Jared Isaacman’s had a weird year.

For the first five months, the billionaire tech founder was preparing for his dream job. A lifelong space obsessive—as well as an astronaut and a pilot—Isaacman was named in December as Donald Trump’s pick to lead NASA.

Then, in late May, the president suddenly yanked his nomination. “I became some message to send,” Isaacman told me. “I take comfort knowing that it had very little to do with me in the end.”

Isaacman, an ally of Elon Musk, was collateral damage in the messy political divorce between the world’s richest man and the president. To many Trump supporters, the arrival in Washington of people like Musk and Isaacman was an exciting feature of his second term: talented and successful outsiders who would bring fresh perspective and much-needed real-world experience to government. And their early departures suggest that the second Trump administration has been too preoccupied by infighting and loyalty tests to get anything done.

Or that’s one way to see it. Another is that Musk was the main source of the dysfunction—and that he and his allies needed to be dumped by Trump. Either way, Isaacman was a victim of the biggest furor of the administration so far.