It has been a fun holiday game. Social media have been full of images showing Donald Trump as Elon Musk’s servant: bringing him drinks in the Oval Office; cleaning his car windscreen; polishing his shoes. The president-elect even added to the fun by saying at a press conference at Mar a Lago that Musk cannot in fact aspire to being president as he was not born in the United States. Shakespeare could not have put it better: Trump “doth protest too much, methinks,” as the great playwright had a character say in “Hamlet” in response to a revealing over-reaction.
There are many uncertainties about Trump’s second term in the White House, but one of the biggest is the question of how this duet between Trump and Musk will develop. To stay with Shakespeare, it could remain a comedy, perhaps under the title of “The Merry Billionaires of Washington,” from Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” But it could easily become a tragedy.
One of the paradoxes of supposedly anti-elite populism is how attractive Trump is to other billionaires, who one might imagine would be epitomes of the hated elite. Indeed, America is home to more than 800 billionaires and as Trump has announced his nominations for his cabinet and other posts during the past month it has often seemed as if every single one of those 800 billionaires might be joining his government.
The paradox is easily resolved, however. Billionaires feel at home with each other because their huge wealth gives them an independence of thought and action that allows them to admire each other personally and interact easily, rather like the wealthy aristocrats of past centuries.
Many also share a belief that government acts as a constraint on their wealth and their actions that they would dearly like to dismantle or gain power over. Few of these plutocrats believe they have become wealthy by accident or thanks to the work of others: they believe that they have special talents and so deserve not just their current wealth but even more. And many derive some or all their wealth from government contracts, especially America’s vast defence budget, so gaining power over those contracts is naturally of huge interest.
This explains why billionaires like Trump so much. What is not so obvious, beyond mutual admiration, is why Trump should like them so much now that he is safely back in the White House and no longer needs their campaign donations. And while it is clear as crystal why Musk likes being close to Trump, it is not at all clear why Trump should continue to like Musk being close to him.
Elon Musk is different from the other billionaires around Trump in two important ways. The first is that he owns a social media platform, X, which he bought as Twitter in 2022 with a purpose that would have been familiar to newspaper owners in the past: as a tool of political power and status. The second is that he has strong opinions of his own about a huge range of domestic and international issues, and does not shy away from broadcasting them loudly to the world, using X.
What Musk does share with many of the other billionaires, however, is that his interests and views are contradictory to many, though not all, of the propositions that Trump put forward during the election campaign and since November 5th.
Elon Musk is an immigrant who was born in South Africa and came to America via Canada. He is globalization personified: His initial billions, from the PayPal payments company, arose thanks to the internet’s global reach; his SpaceX and Starlink companies depend on launching and operating satellites orbiting the planet, for customers worldwide; and his Tesla electric vehicle business produces cars and components in factories in Germany, China and the Netherlands, as well as Canada and the United States.
The theatrical performance that will be the Trump administration is set up for much comedy, especially when the simplest contradiction becomes evident: that Trump is someone who wants to occupy the centre of the stage, in the brightest of lights, and yet in Musk he has allied himself with someone who behaves in exactly the same way. It will be surprising, to say the least, if either of them proves able to share the limelight with the other.
Yet it is when the bigger contradictions become evident that the real action will begin, with its potential for conflict. During December’s tussle with the outgoing Congress over a stopgap federal budget, Musk and Trump competed for the limelight, but also, revealingly, over the substance of the proposed legislation. Musk intervened to force Congress to remove sections of the fiscal bill that proposed new restrictions on American firms’ investments in China, which stood to affect him.
Trump may not have noticed. Or perhaps he didn’t care. But once his administration has been formed, plenty of other powerful figures in defense, national security, commerce and treasury will care a lot about policy toward China, and will not take kindly to Musk interfering so as to protect his own business interests.
The potential for a clash is clear: over “America First” import tariffs versus Musk-style globalization; over “de-coupling” from China versus Tesla’s Chinese factories; between cuts Musk may propose to government spending, and projects dear to the interests of many of Trump’s Republican supporters.
As and when the conflicts occur, they will also create a clash between two of Trump’s key psychological traits: On the one hand, he loves power; on the other hand, he craves approval.
He will want to protect his power against anyone, including Musk or other billionaires, who chooses to challenge it. Trump will become especially angry at anyone whose own actions and beliefs appear to put in danger the public approval that he craves. Musk’s strong, often dogmatic views could easily do that. And yet would Trump dare to fire Musk, given that Musk could then turn his social media platform, X, against him?
The play promises to be riveting. What a pity that we cannot just watch the actors, but instead are deeply involved in the outcome.
First published in English on Bill Emmott’s Global View, this article is the original of an Italian version published by La Stampa. It is republished with permission.
