About 90 minutes into Joe Rogan’s interview on Thursday with Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, a producer interrupted the conversation with some news.
President Trump and Elon Musk “seem to be in a little bit of a spat,” the producer said, displaying on a screen a new inflammatory post from Mr. Musk, the billionaire and owner of X, whose relationship with the president had, until recently, been widely described as a “bromance.”
In the post, Mr. Musk suggested, without evidence, that Mr. Trump was withholding “the Epstein files” because the president had a personal connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case. By Saturday morning, Mr. Musk appeared to have deleted the post.
By this point in Mr. Patel’s interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the F.B.I. director had already spent about 20 minutes discussing Mr. Epstein, promising to release video surveillance from the disgraced financier’s jail cell. Mr. Epstein hanged himself there while awaiting trial.
Mr. Patel swiftly distanced himself from the skirmish: “I’m not participating in any of that conversation between Elon and Trump,” he said. “I know my lane and that ain’t it.”
Mr. Rogan seemed to chose a side quickly. He called Mr. Musk’s post “crazy” and suggested the billionaire’s phone be taken away.
Several other MAGA-friendly podcasters took a similar stance, expressing gratitude to Mr. Musk for his support so far of the Republican agenda, but urging him to fall in line.
Their continued embrace of Mr. Trump underscores just how central a role the president plays in the so-called manosphere, an unruly world of online content targeting male audiences.
The administration has also continued to treat these shows as a critical messaging tool — extending their relationship far beyond the election, when the Trump campaign famously used manosphere creators and channels to reach politically disengaged men.
On the same day as Mr. Patel’s interview, Vice President JD Vance sat across from the mullet-haired comedian Theo Von, host of the podcast “This Past Weekend,” ready to discuss the merits of what the president calls the “big, beautiful bill.” Mr. Von’s show is arguably the second-most popular in the manosphere, with nearly four million subscribers on YouTube. (Mr. Rogan, who has the largest audience by far of any podcast in the United States, has just shy of 20 million. Both men attended the president’s inauguration in January.)
The vice president’s interview was similarly derailed by Mr. Musk’s post. “The missile is in the cannon,” Mr. Von said during the episode, using two expletives, before reading the post aloud.
Mr. Vance had not seen the post until then, he said, but he defended Mr. Trump as not having done “anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein.” He admitted the president had grown frustrated in recent days with Mr. Musk’s criticism of the budget bill and said Mr. Musk was making a “huge mistake.”
“If he and the president are in some blood feud, most importantly, it’s going to be bad for the country,” he continued. “I don’t think it’s going to be good for Elon either.”
The vice president then briefly pivoted to the trial of Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul widely known as Diddy, and rumors surrounding the case he had heard regarding “baby oil but that had drugs in it.” The exchange was the kind of distracted tangent, laced with unverified information, characteristic of manosphere discourse.
Still, Mr. Vance was not overly critical of Mr. Musk, complimenting the world’s richest man as an “incredible entrepreneur” but an “emotional guy” who had “suffered a lot” by getting into politics. He said he hoped Mr. Musk would come back into the fold.
In an episode released on Friday, the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk said he believed Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump would reconcile at Mar-a-Lago, “over two scoops of ice cream and steak,” before Christmas, and posted a Bible verse on X about the virtues of “peacemakers.”
Clay Travis, founder of the sports media company OutKick and host of the “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” echoed similar sentiments on his show on Friday. “I hope that Trump and Elon, on some level, can make up,” Mr. Travis said. He called Mr. Musk “the greatest capitalist who has ever lived in the history of capitalism.”
On what was called an “emergency episode” by Patrick Bet-David, the host of the “PBD Podcast,” he urged Mr. Musk to “accept” that Mr. Trump is the “alpha amongst alphas.” Any disagreements should be voiced in private, he argued emphatically, in order to protect the “image of the alpha,” he said. “You have to save the respect of the alpha.”
Jessica Testa covers nontraditional and emerging media for The Times.
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