The End of Silicon Politics
Trump’s public breakup with Elon Musk is symptomatic of his failure to hold together the broad coalition to which he owes his reelection.
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The “HUGEst” political alliance of the century is breaking apart before our eyes in suitably spectacular fashion.
For the last months, the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, were a political item. Musk donated large sums to Trump’s campaign, lavished the newly reelected president with praise on his social network, and neglected his companies to pursue his side quest at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In return, Trump gave Musk unprecedented powers over the federal bureaucracy, staged joint press conferences in the Oval Office, and allowed him to lecture the assembled cabinet before rolling cameras. Nothing better symbolized the supposed “vibe shift” in America than the fact that Trump, practically a social pariah when he was first elected to the White House, could upon his return count on the outspoken support of the world’s most famous entrepreneur—and many other leading figures in Silicon Valley.
But it was also clear from the start that the match between Musk and Trump might prove stormy. The egos of both men are evidently outsized, their temperaments famously volatile. It did not take a genius to predict that their supposedly perfect match might prove short-lived, or even that it would end in acrimony. And yet, the speed with which their epic bromance has turned into an explosive feud is astonishing.
A week ago, Musk announced his departure from Washington, with the pair giving a final press conference from the Oval Office. A few days later, a New York Times story, apparently drawing on sources in Trump’s circle, chronicled the extent of Musk’s alleged drug use. Then, on Tuesday, Musk publicly came out against Trump’s “big and beautiful” budget bill, which would lead both to a large tax cut and a massive increase of public debt.
But it was yesterday that the fight truly escalated. At a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump responded to Musk’s criticisms of his budget bill, suggesting that “Elon is upset because we took [away] the EV mandate, which is a lot of money for electric vehicles… I know that disturbed him.”
Musk’s ire grew by the hour. First, he told his 220 million followers on X that America could choose between a “big and ugly bill” and a “slim and beautiful bill,” urging Republican legislators to break rank with Trump in pursuit of the latter. As the day wore on, Musk started to draw attention to Trump’s alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that these were the real reason why files about Epstein’s misdeeds hadn’t yet been released. At present, his pinned post is a poll that asks users whether it is time for a “new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle.”
The breakup is likely to prove costly to both sides. Trump will lose his biggest financial backer (though both are billionaires, Musk is estimated to be over 50 times richer than him). He may find that X (which remains the most politically influential social media platform despite being much less central to the political conversation than it once was) suddenly becomes more hostile terrain for him. And the passage of his crucial budget bill is now in serious doubt.
Musk, whose approval ratings already lag behind those of his former boss, is now politically homeless. Having alienated much of the liberal customer base of Tesla, his most valuable company, he is now likely to alienate MAGA, his most fervent fan base in politics. While a majority of Americans may indeed be unhappy with the choices currently on offer, the idea that somebody who is this unpopular can found a successful third party is highly unrealistic.
But the big beautiful break between Trump and Musk is more significant for what it reveals about failed aspirations that now are very much in the past than for what it predicts about events that are yet to come. When romances fail, it is often because each partner projected their hopes onto the other, only to discover belatedly that these had all along been misplaced. That is the true meaning lurking behind the political breakup of the century.
Musk thought that he could use Trump as a vehicle for refashioning the federal government in keeping with the values and the ethos of the Silicon Valley elite. Trump thought that he could use his alliance with Musk to broaden his appeal beyond his traditional pitch. Both of these hopes were destined to be disappointed before the wedding vows had even been pronounced.
The Silicon Vision of Politics
Over the last years, some leading figures in Silicon Valley grew convinced that the federal government was so badly broken that they could no longer afford to ignore it—and coalesced around a particular set of views about how to fix it.
The kings of Silicon Valley succeeded by “moving fast and breaking shit.” The VC firms they lead don’t mind if many of the startups they support fail as long as some go on to have outsized returns. They have grown accustomed to the idea that taking huge risks (as Musk did in founding Tesla and SpaceX) can simultaneously be personally rewarding and socially beneficial. If all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail; it is perhaps inevitable that a set of phenomenally successful people who transformed the world by these methods would come to believe that they can—to the mutual benefit of themselves and their country—apply the same playbook to the federal government.
There was also an ideological element to this. The leaders of Silicon Valley grew deeply frustrated with the left’s instinctive hostility to technological progress, taking particular umbrage at the fact that mainstream outlets like the New York Times often covered significant innovations like breakthrough rocket launches by focusing on minor environmental impacts. They came to loath the way in which woke ideology undermined meritocracy, worrying that it would make it harder to find the talent they needed to succeed. And they started to worry about the ballooning federal budget, which might sap the competitiveness of American companies in the near future.
Musk’s alliance with Trump was based on a bet that the president’s destructive force would prove sufficiently unstoppable, and his substantive views sufficiently thin, that he could become a political vehicle for putting the Silicon vision of politics into practice. For the first hundred or so days of Trump’s presidency, some of Silicon Valley’s leaders retained the hope that their bet was paying off. In his inaugural address, Trump promised a new age of American innovation. The White House went on a full-frontal attack against everything it considered woke. Republicans were still talking a big game about shrinking the budget deficit. Musk and his band of young, inexperienced, high-agency recruits were given enormous power to reshape the federal bureaucracy.
But the truth was always going to prove disappointing. Republicans are less likely than Democrats to oppose technological innovation on the grounds of protecting the environment or advancing some vague notion of social justice. But they are just as likely to oppose it when it threatens the jobs of key constituencies; could lead to lower property prices; or requires attracting the best and the brightest from faraway countries like India and China. The tragedy of the “abundance agenda” is that it doesn’t have a natural home in either big political party.
Similarly, Musk evidently hoped that the war against woke would unleash America’s productive powers, refocusing leading universities on impactful research and giving tech companies a freer hand in recruitment. Instead, the Trump administration decided to make universities their number one enemy, weakening institutions of higher learning by any means possible, and significantly curtailing the inflow of talented students from around the world. In the debate over whether to expand or constrict H-1B visas for the top talent that Musk and his friends in Silicon Valley desperately need, the restrictionists in the White House increasingly look like they have the upper hand.
But, perhaps surprisingly, it is Republican hypocrisy on the national debt that seems most to have alienated Musk. Mercurial and self-serving though he may be, Musk does appear to be a man of conviction. (After all, he was willing to lose a lot of friends and spend enormous money on purchasing a social media platform to advance his political beliefs.) It seems that Musk believed leading Republicans when they spent the last years warning about the dangers of trillion-dollar deficits and promising to turn around public finances. And so it was his revulsion at a budget bill that would increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion which occasioned Musk’s public split from Trump.
Musk has some understandable reason to feel bitter about these betrayals. But to the extent that he retains an ability to be honest with himself, he should also recognize that the roots of his vision’s failure lie closer to home: his unrealistic hope that DOGE could radically remake the country like a startup company that pivots from recognizing hot dogs to powering artificial intelligence.
When Mr. Musk went to Washington, he clearly believed that he would find waste and fraud on a monumental scale. But while bureaucracies rightly have a reputation for inefficiency, the kind of obvious failures that Musk envisaged have, for the most part, turned out to be figments of his imagination. In his first days on the job, he posted a number of “big wins” that amounted to a tiny fraction of the federal budget; in the following days and weeks, even these announcements slowed to a trickle, and then altogether ceased. Musk’s frustration with Trump’s budget bill stem in part from his recognition that the savings he made at DOGE are rounding errors compared to the irresponsible giveaways championed by the president he helped elect.
Most fundamentally, though, DOGE failed because of the structural differences between tech and government. When a VC funds a startup which fails spectacularly, few people suffer and the public doesn’t care. If you inadvertently cut the funding of key public services, the negative consequences for people’s lives will be severe and immediate. Moving fast and breaking shit really does work for startups; it really does not work for government agencies.
The American government could probably be improved if there were more people who combine the fast-moving ethos of the tech world with real experience in politics. But the idea that a senior tech leader could magically fix Washington by breaking a bunch of stuff without even bothering to learn much about what it actually does—an idea that, incidentally, is by no means limited to conservative tech billionaires—was always naive.
The End of the Vibe Shift
Over the last year, Musk let his vocal support for MAGA redefine him in the eyes of the public. That makes this split especially perilous for his image. Trump knows better than to make himself so dependent on any one political ally; it is telling that he has, so far, chosen to respond to Musk’s barrage of social media posts in a comparatively restrained fashion. And yet, the breakup with Musk also signifies the failure of the most ambitious vision for Trump’s second term in office.
When Trump was first elected, he was widely seen as a man of the past. This was partially due to his demographic coalition, which heavily relied on a supposedly declining portion of the American electorate. But it was also because his economic policies harkened back to a lost golden age, with promises to revive jobs in coal mining or steel manufacturing central to his campaign.
The much-hyped vibe shift which heralded Trump’s return to power was rooted in large part in his ability to shed that image. Trump’s success in expanding his demographic coalition, winning over a lot of younger and more ethnically diverse voters, was an important part of this. But Musk’s support was also crucial to Trump’s reinvention as a man of the future. For a brief moment, the MAGA movement was as associated with the idea of colonizing Mars as it was with dreams of reopening coal mines.
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The tensions in this coalition were easy to see. Many MAGA supporters always viewed Musk, who lacks both Trump’s charisma and his demotic ability to compensate for his billions by spending them in the exact way that ordinary people dream of doing if they were to win the lottery, with great suspicion. Most of them are probably happy to see the administration take a hatchet to leading universities, would cheer on an end to the H-1B visa program, and don’t see how colonizing Mars is going to get them a raise.
But the truth is that the alliance did not fail because the interests of Trump’s voters irreconcilably clash with Musk’s vision. (After all, the interests of Trump’s voters also irreconcilably clash with the fiscal vision of the Republican Party, and yet they seem perfectly comfortable with the massive handouts included in the pending budget bill.) Rather, it failed because Trump has again and again proven unwilling to do what it takes to consolidate his hold over the broad coalition that propelled him to office.
Most Americans wanted stricter enforcement of the border with Mexico; they did not want gay hairdressers to be deported to El Savadoran prison camps on the likely erroneous suspicion that they secretly belong to a violent cartel. Most Americans wanted to strengthen domestic manufacturing; they did not want a chaotic tariff policy that threatens to throw the world economy into recession. And they wanted to curb the woke excesses to which many mainstream institutions had succumbed over the past decade; but they did not want an all-out culture war in which the administration tries to impose its own highly contentious ideas on a reluctant public by using the concerted force of the federal government.
Trump’s inability to hold together the remarkable partnership with Musk is but the most visible sign of a wider failure to make good on the promise of turning his presidency into a broader, more forward-looking political project. From here on out, the White House is once again run by the MAGA faithful. The vibe shift, to the extent it was ever real, is over.
Thanks for your coverage of what is IMO a salient moment--even an inflection point--in our current despotic spasm. One thing I keep thinking about, though, which you might also be thinking about, is that both Trump's and Musk's perspectives are relatively narrow, even constrictive, arising as they do from specialized, narrow experience. You see this among aging politicians in general, and also, I strongly suspect, among the tech bros. Intelligent as they are I think both groups are suffering from their respective blinders and immediate needs. Such short-sighted thinking ignores a fact of evolutionary change, which is that it's often multi-factoral, non-linear, and serendipitious, hence predictable only in uncertain ways, which suggests that leaving some room in our planning for the future for scope to allow these forces to flourish. It also suggests we might well opt for less bombast and more humility across the board from our leaders. In closing I'd like to add that electing leaders familiar with both Silicon Valley insights and perspectives as well as those of the
'rest of us' might prove extremely useful in the near term and perhaps from here on out.
Unlike one of the commenters below, I didn't know what to make of this piece. It has a rambling, even desultory, quality to it. The brittle, gossipy early part is already, quite possibly, stale because we heard early this morning that the two leviathans are moving towards an armistice of sorts.
But it was Mounk's reference to the MAGA base that is "irreconcilably" opposed to the Silicon vision but also to the GOP vision represented by the budget bill with its huge handouts that baffled me. The MAGA base is not the Appalachian Forgotten Man of Trump's first term and probably never was even then.
It should be clear that the MAGA base is the Tea Party slice of the population, now better organized. They are the self-employed, the S-Corp, the small businessmen, the private and closely-held companies, the reticent regional capital, who love tax cuts, hate all welfare programs, loathe wokeness and any kind of justice (and they have this in common with Yascha Mounk) and actually venerate billionaires because they hope to become one in the future. So no irreconcilability there at all. And this is why these two grotesque players will patch things up and move on.
Even on the matter of the elite universities there is no daylight between them. Silicon Valley is still predominantly Dem-supporting and pro-liberal education. But the VC and crypto crowd is resolutely pro-Trump and hostile to elite institutions. (A similar parallel is found in finance. Bankers are mostly Democrats, while the PE and HF crowd leans pro-Trump. A possible explanation can be found in the ethnicity of the pro-Trump groups, but I won't go into that here.)
Musk's dislike of universities is only in part due to their supposed wokeness, though it could also be that he was academically a mediocre student. It is because he believes in "learning by doing", rather than the formal learning in the controlled environment found in universities. And the VC crowd is with him on that. (Hence, their embrace of Curtis Yarvin, who wants to put tech businessmen on Mount Olympus.) And here too the MAGA base, as I have described it here, is with them all the way.