The toxic bromance of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk was always going to end ugly. These are not guys who take two deep breaths — or even one — before they post or care whether a scorched-earth insult also makes them look bad.
Another thing they have in common: They are both worshipped as demigods (or something even greater) by millions of people. And while an eventual reconciliation between the two highly transactional and unstable men can’t be ruled out, the alliance between their respective tribes will be fractured. Sides will be chosen.
The toxic bromance of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk was always going to end ugly.
Musk was the president’s top 2024 election donor — and he also spent prodigiously on other Republicans’ campaigns. Musk’s cash bought him his own fake agency, the Department of Government Efficiency. His largesse also helped give Trump small, beautiful majorities in both houses of Congress, thus preventing any investigations into his administration’s rampant lawbreaking, including DOGE’s rampage of arbitrary firings and fund-slashing through nearly every government agency.
But the richest man in the world broke with the most powerful man in the world over the massive spending increases in the latter’s “big, beautiful bill.” And in just a few easy steps, Musk went from politely leaving the White House to giving self-pitying interviews about how hard he tried to save America to publicly blasting the bill to declaring Trump “is in the [Jeffrey] Epstein files. That is why they have not been made public,” and calling for his impeachment.
Musk, who just a few months ago wielded his bags of cash in a failed attempt to get a GOP candidate elected in Wisconsin, even mused about forming a new political party.
What a year this week has been.
Musk and Trump are bound by many traits, but of great relevance today is the fact that each is surrounded by a slavish cult of personality. And the whole point of a cult of personality is that there can be only one true master.
This isn’t to say that all Trump voters worship the president as a kind of deity, nor does it apply to every admirer of Musk’s technological successes. But there can be no doubt that both men have millions of followers — particularly among very online males — who revere one of them as something greater than men.
Trump and many of his MAGA devotees have come to think of him as touched by God, particularly after he survived two assassination attempts last year. And there’s no way he could have sold his “big lie” about the 2020 election without having a ready-made audience of millions who would continue to believe such a thoroughly debunked falsehood.
Musk and his flock, meanwhile, revere him as a visionary on a heroic mission to save humanity and colonize Mars. And when Musk endorses a German political party so extreme that Europe’s other far-right parties didn’t want to be seen with it and Vice President JD Vance appears to follow his lead, Musk’s followers laud his almost supernatural ability to move the political Overton Window in ways previously thought impossible.
What happens now will likely alter the trajectory of Trump’s second term, and the culture of the larger MAGA movement.
But lines are already being drawn. On one side you have the old-school MAGAs: the pizzagaters, QAnoners, Jan. 6ers and Trump 1.0 all-stars like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon. Included among Elon’s team are the Silicon Valley tech utopians, various fascist-adjacent online influencers, heterodox pick-me podcasters whose work he has promoted … and the antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes (who infamously dined with Trump in 2022 at Mar-a-Lago).
Dinesh D’Souza wishcasted that the whole spat could just be a brilliant psyop by Trump and Musk, “a perverse scheme to force the release of the Epstein files,” as he put it. And then there’s disgraced Nazi rapper Kanye West, who wishes everybody could just get along. (I’m willing to bet Musk gets Joe Rogan in the divorce, while Trump keeps the Proud Boys.) Musk, in November 2023, posted on X: “There is a large graveyard filled with my enemies. I do not wish to add to it, but will if given no choice. Those who pick fights with me do so at their own peril, but maybe this is their lucky day …” Trump spent the early months of his successful 2024 re-election campaign telling crowds, “I am your retribution.” The bark is often worse than the bite with these two thin-skinned bullies. They’ve both been known to retreat when it gets too hot in the kitchen. But we’ve also seen how pitiless they can be to their perceived enemies. Their followers will, by definition, follow their leads on whether this was just an ugly Thursday online — or the long-anticipated civil culture war between the ultranationalist base and the Silicon Valley techno-monarchists who’ve become Trump’s biggest financial boosters and who’ve tried to provide an intellectual sheen to MAGA’s racism and xenophobia. What happens now will likely alter the trajectory of Trump’s second term and the culture of the larger MAGA movement. This breakup is going to be incredibly ugly and dumb — even if it was tremendously entertaining on its first day.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
