WASHINGTON – If you think the thermonuclear blowout between President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk was bad, wait until the asset-splitting part of the divorce gets underway.
The battle royale between the world’s most powerful man and its richest inhabitant appears to be mostly over, save for some residual skirmishing on the social media platforms separately owned by Trump and Musk.
Neither man can convincingly declare himself a winner in the dissolution of a partnership so mutually beneficial that it helped propel one to the White House and the other to even more ungodly amounts of wealth in the form of government contracts and regulatory relief.
The fight began over Musk’s public criticism of Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill and the projected $2.5 trillion increase it would cause to the federal deficit. But it devolved into a mudslinging spectacle that included Musk publicly accusing Trump of blocking the release of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking files held by the Justice Department because he’s implicated in them.
But who will lose most when the proverbial dust from the dustup finally settles?
“I don’t think anybody knows,” said veteran Republican political strategist Doug Heye.
“Clearly, what we’ve seen just in the past few months is that if Trump views you as an enemy, he’s going to try and use levers of government against you,” said Heye, a senior official since 1990 who served in the George W. Bush White House, the House and Senate and on the Republican National Committee. “And it may be that some of his supporters, or a lot of his supporters, want that. We’ll have to see.”
What does Musk stand to lose?
The White House said June 6 that Trump was considering selling the Tesla Model S he purportedly purchased from the CEO of the electric car company when its stock was tanking as a result of Americans opposed to Musk’s tactics as head of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency.
More: ‘Elon is going to get decimated:’ How Trump’s feud with the world’s richest man might end
Within hours of the Trump-Musk fight going public on June 5, Tesla shares dropped 15%, wiping over $100 billion from the company’s $1 trillion market value.
More broadly, Musk’s various companies have benefited from at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past two decades, often at critical moments. Most have come from contracts between his SpaceX satellite firm and the Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
And while Musk’s myriad businesses are deeply intertwined with the U.S. government in the form of multi-year contracts, his feud with Trump jeopardizes those, too. Also at risk: Musk’s burgeoning projects like self-driving cars and trucks, protections from tariffs and other proposed alliances with the government.
Musk has also used his Trump connections to sell his Starlink satellite communications services to various U.S. agencies and foreign governments, as well as his The Boring Company tunneling firm, his xAI artificial intelligence firm and other products.
More: President Trump threatens Elon Musk’s billions in government contracts as alliance craters
Without Trump’s support, those current and proposed government contracts could dwindle or disappear, though the latter likely would result in protracted litigation.
Trump could also, conceivably, sign an executive order to seize SpaceX under the Defense Production Act and even deport Musk for immigration violations, two nuclear options proposed Thursday by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.
What does Trump stand to lose?
While Trump controls the levers of government, Musk has at least one ace in the hole – his control over X, which he claims not only handed Trump his November election victory but also Republican control of the House and possibly Senate.
Musk is already using X – and his 220.8 million followers on it – to try to turn public opinion against Trump after trashing Trump’s deficit-hiking budget bill.
Musk said this week he would pull SpaceX’s support of its Dragon spaceship that ferries astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. He’s predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession this year.
The tech billionaire has also conducted one of his rhetorically slanted polls on X to see how many people want a third political party “that actually represents the 80% in the middle” between the Republican and Democratic parties. Its results, pinned to the top of Musk’s X profile, were predictably in favor of it, 80.4% to 19.6%.
Those kinds of broadsides could be a particularly powerful cudgel against Trump just five months into his second term.
Musk could also wield a political tactic he’s used to help Trump in the past, but this time, financing opponents of his political candidates in the upcoming mid-term elections.
A win-win for both Trump and Musk?
Heye said that despite all the incendiary rhetoric, there’s still room for reconciliation or even a public recoupling.
Heye, the veteran GOP official, cited the case of Reince Priebus, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, who found out Trump fired him on a rainy airport Tarmac in 2017 after traveling with the President on Air Force One. Priebus was forced to find his own way home, Heye said, but soon found himself back in Trump’s good graces.
“A relationship with Donald Trump going south is not something new in this political world,” Heye said. “But Donald Trump always allows people to come back if they say the right things.”
Already, Musk has appeared to back down from his threat of taking his Dragon spacecraft out of operation, after an X poster told him, “This is a shame this back and forth. You are both better than this. Cool off and take a step back for a couple days.”
In response, Musk replied late Thursday, “Good advice. Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The post-fight fallout from Trump-Musk tiff could get even uglier
