At Waterloo, Napoleon rode to his defeat wearing the fetching forest green uniform of a light cavalry colonel and his signature bicorne chapeau. In Wisconsin, Elon Musk rocked up in a novelty cheesehead hat.
Dramatic? Okay, maybe a tad. The tech mogul’s disorderly rout in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election this April, after splashing nearly $20 million on the race, was not Musk’s final defeat. Even now, amid the glowing ruins of his thermonuclear exchange of views with his erstwhile bestie Donald Trump, it would be unwise to count him out.
Nevertheless, the Wisconsin debacle marked a turning point in Musk’s relationship with his presidential patron. And it’s crucial to understanding just how their alliance unraveled so quickly and so explosively.
Cast your mind back to the unfathomably distant past of March 19, 2020. While the world plunged headlong into disaster, Musk — having previously tweeted that “the coronavirus panic is dumb”, while falsely claiming that “kids are essentially immune” — predicted that there would be “close to zero new cases in the U.S. by the end of April”.
Today we know that COVID-19 ended up killing an estimated 1.2m people in the U.S. and 7.1m people across the world (maybe far more). Around the same time, Musk reportedly made a private $1m bet with the philosopher Sam Harris that U.S. COVID-19 cases would never top 35,000.
According to Harris, Musk never paid out, and the disagreement ended their friendship. “It was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses,” Harris later wrote.
In this we see the seeds of Musk’s next five years. His attitude to COVID-19 exemplified his willingness to tweet from the hip and spread misinformation even with millions of lives at stake. His increasingly strident opposition to lockdowns and vaccine mandates, calling the former “fascist”, presaged his embrace of movement conservatism and his descent into COVID conspiracism and antivaxism. And his alleged ghosting of Harris suggested a thin-skinned reluctance to ever admitting that he’s wrong.
Even so, in those days Musk was popular and admired across the political spectrum. He was the genius rocket-builder who put a sports car in orbit and made electric vehicles mainstream. He’d served as inspiration for the Marvel movies’ take on Tony Stark, and graced the cover of TIME as its 2021 Person of the Year.
Some tech journalists and electric vehicle experts had a less flattering view. They’d witnessed Musk’s willingness to attack his critics and pursue petty grievances; to bend the truth, pick pointless fights, and (allegedly) break the law. But these incidents don’t seem to have penetrated into wider public view.
That remained the basic picture even as Musk’s politics changed drastically. Piqued by his daughter Vivian Wilson’s coming out as transgender, and seemingly aided by the brain-pickling effect of his favourite social network, he shifted rightward — from self-proclaimed “socialist” and centrist to redpilled crusader — and ultimately underwent a full-fat far-right radicalization.
As recently as December 2022, Musk’s net approval rating among American voters was narrowly positive, with many simply not knowing enough about him to have an opinion. By mid-2024, when Musk’s political shift finally brought him into alliance with Trump, his popularity was dropping slowly. Still, it stayed close to neutral through the election in November and for weeks afterwards as citizens waited to see what Trump 2.0 would bring.
All of which is to say that Musk might be right when he claims that he won Trump the election. While it’s impossible to know what happened in the alternate universe (or, perhaps, the parallel simulation) where the tycoon did not intervene, there’s every reason to think he made a big difference.
Obviously his money helped; with a total contribution of $291m, he was both the biggest individual donor of the 2024 election cycle and the biggest of any election since at least 2010. Yet money isn’t everything.
Musk’s endorsement gave permission to other tech barons to swallow their doubts or fears about Trump. Technocratic businessfolk who fancied themselves as hard-headed intellectuals, focused on excellence and competence above ordinary partisan politics — not a natural fit with Trump’s governing style, to put it generously — now had one of their own tribe to help them imagine that Trump would build, build, build rather than burn, burn, burn.
It’s also possible that Musk had a hand in Trump’s significant gains among young men, among whom he was especially popular. His reputation as a forward-thinking intellectual and an entrepreneurial mastermind — backed up by being the literal richest person on Earth — seemed to mitigate the fear that Trump really might be an atavistic troglodyte who’s bad for business as well as merely bad at it.
The strongest alliances, of course, are founded on mutual advantage. And at first it did seem like Trump had plenty to offer Musk in return: favorable regulatory treatment for his businesses, billions of dollars in government contracts, and even an influential position in government — along with, allegedly, access to millions of Americans’ sensitive data.
We don’t yet know exactly why their relationship soured so quickly. Although both men have offered their own explanations, they are also historically unreliable narrators. Still, early reporting suggests that Musk was progressively disgruntled by a series of decisions made by Trump that were not in his favor. Chief among them: refusing to install his pal Jared Isaacman as head of NASA, which regularly awards lucrative contracts to Musk’s company SpaceX.
According to The New York Times, Trump objected to Isaacson’s past donations to Democrats. However, it’s hard to imagine that disqualifying him if Trump was really, truly committed. So why might Trump have been having second thoughts about his obligations to Musk?
That brings us back to Wisconsin. Beginning in January, Musk’s polling began to plummet, and by the eve of the judicial election it had hit -14 percent. It turns out that while voters broadly supported the idea of DOGE, many disagreed that indiscriminately bulldozing research and aid programs practically overnight — possibly causing hundreds of thousands of extra deaths around the world — is the best way to do it.
Musk and Trump had worked so well together because they share many traits. Both have a deep-seated instinct to pick fights, and an uncanny knack for exploiting such conflicts to grow their personal brand. Both have an affinity for “big, beautiful” projects with implausibly ambitious goals. Both peddle falsehoods fluently and incessantly. Now those same qualities were coming back to bite them.
Worse, accepting the DOGE job — let alone treating it as a license to abolish government agencies by fiat rather than a mere advisory role — was always inherently dangerous. Throughout human history, leaders have protected themselves from the consequences of their actions by scapegoating then sacrificing their subordinates. Opponents too may feel safer criticising the grand vizier than the sultan. Strangely, the smartest and wisest man on the planet seems not to have anticipated this risk.
So whereas in 2024 Musk’s strengths helped mitigate Trump’s weaknesses, in 2025 Trump may have come to feel that Musk was dragging him down. If so, that feeling seems to have been mutual. “DOGE has just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” Musk told The Washington Post last week. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”
That’s without even mentioning the impact on Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle maker. Rather than delivering new riches, working with Trump has earned him the hatred of car customers across the world, prompting mass protests and a steep drop in sales. You can imagine him feeling like he’d got the raw end of the deal.
Musk, a business veteran but a political neophyte, has repeatedly claimed that his views and policies are overwhelmingly popular, often suggesting that appearance to the contrary is actually a mirage confected by the woke-industrial complex. Assuming he really believes this, Wisconsin must have been an awful shock.
Just as hardship or tragedy can expose the cracks in a marriage, electoral failure widens the contradictions of an awkward political partnership. Suddenly all those little frustrations and ideological mismatches, which have always been there but were overlooked as long as the wins kept coming, become potential dealbreakers.
So if Musk or Trump didn’t have concerns before, that probably began to change at around 9:16pm local time on April 1, when the Associated Press called Wisconsin for the liberal-leaning Judge Susan Crawford.
Now here we are. One can’t help suspect that this partnership could still be intact if either man had properly factored into their calculations that Elon Musk might act like Elon Musk and Donald Trump might act like Donald Trump.
But perhaps that’s just proof that you and I lack the intellectual competence, the raw reasoning capability, to comprehend the complex five-dimensional chess moves that Musk has been executing all along. Masterful gambit, sir! What’s next?
