The strange futility of the Musk-Trump feud

The Trump-Musk spat is not the sign of a new split between oligarchs and populists, as some have claimed – but of the growing pains involved in reassembling this old coalition. 

Keeping capitalism going under mass suffrage is no small feat, and capitalists used to be much shrewder in how they went about it. Electorates wouldn’t reliably go for laissez-faire – except after a crisis – and so the only option for the capitalists was to hitch themselves to the wider lower-middle-class coalition for law and order, low taxes and national swagger.

Musk’s attacks on Trump yesterday, which included a pitch for a new party “that actually represents the 80 percent in the middle,” represent something drawing to a close rather than being born. This was the idea that enterprise no longer needed popular backing, and could now go it alone. At some point in the mid-2010s corporate America decided that it could get better terms by forcing the two major parties to bid for its loyalty. Part of this was naiveté, part of it was down to new cultural ideas that made the old sponsorship of the right feel icky. Part of it was globalization – always more slogan than reality – which wrongly persuaded corporate America that it’d always have exit options. Add to this some of the messianism and poptimism of Silicon Valley, and the result was a foolhardy go at independence.

From 2015 to 2024 there was even a hubbub about the DNC becoming the natural party of enterprise, because of its greater respect for “institutions” – whatever that means. 

By the end of the Biden administration all was going sideways. Despite donating more to the DNC in 2016 and 2020, corporate America entered the mid-20s razzle-dazzled with equity shakedowns; Wokery encamped in the boardrooms; the looming threat of price controls and a tax on unrealized capital gains. Silicon Valley was especially badly hit – its ecosystem relies on a constant churn of startups, and so it, perhaps uniquely in corporate America, did not benefit from the new Bidenist regulations that served to freeze out new entrants. American enterprise had forgotten what their more hardboiled 19th-century predecessors had learnt the hard way: that under universal suffrage capitalism is forever dancing on a knife edge, and that the votes of the lower-middle classes is the only thing that keeps it from being regulated out of existence. 

Burned once, twice shy. Traumatized by the events of 2021-24, corporate America now clings to Trump in trembling, giving him a latitude that any other class in society might sensibly withhold. There’s almost no price it’s unwilling to pay – in tariffs or in less access to foreign labor – to keep together the political coalition that delivered it from Bidenomics. The rolling over of entitlement spending in the Big, Beautiful Bill is only the latest example. 

The one person who doesn’t seem to have fully grasped the implicit bargain is Elon Musk – himself the symbol of corporate America’s defection. Like the President he is a rare bird. We would no more expect him to be able to coexist for long with Trump under the same roof than we would Howard Hughes. 

What this personal drama obscures is that the pact has already been made, and that no one individual can unmake it. For every Musk there are a hundred Bill Ackmans: those who are keenly aware just how close to the edge they came during the Biden years. Musk is restless and reluctant to be tied down in this way, but this same self-interest will force him to recant sooner rather than later – just as he recanted his outburst over H-1B visas last December. The greatest of modern American capitalists, Musk is learning – in fits and starts – that his existence will forever depend on a few thousand voters in Pennsylvania.