Trump is plainly fascinated by Musk.<\/strong> Unlike Trump, who made his fortune in sleazy real estate deals, Musk, for all his weirdness, is a genuine entrepreneur and inventor. He has all but taken over NASA with his SpaceX venture. His Starlink network of 4,000 satellites includes battlefield communication services to Ukraine, a function that Musk has also used to be a foreign-policy player. Musk launched the first successful new car company in a century, working with engineers to solve daunting technical challenges. Musk\u2019s takeover of Twitter, rebranded as X, which was on the verge of failing, has made him even richer and more influential.
Musk, who spent a reported $130 million to help get Trump elected, gains immensely from his partnership with Trump. In the two weeks after Trump\u2019s election victory, Tesla\u2019s stock price went from $251.50 to $320.72, making Musk richer by some $50 billion. Musk can count on Trump to kill consumer rebates for EVs that his competitors to Tesla rely on more than he does, cementing his dominance of the EV market. The Trump administration is in a position to use tariffs to limit competition from Chinese exports of e-vehicles, and to lock in and expand Musk\u2019s valuable contracts with the Pentagon and NASA.
But at some point, Trump has to realize that Musk will not be constrained, and that allowing him to be a loose cannon will backfire on Trump. Ultimately, Trump and Musk are two scorpions in a bottle. There is room for only one.
Yet, for once, Trump can\u2019t simply tell Musk as he has done with so many others, “You\u2019re fired!” If Musk should become Trump\u2019s enemy, Musk could do Trump substantial harm.
There is no historical case of an aspiring dictator giving this much power to a seeming ally who has independent sources of influence, and then realizing that he has a tiger by the tail. As outsiders, Democrats can only hope this fraught brotherhood of narcissists does maximum damage to Trump\u2014and work to limit the damage to the country.<\/td><\/tr>| ~ ROBERT KUTTNER<\/td><\/tr> | | Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter<\/a><\/strong><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Robert Kuttner December 20, 2024 (info@prospect.org) Kuttner on TAP An Odor of Musk Can the Trump-Musk bromance possibly end well? As I write, the latest from the smoking crater that is the House of Representatives is that they will hold votes on discrete pieces of a government funding package\u2014a vote… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38359"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38360,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38359\/revisions\/38360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} | |