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Okay, Elon Musk got a full day and night of victory laps for his role in helping to get Donald Trump elected once again. Now it's time to come back down to Earth, before we go to Mars.
There's no question that on paper, Musk's maneuver was a masterstroke in positioning both himself and all of his companies extremely well going forward. But as much as Trump might like it, the world doesn't exist on paper. It's a very fluid, very messy bowl of interpersonal agendas. Nowhere is this more true than in the orbit of Trump which is more transactional and perhaps as a result, far more chaotic than with your normal person – let alone an American President. How do I know this to be true? Well, just look at Trump's first administration...
An interesting if imperfect proxy there is Musk's PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. He bet on Trump when it was actually a contrarian bet that cycle – not the faux-contrarian nonsense this go around, when Trump was actually the front-runner for much of this cycle, despite the hopes and dreams of the mainstream media and various celebrities (and, to be transparent and honest, myself). Thiel came into that first Trump administration riding high, helping with the transition team and putting some key early figures in place. He set up meetings to bridge what at the time was a wide gap between Trump world and the tech community and advised on some policy matters. But then something funny happened.
Actually, it wasn't funny. It was reality. It was just your usual dose of bureaucracy and incompetence mixed with good old Trump being Trump. Thiel himself has spoken openly about all of this in the intervening years, perhaps most notably in an Atlantic profile published a year ago:
“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.
He admits now that it was a bad bet.
“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”
There's certainly an argument to be made that now is the time for that reckoning Thiel was hoping for.1 Trump is naturally likely to be more "effective" in his second go-around. And also potentially harsher with the changes he aims to make, in part because of what Thiel is talking about. Trump got checked and balanced on a number of fronts four years ago as some men – and they were almost all men – as it turns out, don't want to watch the world burn. This time, the training wheels are likely coming off. And perhaps the brakes too.
And yes, Musk may be a big proponent of such management of the government. Trump saw what he did in taking over Twitter and cutting it down to the bone and wants him to do the same with the government. I mean, has there ever been a more "hold on to your butts" moment? In history?
And Thiel is undoubtedly a fan of all of this and especially in knowing that Musk will be effective whereas career politicians were always going to politic.
But Trump is still Trump.
I don't think I've read the word "mercurial" more than I have the past couple of days in these stories covering Trump's latest win and talking about his last administration. But it's really just a nicer way of pointing to his complete and utter narcissism. Musk's only real hope here is that he's richer than Trump, and it's one of the few qualities in people that Trump respects: being wealthier than he is. Also being smarter – a quality Trump keeps pointing out in recent days – but that's a relatively low bar. Thiel is probably smarter than both,2 it didn't help much, in the end. And ultimately, Musk and Trump are just too similar in their desire to be the "main character" in the movie. There's just no way this ends well.
And for all Musk's money and smarts, Trump unquestionably now has more power. The election has shifted that dynamic. And Trump will leverage it. That's what Trump does. Then the question shifts to if Musk, knowing the game of 3D Zany Chess to be played, recognizes that it's in his own best interest, quite literally, to figure out how to play under Trump's new rules. But life is short and Trump's time in office will be as well thanks to term-limits.3 Four years will pass fast, especially when you're working to get to the Moon and then Mars.
Hell, will the Cybercab even be available before Trump's second term is up? Given everything we know with regard to Musk and timetables, it's a valid question! And so he's going to have to start thinking about that next administration at some point, if nothing else, and positioning himself accordingly.
It's all really just a question of timing. How much can Musk actually get done before he and Trump inevitably butt heads and are at war?4
1 Here's where I'll admit that I shared some of those desires in a post I wrote nearly a decade ago entitled 'Why I’m Secretly Rooting For A President Trump' – I know, I KNOW – but also, I got quite a bit right (and quite a bit wrong) in that post. And here we are, again.
2 I don't know either of them, but it strikes me that while both are obviously beyond smart, Thiel is more cunning whereas Musk is more blunt-force.
3 Yes, yes, Trump will talk about abolishing term limits. It's just hard to see how that goes anywhere -- especially given his age. He'll be 82 at the end of this term, the age Joe Biden is about to turn. But there might be a lot of chatter that he should be allowed to serve two terms this go-around (which is not technically allowed, even if it's non-consecutive terms -- I see you, Grover Cleveland) because four years really is pretty short for a presidency, relatively speaking.
4 Ideally not literally. But it cannot be ruled out.