Ordinarily Bill and Andrew try to tackle different topics in Morning Shots, but you wouldn’t ask one of us to pass silently over this Trump/Musk story, would you? Pick your poison¹—and hey, maybe we’re both wrong! Happy Friday.

Opportunity Knocks

by Andrew Egger

In yesterday’s Morning Shots, Bill wisely counseled Democrats (and the rest of us) to ward our hearts against developing a Strange New Respect for Elon Musk. We didn’t know how soon our resolve would be tested. Elon spent yesterday making some excellent points.²

In a must-read emergency Triad last night, JVL laid out the stakes for what happens if the fight between the two men continues at a boil and what happens if it goes back to a simmer. These people, who have enormous opportunities to wound one another, have correspondingly massive incentives to go back to playing nice—but then, they had massive incentives never to pick the fight in the first place.

Whether they make peace or not, it would be malpractice for Democrats not to make this whole sordid episode a bedrock part of their critique of the Trump administration.

Since Trump retook office, the unholy MAGA/tech alliance personified in the persons of Musk and Trump has been fundamentally unlike ordinary political corruption or access-trading. Trump didn’t just give Musk ample opportunities to make himself richer; he gave him unprecedented authority to remake the U.S. government in his own image. It wasn’t just DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX was positioning itself to helm the effort to update the Federal Aviation Association’s creaky communications systems. Trump’s trade-war negotiators were hard at work strong-arming smaller nations into giving contracts to SpaceX’s Starlink service.

How confident was Musk that his businesses enjoyed a favored position in White House policy? Last month, he tried to bully the United Arab Emirates into shoehorning his AI startup into an Abu Dhabi data-center deal they had struck with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, claiming Trump would never approve the deal if Musk wasn’t included. (The White House did approve the deal, however, in what now appears to be a critical and underappreciated moment in the disintegration of the relationship between the two men.)

All along, the line from Trump world was that Elon was simply the best man for every job. “Elon loves the country,” the president said back in March. “He’s never asked me for a favor, not one time.” This convenient fiction lasted about five minutes into the men’s public feud. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump posted on Truth Social. If those contracts were so good for the country yesterday, you’d think they’d be good for the country today, whatever Musk’s stance on the Big Beautiful Bill.

To this Musk responded: You can’t fire me if I quit. “In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts,” he posted, “SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.”³ A few hours later, he backed off this specific threat. But the disquieting reality continues to hang in the air: Major parts of our government rely on a return to goodwill between two of the most arrogant and emotionally unbalanced men alive. In what world is that not a massive national security risk?

This is how Trump wants to run everything, of course—from the broadest-swath international trade policy down to the nitty-gritty level of individual government contracts. His lodestar is rewarding friends and punishing foes. It’s not even clear that, in his megalomania, he sees this as a different thing from rewarding good work and punishing bad work. Of course it was previously good for the country for the computer and business genius Elon Musk to run everything—it’s obvious what a good, patriotic guy he is from how much he loves Trump. Of course it’s good for the country now to pull the plug on everything Musk touches—tragically, you can tell he’s gone crazy by the fact he criticizes Trump.

Democrats need not embrace Elon Musk to hammer these points home. Two of the world’s most powerful men are having a dirt-kicking hissy fit. It’d be a better world if they couldn’t drag the rest of us into it too.

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Trump Triumphant

by William Kristol

Some dramas end in postmodern ambiguity. But not, I think, the drama of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The outcome of this confrontation will be straightforward. In fact it is already clear: Trump wins. Musk loses.

The action began a week ago when Donald Trump fired Elon Musk. Yes, fired. Musk had served his purpose. His money had helped Trump get elected. His shock troops had helped in the takeover of the executive branch in the first months of the administration. But Musk’s prominence had gone to his head. His shock troops had gotten too big for their britches. He’d outlived his usefulness as a separate force, though some of his people willing to pledge loyalty to Trump could be merged into Trump’s political app