It’s official: United States President Donald Trump and the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, have broken up.
At the end of last month, Musk departed from his post as the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he oversaw the mass firing of federal employees and dismantling of various government agencies – all the while benefitting from his own companies’ lucrative contracts with the government.
Anyway, US “democracy” has never met a conflict of interest it didn’t like.
Musk’s service at the White House initially appeared to end on an amicable note as Trump praised him for the “colossal change” he had achieved “in the old ways of doing business in Washington”. The former head of DOGE in turn thanked the president for the opportunity.
But soon after his departure, Musk publicly criticised the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, a tax and spending bill that Trump is currently obsessed with passing, slamming it as a “disgusting abomination”.
There ensued predictably dramatic social media exchanges between the two right-wing billionaires with Trump pronouncing Musk “so depressed and so heartbroken” after leaving the White House and offering the additional coherent analysis:
“ It’s sort of Trump derangement syndrome. We have it with others, too. They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour’s gone. The whole world is different, and they become hostile.”
Musk has repeatedly taken credit for Trump’s 2024 election victory on account of the gobs of money he donated to the president’s campaign and those of other Republican candidates. Now that the relationship is over, Trump has wasted no time in warning Musk that he’ll face “very serious consequences” if he chooses to fund Democratic campaigns in the future.
But some Democratic ears, at least, have perked up at the possibility of getting the planet’s richest person back on their side – which he abandoned in favour of Trump after having extended support to Democratic former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The political switcheroo was hardly extreme. At the end of the day, ideology matters little when you’re just in the business of buying power.
California Congressman Ro Khanna, for example, recently opined that Democrats should “be in a dialogue” with Musk in light of their shared opposition to Trump’s big beautiful bill.
As per Khanna’s view, “we should ultimately be trying to convince [Musk] that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with.” He went on to list a few of these alleged values: “A commitment to science funding, a commitment to clean technology, a commitment to seeing international students like him.”
Never mind that Musk’s main “value” is a commitment to controlling as much of the earth – not to mention the whole solar system – as he possibly can for the benefit of himself and himself alone. Beyond his mass firing activities while head of DOGE, a brief review of Musk’s entrepreneurial track record reveals a total lack of the “values” that Democrats purport to espouse.
Over recent years, reports have abounded of sexual harassment and acute racism at Musk’s Tesla car factories. In October 2021, a federal jury in San Francisco ordered Tesla to pay $137m to a Black former employee who claimed he was told to “go back to Africa” among other abuses suffered at his workplace.
Along with violating federal labour laws, Musk as chief executive of Tesla threatened workers over the prospect of unionisation. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, he violated local regulations to keep his factories up and running, underscoring a general contempt for human life that, again, should not be a “value” that anyone aspires to.
To be sure, not all Democrats are on board with the proposal to woo Musk back into the Democratic camp – but he may be getting a growing cheering squad. In addition to Khanna’s advocacy on his behalf, New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres seems prepared to give Musk his vote as well: “I’m a believer in redemption, and he is telling the truth about the [big beautiful] legislation.”
Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former White House director of communications, has, meanwhile, suggested that Democrats could “bring Elon Musk back into the fold as a prodigal son” by foregoing more left-wing policies – as if there’s anything truly left-wing about the Democratic Party in the first place.
Newsweek’s write-up of Scaramucci’s comments observed that “It would be a coup for Democrats if they could court the influence of the world’s richest man once more.” It would not, obviously, be a coup for democracy, which is supposed to be rule by the people and not by money.
And yet a longstanding bipartisan commitment to plutocracy means the US has never been in danger of true democracy. Instead, billions upon billions of dollars are spent to sustain an electoral charade and ensure that capital remains concentrated in the hands of the few – while Americans continue to literally die of poverty.
Now it remains to be seen whether the Trump-Musk breakup will drive Democrats into Musk’s arms. But either way, the country’s plutocratic values remain rock solid – and that is nothing less than a “disgusting abomination”.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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