Alexander the Great, known for his military conquests, once expressed sadness at the thought of having no more worlds to conquer. In a similar vein, Elon Musk, the wealthiest individual of our era, faced disappointment recently as one of his ambitious projects suffered a significant setback.
During its ninth test flight, Musk’s SpaceX venture, the ‘Starship’, encountered issues upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Meant to facilitate human colonization of other planets, the 400ft spacecraft lost communication with the control center, spiraled out of control, and ultimately exploded. Musk, donning his ‘OCCUPY MARS’ T-shirt, sought to highlight the positive aspects of the crash, referring to it as a notable improvement and sharing videos of the craft ascending into the sky.
Despite Musk’s attempt to maintain optimism, the incident was a significant setback. Following the destruction of the Starship as it landed in the Indian Ocean, Musk opted to cancel a planned speech to commend his SpaceX team. His pledge to President Donald Trump to have American astronauts set foot on Mars by 2028 now appears increasingly unlikely given this recent turn of events.
Musk must have been hoping that his mission to Mars would have provided a much-needed escape because here, on this planet, things seem to be going from bad to worse for him.
On Wednesday Musk, 53, finally confirmed what everyone in Washington knew: his ‘scheduled time’ as head of the White House’s Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) is over. He thanked Trump for giving him ‘the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending’.
Publicly, at least, Trump and Musk have sought to remain on the best of terms. On Friday the President held a special farewell press conference to mark Elon’s departure. ‘This will be his last day but not really because he will, always, be helping all the way,’ he said. ‘Elon is terrific!’
Elon Musk holds a chainsaw reading ‘long live freedom, damn it!’ at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February
Trump then gave Musk a special golden key to the White House and reiterated that ‘he’s not really leaving’. Musk, who curiously had a black eye (the result, he said, of playfighting with X, his four-year-old son), thanked and praised Trump in return.
But warm words can’t cover up the fact that relations have soured between Musk and Team Trump, if not the big Donald himself.
Yet in a major TV interview to be shown this weekend, Musk has risked a major rupture with the Commander-in-Chief by criticising Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Tax bill’, which is working its way through Congress. ‘I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it,’ Musk said. ‘I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both.’
That has not gone down well in Trumpworld. ‘That bill is Trump’s pride and joy,’ says a source close to the administration. ‘And he really will not have appreciated cold water being poured on it.’
The official line is still that Musk has only ever been a temporary ‘special government employee’ and his formal role was always going to end after three months. Talk to insiders, however, and the picture becomes clear: DOGE has backfired and Team Trump is increasingly hostile to Musk.
Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump is believed to have soured since the billionaire joined the president’s administration. Pictured, Trump appears to be pointing at Musk in the White House in March
‘As far as I’m concerned he’s just another ungrateful immigrant,’ one source says of the South African-born tycoon. A more sympathetic source adds: ‘It’s the first time he’s come up against the DC blob and I’m not sure he had any idea how to deal with it.’
Musk seems bruised by his experience. Looking morose, he told a conference in Qatar two weeks ago that he would be cutting back his campaign spending. ‘If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it,’ he said. ‘I do not currently see a reason.’
Last Monday, a Musk fan on X expressed his disgust at the Republican party for not supporting Musk’s work at DOGE. ‘Did my best,’ replied dejected Musk.
His political career seems to have imitated the flightpath of the last Starship. After a spectacular start, he soon found himself burning up in the poisonous atmospheres of Washington, DC. Or, as one insider puts it: ‘Elon came to Washington to drain the swamp. But the swamp has drained him.’
Worst of all, Musk’s adventure with Trump appears to have greatly harmed his business empire. His biggest company, the electric car maker Tesla, is facing a host of problems.
Last week, ahead of the multi-national’s big ‘robotaxi’ launch, Musk’s brother Kimbal, along with one of his senior associates, sold almost $200 million in Tesla stocks – a big red flag for investors.
How things have changed. In January, as he celebrated Trump’s second inauguration in Washington, Musk looked unstoppable. He was the President’s ‘First buddy’, the biggest billionaire in the Trump jungle. He was the man who had bet some $300 million in donations, his reputation and arguably his whole career on defeating the Democratic party in the 2024 election – and he’d won.
Musk dances around the stage as Trump speaks at a campaign rally last year
With the President’s full blessing, Musk and his merry band of DOGEsters – a group of mostly twentysomething data geeks – happily set about exposing and removing government waste and fraud
His decision in October 2022 to spend $44 billion buying the social media platform Twitter, which he turned into X, was widely hailed as a decisive moment in American political history. He’d turned a powerfully censorious anti-Trump platform into the most potent pro-free speech website on the planet.
From the November 2024 presidential election until the turn of the year, he’d been a near constant presence at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s ‘Winter White House’ in Florida. He was heavily involved in Trump’s decision-making and cabinet selections. Insiders called him ‘the de facto President’.
‘The real President doesn’t take too kindly to that kind of talk,’ says one DC insider.
At the time, however, Trump seemed too smitten with Musk to care about all the chatter over two planet-sized egos clashing.
In his speeches, Trump never missed a chance to call Musk a ‘genius’. On his first day back in office, the President duly issued the executive order to create DOGE, giving Musk the awesome responsibility of tackling America’s $36 trillion national debt.
A few weeks later, Musk appeared on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, wearing a gothic-style MAGA cap and wielding a chainsaw, a symbol of his mission to slay the federal leviathan.
If you spend any time among some of the Elon people, it feels more like a cult than a proper business. You have to be a bit mad to work for someone like Elon. What’s happening in the Musk empire is that people are learning that the emperor has no clothes
With the President’s full blessing, Musk and his merry band of DOGEsters – a group of mostly twentysomething data geeks – happily set about exposing and removing government waste and fraud. They briefly shut down the US Agency for International Development, which oversees the government’s aid efforts.
Even more controversially, they froze Medicaid health insurance payments and laid off thousands of federal employees. As a newfangled executive department, though, DOGE never really had any true constitutional authority. Without majority support in Congress, almost all its actions can be legally reversed.
‘They found the waste,’ says a Washington source. ‘Dealing with it is a whole separate issue. The DOGE guys signalled to the public that they had the power to do stuff they never had the power to do.’
‘They were high on their supply,’ says another insider with links to the intelligence community. ‘We owe Trump a debt because by bringing in Elon and his DOGE people front and centre in the way that he did, he exposed them for the bunch of charlatans they are.
‘If you spend any time among some of the Elon people, it feels more like a cult than a proper business. You have to be a bit mad to work for someone like Elon. What’s happening in the Musk empire is that people are learning that the emperor has no clothes.’
Trump may have been enamoured with Musk’s move-fast-and-break-things approach, but members of his cabinet quickly became fed up with Musk’s haughty attitude to their affairs.
He insulted Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, by accusing him, in front of Trump, of not cutting back on his staff and clashed with Transport Secretary Sean Duffy for not firing enough air traffic controllers.
But the real splits with Trump’s inner circle began to show after April 2, ‘Liberation Day’, when Trump sent the global economy reeling as he imposed sweeping tariffs on most of the world. Musk, a free-marketeer by instinct, disapproved of Trump’s agenda, not least because it threatened to further harm his Tesla business which was suffering from an at times violent sabotage campaign.
On X, Musk posted a video of Milton Friedman, the famous economist, explaining how the marvels of international trade come together to produce a pencil.
He also called Peter Navarro, the architect of Trump’s trade policy, ‘a moron’. A few days later, he accused Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, a moderate in the internal White House debate over tariffs, of being an ‘agent’ for George Soros, the Left-Liberal billionaire and global bogeyman of the Trumpist Right. Musk’s relations with the White House have never been the same since.
Some voices in Washington suggest Musk, under so much strain on so many fronts, may have suffered some kind of breakdown.
A person close to the Trump administration who interacted with Elon over 2024 and this year says ‘his cognition seemed to decay’ and suggests there is ‘little distinction’ between how he ‘presents in real life and his life on X’.
His ownership of X has turned out to be just one more massive business headache.
He still has the power to change the global conversation just by tapping on his phone. But latest reports suggest ‘user engagement’ on X is flatlining and subscription revenues are nowhere near as high as shareholders wanted.
Musk would hardly be the first person driven mad by social media. But he’s a highly intelligent and hyperactive man with a terrifying number of responsibilities and a very complicated love life.
He’s had 14 children with four women. He has struggled with depression and told CNN last year that he uses the powerful drug ketamine to stabilise his mood.
A report in The New York Times on Friday suggests he has been taking a daily cocktail of drugs, including the prescribed stimulant Adderall, plus mind-altering substances such as ecstasy and magic mushrooms. In the Oval Office on Friday, Musk sarcastically criticised The New York Times, saying that it had a history of printing ‘lies’, but he hasn’t yet rebutted its new allegations.
‘He’s becoming a lot more nasty,’ says an insider. ‘He’s yelling more at people. He used to be a much more charming figure.’
Musk is also reportedly furious at Trump’s courting of his friend-turned-nemesis in the tech world, Sam Altman. Musk helped co-found OpenAI, the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, with Altman in 2015 but the two fell out spectacularly. Musk accuses Altman of ‘perfidy and deceit… of Shakespearean proportions’ and is suing him.
Musk, earing a ‘Gulf of America’ hat, listens as Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting in April
According to the Wall Street Journal last week, Musk attempted to derail a deal, brokered by the US government, for Altman’s OpenAI to build one of the world’s largest data centres in Abu Dhabi.
Musk lobbied for his company, xAI, to be part of the plan, to no avail. Altman and Musk travelled with Trump to the Middle East last month, but it was Altman who appears to have secured the biggest Arab AI contract.
It is thought Trump tried to give Musk some solace during a press conference in the Oval Office last month by publicly berating South African President Cyril Ramaphosa about persecution of white farmers in Musk’s homeland.
Here too, however, behind the political theatrics, lies another tangled geopolitical business web.
Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink has been denied a licence to operate in South Africa, partly due to race-based ownership laws and also because the African National Congress, the ruling party, would rather let China control its digital infrastructure.
It’s far too soon to write off Elon Musk and his many billion-dollar interests. Throughout his career, he’s triumphed over adversity. Time and again, his companies have proved too innovative to be written off. ‘The real story is not one of Musk’s empire collapsing,’ says a less hostile Trumpworld source. ‘It’s one of strategic retreat.’
But these are dark days for the prince of MAGA.
