JUNE 5, 2025, 10:40 PM ET<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sun rises every morning. Spring turns to summer. Water is wet. Donald Trump and Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0relationship<\/a>\u00a0has ended with a tweet about Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was inevitable. When\u00a0Elon Musk<\/a>\u00a0attached himself to\u00a0Trump<\/a>\u00a0during Trump\u2019s presidential transition last fall, there was great speculation that these two massive egos would, eventually, clash and that their strategic partnership would flame out spectacularly. Many onlookers assumed that Trump would be the one to tire of Musk and that the centibillionaire would fly too close to the sun, becoming too visible in the administration or simply too annoying. During his short time in government, Musk did manage to anger\u00a0some of Trump\u2019s staff and advisers<\/a>, tank his\u00a0public reputation<\/a>\u00a0with many American voters, and jeopardize the\u00a0financial health<\/a>\u00a0of his EV company, Tesla. Still, through all of that, Trump remained remarkably on message and supportive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead it was Musk who fired the first shots, specifically criticisms of the Republicans\u2019 budget-reconciliation package (a.k.a. the One Big Beautiful Bill Act). On Tuesday, Musk called the bill a \u201cdisgusting abomination,\u201d threatened<\/a>to politically retaliate against its supporters, and argued it would increase the debt. This led to Trump calling out Musk in an Oval Office meeting today with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and suggesting that the DOGE figurehead had \u201cTrump derangement syndrome.\u201d The episode that followed<\/a>has been playing out in reality-TV fashion, with X and Truth Social acting as confessional booths. On X, Musk argued that, \u201cwithout me, Trump would have lost the election\u201d and accused Trump of \u201csuch ingratitude.\u201d On Truth Social, Trump posted<\/a> that \u201cElon was \u2018wearing thin\u2019\u201d and that, when the president asked Musk to leave, \u201che just went CRAZY!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It keeps going. At one point in the afternoon, as if sensing the feud had reached a critical mass of attention, Musk leveled a serious allegation against Trump, posting<\/a>: \u201c@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Musk had, it seems, kicked off an attentional spectacle without precedent. You have the world\u2019s richest man, who is terminally online and whose brain has been addled by social media and, reportedly<\/a>, other substances. He is one of the most prolific and erratic high-profile posters, so much so that he purchased his favorite social network to mold it in his image. He is squaring off against Trump, arguably the most consequential, off-the-cuff poster of all time and, one must note, the current president of the United States. If it weren\u2019t for the other, both men would be peerless in their ability to troll, outrage, and command news cycles via their fragile, mercurial egos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The point being: If this public fight between Musk and Trump continues, we will witness a Super Bowl of schadenfreude unfold. It\u2019s guaranteed to entertain and leave those of us who spectate feeling gross. It is, in other words, the logical endpoint of internet beefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This spectacle is tempting to view as a cage match: Two men enter, one man leaves. (Musk, at least, is familiar<\/a>.) But that mentality supposes a winner and a loser, and it\u2019s worth asking what winning even looks like here. Surely, nobody will come out of this unscathed. Musk\u2019s \u201cEpstein files\u201d comment, beyond being an allegation about Trump\u2019s relationship with the convicted sex offender and child trafficker, also is a suggestion that Musk might have other dirt on the Trump administration. And the likely loss of Musk\u2019s donor money deprives Trump of political leverage. Similarly, Trump has suggested<\/a> he might strip Musk\u2019s companies of their federal funding and subsidies. Tesla\u2019s stock has fallen sharply<\/a> today since Musk began rage-posting against Trump, which suggests there will be real consequences. (Meanwhile, people, including Steve Bannon, are already musing<\/a> that Musk could get himself deported.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider, though, that in the realm of social media, Musk and Trump both know exactly what they are doing. Musk and Trump are innately attuned to attention and how to attract and wield it. It stands to reason that their interpretation of their past decade online is that public feuding has, essentially, no downside for them. Instead, their perma-arguing, norm-stomping, and general shamelessness has allowed them to become the main characters of a media and political ecosystem that demands constant fodder. Harnessing attention in this way has proved remarkably lucrative. Many credit Trump\u2019s initial victory in 2016 to his ability to program the news cycle 140 characters at a time. Meanwhile, some analysts<\/a> have suggested that Musk\u2019s companies are, in their own right, memestocks whose fortunes have risen on the centibillionaire\u2019s incessant ability to stay in the spotlight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s and Musk\u2019s constant provocations and attention seeking have downstream effects, too. Their feuding creates content for others to draft off of. The press can cover it, influencers can react to it, politicians can fundraise off it, and all manner of online hustlers can find a way to get in. You can already see the attentional cottage industry hard at work in the Musk-Trump fight as lesser attention merchants try to involve themselves. The podcaster Lex Fridman offered<\/a> to broker peace on his show while the rapper Ye stepped<\/a>in to comment on the chaos. The onetime presidential candidate and third-party champion Andrew Yang seized<\/a> on Musk\u2019s comments to drum up enthusiasm for his pet project. Even the replies became valuable real estate\u2014the long strings of responses to Musk’s posts about Trump are littered with advertisements automatically inserted by X. (I saw one for a Trump T-shirt company.) In this way, a Trump-Musk beef is an attentional Big Bang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2020, the blogger Venkatesh Rao<\/a> wrote a seminal post titled \u201cThe Internet of Beefs,\u201d arguing that the structure of social media and our culture-warring has brought about \u201ca stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict.\u201d In it, he describes the Internet of Beefs as having \u201ca feudal structure,\u201d with charismatic leaders (knights), and anonymous legions of normies (mooks) who\u2019ve devoted themselves to fight on behalf of these leaders. Rao identifies Trump as an ur-example of a knight, who is able to profit off of all of the discord he\u2019s helped sow. \u201cFor the mook, the conflict is a means to an end, however incoherent,\u201d Rao writes. \u201cFor the knight, the conflict is the end. Growing it, and keeping it going, is something like an entrepreneurial cultural capital business model.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I reread Rao\u2019s post as the internet worked itself into a lather over today\u2019s fight. Many of the dynamics Rao explained were on display: sycophants lining up to defend Musk or Trump in the hope of getting noticed, various posters (myself included) excitedly or dutifully chronicling the fallout\u2014there is seemingly opportunity everywhere, created by this attentional spectacle. The content<\/a> is at once<\/a> depressing<\/a> and tremendous<\/a>. At a glance, it looks like everyone\u2019s winning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, nobody is. Rao\u2019s most salient point in his essay is that this state of forever beef is a consequence of a societal rot. It\u2019s a stalling tactic of sorts, one that prevents us from deciding who we are, both individually and collectively. If that sounds overwrought, it\u2019s worth remembering the genesis of Musk and Trump\u2019s feud, a funding bill in Congress that would result in roughly $1 trillion in cuts<\/a> to Medicaid and food stamps, while offering a similar value<\/a> in tax cuts to high earners. Millions of people could<\/a> lose their current coverage through Obamacare if the bill passes. These details are vaporized by the size and scale of this particular beef.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Trump-Musk feud is not so much a distraction as it is evidence of a societal tendency toward abstraction, even obfuscation. A cage match is easier to watch than a discussion about who deserves benefits and resources. It is certainly more cathartic than an ideological stalemate about the world we want to build. Maybe Trump or Musk will find a way to win or lose their spat. The rest of us, though, will probably not be so lucky, destined instead to spectate fight after fight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charlie Warzel<\/a> is a staff writer at The Atlantic<\/em> and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain<\/a>, about technology, media, and big ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nobody wins in the Trump-Musk breakup. By\u00a0Charlie Warzel JUNE 5, 2025, 10:40 PM ET The sun rises every morning. Spring turns to summer. Water is wet. Donald Trump and Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0relationship\u00a0has ended with a tweet about Jeffrey Epstein. This was inevitable. When\u00a0Elon Musk\u00a0attached himself to\u00a0Trump\u00a0during Trump\u2019s presidential transition last fall, there was great speculation that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16459"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16461,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16459\/revisions\/16461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Elon](\"https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/vxudU5bhuybSxLhNMvOg_bnZbSk=\/0x0:2917x1641\/960x540\/media\/img\/mt\/2025\/06\/2025_06_TrumpElonTrolls\/original.jpg\")
ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/h3>\n\n\n\n