Elon is supposedly on the outs with Trump and senior officials within the administration, as reported by Reuters yesterday. I have no doubt there will be significant distance as Musk is reportedly despised by everyone, but I’d take any talk of total separation with a grain of salt. For one thing he’s obviously willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Trump. He also tends to be a cult-like figure among his hirelings, in this case the uber nerds at DOGE who are a key part of the federal payment system and private data collection operation at its heart.
But “off-boarding will begin tonight” according to an unnamed official. This comes just a day after Musk publicly criticized Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” that, gasp, actually increased the deficit instead of decreasing it. If only Elon had spared a moment to learn the history of Republican presidents vis-a-vis what they say vs what they do in terms of balancing the budget.
This news comes the same day that a group of pension fund managers called for Elon to return to Tesla and work a full 40 hour week at the company. Whether that would be good or bad for Tesla depends on how much you buy into the Musk as business genius mythology. The company is in a tailspin, sales are collapsing and the brand is irreparably harmed. Musk returning to berate his staff about why they can’t achieve the impossible, like robocabs in Austin this summer or millions of humanoid robots by next year is probably not going to help.
Either way, as the saying goes it ain’t over til the sociopathic billionaire gets launched into space on one of his exploding rockets. Or something like that.