Technology’s greatest overpromiser & overdeliverator has met America’s chao-monkey-in-chief. The result is a Musk entangled in the Trumpian vortex and no longer able to outmaneuver failure, for he did not recognize that Trump is not a transactional politician at his core…

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Last fall, I thought I understood what Elon Musk was doing.

Face it: The guy is annoying. He lies a lot. He overpromises, constantly. But there is, or there was, a but: Although he massively overpromised, nearly always, he substantially overdelivered. Tesla made cars. Starlink carried voice and data. SpaceX launched rockets. And it was not implausible to think it was his presence and actions and salesmanship and overpromising that had kept those three operations from being wound-up and wound-down. And those three operations were immensely valuable to humanity as technology-forcers, and substantially valuable to all their stakeholders from raw-material suppliers to users as globalized value-chain economy production networks. He had somehow turned overpromising into a kind of business and financial sorcery, delivering rockets, cars, and satellites against the odds, as his audacity propelled technological revolutions.

So I was surprised and disappointed when he showed up as a value-subtracting chaos monkey with Twitter. And then I was disappointed when he began spending all of his time attending on America’s chaos-monkey in chief, Donald Trump. But I was not surprised when he began spending all of his time attending on America’s chaos-monkey in chief, Donald Trump: I thought I understood what he was doing.

But now I don’t understand. It appears that he tried to arm-wrestle Washington and lost. This is the story of a man who mistook political chaos for a new frontier, only to discover that Trump’s dealmaking is not a zero-sum game.

But wasn’t this very predictable? I mean, Musk thought he was the frog and Trump the scorpion in the Russian fable of the frog and the scorpion crossing the river. But how could he not understand Trump’s nature, and not see that Trump who knows his own nature well had strapped on a jetpack?

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The guy truly broke through in the years after 2015. He became in some sense the richest man in the world from sky-high bubble valuations of his companies. Successful SpaceX launches per year went from 7 in 2015 to 21 in 2018, 31 in 2021, and 133 in 2024. Teslas shipped went, in thousands per year, from 50 in 2015 to 245 in 2018, 936 in 2021, and 1,789 in 2024. Those raging against his continual overpromising ran up against that track record. And that track record made many willing to bet their money on his enterprises even at their sky-high bubble valuations in the hope that he might overdeliver again.

Why would a man going from such extraordinary success to success start hanging out with Donald Trump fulltime in the fall of 2024? Why would he pivot to high politics to become Donald Trump's #1 comrade in arms and most trusted ally?

I thought I knew.

Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo wrote the line "keep your friends close, and keep your enemies closer" for their Michael Corleone character.

In the culture war—in advancing Elon Musk's cause which he truly and deeply believes in that it is essential for America's future to fight the Woke Mind Virus—Donald Trump was a great friend to Elon Musk: potentially his most valuable ally.

But with respect to the profitability and sustainability of his businesses, and hence the sustainability of his wealth built on their high market and private valuations, Donald Trump was a threat: a clear and present danger and extistential threat to Elon Musk. For, as of mid-2024, there were too many applause lines in Trump's speeches about how electric vehicles were a flop, kept alive only by government subsidies that he would immediately terminate.

So what, as of mid-2024, was Musk to do in this situation?

It was to hug Donald Trump his culture-war ally close: become his #1 cheerleader, his #1 funder, and the guy who would take the heat for actually cutting back the federal bureaucracy and making it subservient to Trump. And it was to hug Donald Trump the existential business threat closer: to get, in return for Musk's support, Trump undertaking actions as president to get:

1. Justice Department harassment of his businesses stopped,

2. The EV tax credits that made it worthwhile to buy Teslas preserved,

3. tariff carve-outs so Tesla could continue to make cars for less than their sale price and so survive as a globalized-economy value-chain production network, and

4. the bulk of the NASA budget transferred to SpaceX.

But Elon Musk was naïve. Many people could have told him that, if you make such a bargain with Trump, it cannot be wink-wink implicit, and it cannot be verbal. At the very least you get a letter. Handwritten. Laying out the terms of the deal. And you get leverage: ways that you can punish him if he welshes. You need to put him in a situation so that if he double-crosses—or rather, when he is tempted to double-cross you—you have something to show, and some way to harm, and thus when he thinks about double-crossing you he says: “naaah”.

Musk failed to do that.

Trump delivered on investigation quashing. Trump did not deliver on EV credits or tariff carve-outs. Then Trump pulled the plug on NASA.

So what was Musk to do?

It seemed to me that Musk's natural next move would be to demonstrate that he could, using balanced-budget purity-Republican ideology, his money spent now on ads, and his money spent next year on elections to protect his allies, form and hold a bloc of four Republican senators in opposition to the reconciliation bill—and so have it fail, have Trump-Thune-Johnson have to go back to the well for another budget resolution, and at the very least postpone Trump's renewal of his tax cuts for six months or so, and gain credit among purity Republicans for holding the good-policy anti-welfare state line.

But that is not what he did. Individual tweets, yes. Calling Donald Trump a pedophile, yes. But an actual serious bill of particulars on changes that need to be made in reconciliatilon before he will support it and his allies will vote for it? No.

It does look much more like a ketamine-addled emotional wreck undergoing hour-by-hour adrenaline-testosterone fueled rage mood swings.

And so the test of strength never came. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson have announced opposition to what they describe as a “completely unsustainable” budget buster. But that is two, rather than the four whom Musk would need to have leverage. And I see no attempts on his part to recruit others to join that ilk. And I see no attempt by Musk to fund and form a caucus uniting the two dissatisfied fractions of Republicans, because in addition to the deficit hawks there are Collins, Murkowski, Hawley, and Grassley opposed to the cuts in rural and low-income health programs.

And now it seems that Musk is in full retreat without even seeing how much leverage he can generate. We have Carla Norrlöf:

Carla Norrlöf: Lessons From the Trump-Musk Feud: ‘Elon Musk's public retreat after a high-profile fight with Donald Trump demonstrates that even the world's richest person is no match for the US government. Money may buy you access, but it cannot shield you and your interests…. Trump can inflict tens of billions of dollars of losses on Musk, who as a private magnate lacks any reciprocal mechanism to bankrupt the Treasury.

True… SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is now NASA’s only operational transport…. [But] Musk underestimated just how dependent his own businesses are on state support. Notably, his apology came after Trump threatened “very serious consequences” in response to Musk’s threat to shift his financial support away from Republicans. Such a public retreat demonstrates that money may buy access, but it provides no shield against the unrivaled tools of state power…

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