Why the Trump/Musk partnership is taking off

Two alphas with very different skills, one government to shrink.

Fair to say no one expected this.

In July, when Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president, almost everyone assumed his support would be mostly financial, maybe a couple of hundred million dollars - a rounding error for Musk.

In November, when Trump announced Musk would run a new “Department of Government Efficiency” after winning, the plan sounded like a joke. That was especially true considering DOGE is the name of a favorite crypto “memecoin” of Musk’s — a pretend currency that’s essentially a legal Ponzi scheme.

In December, as a fight over visas for skilled tech workers escalated, Steve Bannon, an architect of the Make America Great Again movement and fierce Trump loyalist, took aim at Musk, calling Musk a “toddler.” Bannon later promised to ensure Musk didn’t have free rein in the White House. Musk “should go back to South Africa,” he said.

Meanwhile, Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter normally well-sourced in the White House, reported that Trump was complaining “how Musk is around a lot.”

Bad read, Maggie.

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(The facts. The truth. With your help.)

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At least for the moment, Musk has pushed aside Bannon and everyone else who stood in his way. Not only does he have free rein in the White House, he and his son X had an Oval Office press conference with Trump on Wednesday.

The left fervently hopes Trump will grow tired of the publicity Musk is receiving - and refers to “President Musk” to annoy Trump. It’s not working. Trump and Musk, who barely knew each other not long ago, are now each other’s biggest fans.

Don’t take it from me.

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(Okay then.)

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The left is not wrong. Both Trump and Musk are extreme alphas, used to giving orders, not taking them. So what’s going on here? And can it go on? Can the world’s most powerful person and its most powerful private citizen continue this alliance?

I suspect part of the reason Trump and Musk get along is simple cultural affinity. Musk is vehemently anti-trans. The issue is personal for him. His son Xavier Alexander Musk legally changed his name to Vivian Jenna Wilson and his gender to female in 2022 and has spoken out against Elon. Trump’s executive orders restricting trans military service and child surgeries, which explicitly called the trans movement out for the madness it has become, must have resonated with Musk.

But the alliance is more than cultural.

Trump and Musk have very different strengths, and they fit together better than may first be apparent.

Trump has proven over the last decade that he has the rare gift of being able both to reflect and drive public opinion even when the media stand in his way. He understood the anger at illegal immigration and the failure of the Iraq war before any other national figure. Populist politicians cannot be successful if they are not popular. Trump grabs attention unlike any other leader in generations.

Further, his policy instincts can be weirdly prescient. He was right about Covid, even though the medical establishment cowed him into agreeing to lockdowns, right that Europe needed and still needs to take a greater stake in its own defense, right to stand up for Israel’s duty to defend itself after Oct. 7.

What Trump is not is detail-oriented.

Which isn’t ideal, considering he’s running a government with 4 million civilian employees, soldiers, and postal workers, as well as another 5 million contractors, a bureaucracy that spends or distributes $7 trillion annually. (I know some of you may disagree and argue Trump should merely set priorities and have his subordinates carry them out, but I think that in an organization this complex, it’s crucial that the chief executive have command of the details two or three or even four levels down.)

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(Make bureaucracy great again.)

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You know who is detail-oriented?

Elon Musk. Musk is the world’s foremost engineer. His unparalleled gift is to take ideas that seemed fictional and make them real by sheer force of will and intellectual. He has built two massively successful companies, Tesla and SpaceX, not by inventing technology, but by improving it cycle after cycle.

Going to Mars is not a new idea. Philip K. Dick wrote about it generations ago. But the practical obstacles seemed insurmountable. Not to Musk, though. At this point, when Musk says he intends to send people to Mars, does anyone really think he won’t?

And Musk loves these challenges. He loves proving the media wrong. He loved proving he could run Twitter/X with a fraction of the workforce it had had before he bought.

Meaningfully shrinking the American government, whose spending has grown almost $2 trillion annually in just the last seven years, might be even more complicated than going to Mars. No wonder Musk is so into it.

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(The truth - for less than $2 trillion.)

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This doesn’t mean every move that Musk and his DOGE engineers have made so far will work - or even be legal. But the crisis of a government that is so big that it has become effectively unaccountable both to the legislature and the executive is real. Musk and Trump are not wrong to intuit that Musk has the skills to attack it more aggressively than anyone else in the world.

How long will the partnership last? At this point, I don’t think anyone can know. Musk may want to get back to his other projects. Trump may ultimately bridle at the attention Musk gets.

But - at least for now - I suspect the woke whining over it will do nothing but bring Trump and Musk even closer.