of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, the Zuckerbergs of the world were also discovering that shovelling fat wodges of money into Mr Trump’s pockets did not automatically entitle them to special treatment.

In January, Meta settled a lawsuit from the president after he was kicked off Facebook and Instagram after fomenting an armed insurrection, paying the world’s most famous Fillet O’Fish lover more than $40 million.

Are Donald Trump’s tech billionaires turning on him? Picture: Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images

Added to which, Zuckerberg, Bezos and the CEOs of Apple, Google and Microsoft donated a combined $8 million towards Mr Trump’s inauguration.

Taking the cake is Mr Musk, who put $464 million into the former reality star’s election campaign.

Turns out it was all for a quid pro no.

They could not, after all, buy themselves protection from Trumpian insanity.

Since the Great Tariffing, they have personally lost nearly unfathomable-for-mere-mortals-to-comprehend sums of money as their businesses will be bludgeoned by the new regime of tariffs.

But if there is one person who should be particularly grumpy that their munificence has not paid off it’s Meta’s Mr Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg has millions of reasons to be grumpy. Picture: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Despite having caved to the right wing and ditched Facebook fact checking, along with ponying up all that cash, next week a landmark antitrust trial will begin in Washington as the Trump administration forges on with the push, started under Joe Biden, to possibly break up Meta.

If you can’t trust a vainglorious, out-and-proud autocrat-in-the-making who doesn’t understand, as he actually put it, “computer”, who can you trust?

Meanwhile, the manosphere has also rounded on Mr Trump.

Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy posted, in the wake of the stock markets going into free fall sans parachute, “Everything’s in the shitter because of it”, adding, “Don’t call it Black Monday, it’s Orange Monday”.

Adin Ross, an online streamer with nearly 20 million followers, simply went with: “Bro, holy f**k”.

Joe Rogan told his audience that the tariffs are “so baffling, it’s so crazy, like, what is going on? The whole world is mad at us, Trump’s playing golf”. (Interestingly, in March he went against Mr Trump, saying it was “horrific” that “people who aren’t criminals are getting lassoed up and deported”).

Things are going from bad to worse for Elon Musk. Picture: AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth

As the week ended, things got even worse for Elon Musk, with White House insiders now briefing the media about him, including that his nickname is “Crazy Uncle Elon” and that he is “immensely disliked”.

According to a juicy new Rolling Stone report, “Trump lieutenants have walked out of meetings and earnestly asked one another if they thought Musk was high”.

“He’s just the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with, and that is saying something,” a White House source has said.

And what was Number 47 himself, the fake-tanned chaos agent at the heart of this maelstrom and the reason for the US’ current cheeseburger shortage, actually doing while his political empire started to crack and buckle?

Hammering away at a tiny ball on a fairway thousands of kilometres away in Florida for a golf championship.

Nero and his fiddle had nothing on the president and his putter.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles

Originally published as ‘Clearly started to disintegrate’: White House is chaos as billionaires turn on Donald Trump