Naughty List
While Elon Musk and president-elect Donald Trump have appeared to become closer than ever since the tail end of the election, the famously mercurial Trump may now be growing weary of Musk’s clinginess.
“Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him,” Trump teased at a Capitol Hill meeting on Wednesday, as reported by The Hill. “Until I don’t like him.”
Though Trump framed his remark as a joke — a common rhetorical trick in his repertoire — it had an unmistakable undercurrent of truth. Both Musk and Trump have a long history of tempestuous professional relationships; neither likes being inconvenienced with criticism.
Earlier this year, Musk fired Tesla’s head of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci and her entire team after one disagreement. In 2023, he culled X-formerly-Twitter’s staff after some workers disparaged him on Slack. Trump, meanwhile, publicly burned through an astonishing number of government officials and White House staff — including his former right-hand man Steve Bannon in 2017, who held an influential position not unlike Musk during the 2016 race.
Given that Trump’s catchphrase is the nasally declaration that “you’re fired,” it seems likely that it’s only a matter of time before his volatile bromance with Musk blows up.
Trump Card
On Wednesday night, Musk ominously posted on X-formerly-Twitter that “the Hammer of Justice is coming,” and he’s been repeatedly declaring his goals for the incoming Trump administration.
“The obstacles are overcoming the Kafkaesque nature of the rules governing this vast bureaucracy and ensuring that maniacally dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration!” Musk posted on November 10. 
But president of the conservative think tank American Action Forum Douglas Holtz-Eakin told The Hill that Trump has given Musk a lot less power than he thinks he has.
Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency, which aims to axe government spending, won’t “have any authority to do anything other than say, ‘We think this will be good,'” Holtz-Eakin said. “Evidently, Mr. Musk has a lot of free time, and if he wants to waste it, that’s fine.”
