The Last Kek?

Is this really the end for the Trump-Musk bromance?

Gone forever, it seems, are the days when the great Kekius Maximus, giant among men, would stride into the Oval Office brandishing his gold-plated chainsaw and lay waste to Jill Biden’s expensive curtains; or arrive, unbidden, at some benighted government agency and take a Tesla-branded flamethrower to the whole HR department, before turning it on the interns in the parking lot, crisping them all to cinders and thus saving American taxpayers a big fat wedge of their hard-earned moolah. The legends will tell…

Yes, Elon Musk is no longer in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency and, what’s more, his bromance with Trump is officially over.

Dead and buried.

I can’t say I’m surprised. It was an unlikely pairing, and not just because we’re talking about two men whose egos, ambitions and wallets are about as large as those things could possibly swell before they burst. No town, let alone a single white building, is big enough for two men like that.

It might just be irresistible, a law of nature. Two celestial bodies so huge, in such close orbit, will inevitably collide, and the results will be spectacular. Newton would agree, I think.

The interests of the American tech elite, whose focus is innovation and advancement at any cost—brain chips and self-cleaning sex robots and large language models—do not naturally align with those of a populist leader like Donald Trump.

Men like Elon Musk would rather be seasteading the oceans beyond the reach of land-bound government and building Doomsday bunkers on Te Waiponoumu to wait out the coming pole shift. Why would they want to bring manufacturing back to America, kick out tens of millions of illegals and give the American Dream the enormous hoof up the arse it so desperately needs? The dreams of these big men don’t really have a place for little men, and certainly not in first position, deciding who does what and what goes where.

The things it took to get Elon Musk onside with Trump—Elon having been an Obama, Hillary and Biden donor—were the trans-ing of his son by radical leftists; the clear and present danger to his entire industry, and maybe even his freedom, from a Harris-Walz-led gay-race-communist revolution; and, of course, Trump’s remarkable display of courage and leadership on that fateful day in Butler.

It was only after Trump stood back up, bloodied but totally unbowed, raised his fist in the air and said, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” that Musk knew he was the man. It was like a moment from a video game. And Elon Musk is a gamer. He respects those epic cinematic moments when you put down the controller and go, “WOW! HE DID WHAT TO THE CYBERDEMON WITH HIS POWER GAUNTLET!?”

Back in December, over the Christmas holidays, we had an intimation of the split-to-come when the whole H-1B thing happened. That unpleasant little spat saw Vivek Rathersmarmy banished to the outer darkness of Ohio, there to campaign for the governorship in perpetuity, and we also saw Elon forced to moderate his position on the South Asian patronage networks that Big Tech has relied on to get its coding done at rock-bottom prices. I should think the number of times Elon has been forced to change his opinion in public like that could be counted on the fingers of one severely mutilated hand.

It was clear, even before Trump took office, that Musk’s patience would wear thin with all the compromise and the politics.

Even so, the speed of the descent into divorce and acrimony really was quite shocking.

Musk had scarcely handed over the keys to the DOGEmobile and he was saying Trump was a pedo who went to Epstein’s island and agreeing with notorious Malaysian grifter Ian Miles Cheong that Trump should be impeached and a third party, called the Kek Party, should be created to give gamers real representation in government.

Just what the hell was going on?

It didn’t help that Trump was saying Elon didn’t do a thing to help him win the election and he’s crazy and probably on drugs, and maybe we should cancel all the SpaceX rockets and sell that ugly red Tesla round the back of the White House. Barron can’t even fit his left foot in it.

Then Steve Bannon injected some much-needed realism and restraint into proceedings by suggesting Elon Musk should be ground up into a diamond—how fitting, as he’s South African—and fired into the sun in a confiscated SpaceX Dragon rocket.

How on earth did we get here?

The proximal cause, it seems, is the debate over the Big Beautiful Bill and whether it really is a Big Beautiful Bill or a Big Ugly Bill full of familiar bad-smelling rotten pork. Wasn’t DOGE supposed to be cutting down on all that stuff, making government less wasteful and less corrupt and so on? That’s exactly what Elon Musk said on X, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

But there were other things too. Musk was rankling that his choice to lead NASA was rejected, with prejudice apparently, and there were ongoing personal beefs behind the scenes too, including with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent and Musk are reported to have come near to blows in the White House, only to be held back by their friends, like a pivotal dramatic scene from an eighties teen movie.

And then, of course, as I say, there’s just the fact that Musk’s agenda overlaps imperfectly at best with Trump’s, and Elon himself has a lot of stuff to do and is clearly running on maximum dosage just to keep up.

If this blowup was inevitable, I think it’s for the best it happened sooner rather than later. It will be much less of a gift to Trump’s opponents than if it came close to the midterms, and there’s plenty of time to patch things up and let bygones be bygones.

Perspective will quickly be restored. And we should have perspective on Musk’s contributions.