Elon Musk and Donald Trump: The end of the Oval Office bromance

Elon Musk couldn’t help himself. Rather than leaving the Oval Office with the President’s undeserved praise still reverberating around the Internet, the world’s richest man-child decided to have a tantrum on his website.

First, though, he warmed up with attacks on the Trump economic agenda that he’d be strangely silent on while wreaking chaos across the federal bureaucracy, running an agency named after a joke that became a joke.

Uncharacteristically, the President did not directly respond to the attempt to defeat his “One Big Beautiful Bill”, a budget that epitomises Trumpian economics.

Unused to being ignored, something snapped. Like a teenager erupting in futile anger after being laughed at by his parents, Musk hurled an allegation calculated to trigger the worst in his former patron: his relationship with America’s modern Rasputin, the sex-trafficker of teenage girls, Jeffrey Epstein.

“Time to drop the really big bomb,” he posted on X Friday morning, Australian time. “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

‘Wearing thin’

The Epstein files are like the US Government’s documents on the Kennedy assassination or Area 51: a source of conspiracy theories that have become more important to pop culture than history.

Both New Yorkers on the make, Trump and Epstein were drawn to each other. It would be strange if the President’s name did not appear in the evidence against the late financier.

“Elon was ‘wearing thin,’” Donald Trump wrote on his social media site (doesn’t everyone have one?). “I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”

And so came the end of one of the greatest bromances in the history of right-wing politics. It was an affair of mutual displays of rhetorical affection that might have been embarrassing if they didn’t seem strangely genuine.

The president even gave Mr Musk’s Teslas a product endorsement after they became the target of DOGE-inspired vandalism by leftists - a true demonstration of devotion from the arch capitalist. It was as though Richard Branson had buddied up to King Charles III and convinced the monarch to take a discount Virgin Atlantic flight to the Canaries.

Gratitude

The ticket price for Musk to enter orbit in Trumpland was around $400 million. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” he wrote, complaining about the president’s “ingratitude”.

Instead of clearing out Washington, Musk got cleaned up. The politician he thought he bought decided to nix Musk’s pet candidate for director of NASA, the space agency that ignores Musk’s ketamine use while renting his rockets.

Not one to de-escalate a feud, Trump threatened to “terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Joe Biden may have been a doddering old man, but he didn’t run America on social media.

A few minutes after the presidential post, Musk decided to, as Australians used to say, pack up his bat and ball and go home.

“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” he wrote.

Troll-fest

The Dragon services the International Space Station, one of the few places where the US, Europe and Russia cooperate anymore. A SpaceX Dragon launch is scheduled for Tuesday to take four astronauts from the US, India, Poland and Hungary to the ISS.

Musk’s company has already been paid $30 billion by NASA and the Department of Defence for its rocket services. Even by his impetuous standards - Musk has been known to fire employees after a single, hesitant conversation - forcing cancellation of next week’s private flight would be an extreme act of retribution.

Musk ostensibly left politics because his businesses were suffering without his full-time genius attention. Maybe they would have been better if he had stayed. Tesla shares have fallen 20 per cent over the past five days, a $335 billion wealth destruction that must mark history’s most-expensive troll-fest.

Trump’s still President. Musk’s just another weird billionaire.