That escalated quickly

Just to show that everybody who contributed to the lawyersgunsandmoneyblog.com fundraiser was justified in supporting a prime mover in American politics, “defund Elon” is already getting traction!

Their sparring swiftly degenerated into threats on social media, as Mr. Trump questioned whether the government should cut its billions of dollars in contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies, and Mr. Musk claimed that there were references to Mr. Trump in government documents about the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while also seemingly approving of calls for Mr. Trump to be impeached.

[…]

Elon Musk’s friends and associates on Thursday are in a state of disbelief. Several said they, like the rest of Washington, are glued to their computers as they watched their friend joust with President Trump, unsure what exactly his plan is.

Few of Musk’s associates expected this to last forever, but they are sad that it had come to this.

[…]

Elon Musk posted on X, “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.” Musk’s disapproval of the sweeping tariffs are not new — he has long been a critic of the policy, including while he was in the White House.

[…]

Among a barrage of social media posts attacking President Trump and threatening to decommission a spacecraft contracted to the federal government, Elon Musk agreed with another post saying that Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him.

Amazing how many different people have failed to learn this lesson.

…Good summary by JMM:

Musk has now at least shown that he’s serious about this, not just whining about the “Big, Beautiful Bill” which the White House and the Hill mainly didn’t care about. This is a truly sui generis situation in the sweep of American history, in large part because we’ve never had a U.S. President who is governing in the way Donald Trump is or willing to do the things he’s willing to do. We’ve also not really — though here history’s analogs are less certain — had a plutocrat with Musk’s scale of wealth and hold over multiple critical industries. There are even fun side questions: who gets custody of Katie Miller? (Google it.)

So with all that said, I don’t pretend to know where this will go. But there are a few things that are clear. The first is that Trump’s threat to cancel Musk’s contracts is no joke. The irony of Musk’s libertarian anti-government song and dance has always been that his fortune and his empire are profoundly dependent on the U.S. government. Now that matters more than just a tweak from Dems saying he couldn’t have done it without U.S. government spending. An additional wrinkle to that part of the story is that the U.S. government is actually not in any position to cut off SpaceX. The U.S. government is now deeply, deeply dependent on SpaceX as its go-to near earth orbit launch service. There’s no alternative in the short and probably medium term. That’s precisely why the situation with SpaceX has always been such a dangerous one. There’s no alternative. The options the U.S. government has are some kind of expropriation or nationalization. Where that goes I don’t know. But I’m on very strong ground when I say that the U.S. government does not have a current option for delivering things to orbit at the volume and regularity SpaceX provides.

My overall sense is that Trump just has more cards than Musk does, even with his vast wealth and the communications platform of Twitter (X). And a big part of that is Musk’s dependence on the U.S. government as a central customer, certainly for SpaceX. Tesla isn’t selling to the U.S. government mostly, but it’s heavily reliant on regulations giving preferment to electric vehicles. To the extent Musk has already destroyed his brand for its target market (affluent liberals) in the U.S., he’s also highly dependent on U.S. trade policy.

It’s not entirely clear to me that Musk has many cards to play, as I noted earlier. He’s stuck out on the rightward fringe of the U.S. political spectrum when the transgressive, racist-nationalist, give-all-the-money-to-the-billionaires lane is entirely occupied by Donald Trump. A TPM Reader mentioned to me earlier that he thought people were underestimating how badly that New York Times drug story had damaged Musk. And I think he was right. I think that’s a big part of why Musk has looked weak and hapless in recent days.