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For one thing, both view the state largely as something to capture for themselves—Musk to gain support for his Promethean schemes for the future of “humanity,” and Trump to engage in world-historical self-dealing and corruption. This was neatly captured by Trump’s threat to cancel Musk’s federal contracts. Musk’s visions for space travel and electric vehicles have benefited enormously from federal support over the years. His achievements might not exist without the U.S. state. Yet Musk’s DOGE—with its assault on science, universities, and research and development—would dramatically downsize the state’s role in enabling the future flourishing of countless Americans and in keeping total immiseration and death at bay for the poorest of the poor. As Michelle Goldberg notes, the DOGE boys showed zero curiosity about who is being helped by all that foreign aid, and how.

Musk does have some sort of vision of future human flourishing. But he often talks about keeping alive the human “consciousness,” an oddly cold concept that doesn’t really depend on making the whole world a better and fairer place for living, breathing human beings. It could be kept alive by a select few—some of them on a faraway planet like, say, Mars—once the civilizational dead weight were systematically abandoned, as cutting foreign aid seems like a first step toward doing.

Meanwhile, to Trump, everything involving the state is up for corrupt horse trading and for punishing and extorting enemies. So his immediate instinct was to threaten Musk’s contracts, which Trump can only understand as a form of self-dealing by Musk—one that Trump can take away in a grand dominance display.

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In the end, Musk would use deficit fears to gut the state more thoroughly than Trump would, while Trump seems more focused on dramatically reducing the tax burden of the wealthy and slashing the safety net to pay for it. They are at odds, but mainly because they merely fall at different places on the same spectrum of impulses. And those impulses all tilt toward the same place—toward making our society a less egalitarian, more unequal, meaner, crueler, and much more savage place.

For starters, I say Donald Trump is due our congratulations and respect. He finally found a white Afrikaner he’d like to throw out of the country.

The early conventional wisdom on the Trump-Elon Musk divorce is that it was simultaneously shocking and inevitable. I suppose it was both of those things—Musk’s fusillade of tweets Thursday was pretty shocking, especially the Jeffrey Epstein bomb; and it’s true that this was bound to happen one day—no friendship between a ketamine-torqued egomaniac and a sociopathic liar with the emotional architecture of a 5-year-old is destined to go the distance.

Taking a somewhat more historical perspective, this is the feud that Milton Friedman’s America deserves. We’ve now lived through decades in which vast fortunes were amassed and lionized—and, importantly, at least in Trump’s case, inherited and far too lightly taxed. Fred Trump gave Donald over $400 million, adjusting for inflation, when he died in 1999. Errol Musk was an emerald-mine magnate who once bragged that he had “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe,” though the extent to which he supported his son is a matter of heated debate (between them, mostly). Whatever the truth is there, the bottom line is that here we are, stuck with a crooked and stupid billionaire president and a crazed narcissist who could buy several countries fighting over which one has the purer, more Friedmansque-reactionary vision for what the United States should become.

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But any eulogy for this relationship must first and foremost be a eulogy for the United States of America. An amoral billionaire who by rights should have been impeached and barred from running for office for life became president again—legitimately this time, as far as we know—and put the world’s richest multibillionaire in charge of a sensitive task that he oversaw with the delicacy of a hyena stripping a wildebeest carcass clean. Their efforts have already resulted in deaths around the globe and will cause untold harm in this country over time.

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