Newscasts - Musk-Trump feud

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12/06/2025 12:32

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Description: After leaving his role at the White House, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire started a deeply personal spat with the US president. In this week’s Viewsroom debate, Breakingviews columnists offer ringside color commentary on the burgeoning brawl.

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Video Transcript:

The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News.

It's kind of a false choice to think that there's any wiggle room between the United States and SpaceX in one way because the US Government's about a quarter to a third of all revenues at SpaceX. So, SpaceX is tremendously dependent on them and the US is tremendously dependent on SpaceX because about 90% of all launches are from SpaceX. So, both of them are caught together. The question is what happens and what are the dangers for both of them from being stuck in this relationship.

I could have said, drop to your knees and beg, and he would have done it. So, President Trump once said of Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk. The tycoon hasn't seemed in a begging mood of late. Once verbal sparring partners during Trump's first run in office, and for years following, the richest man in the world and the leader of the most powerful country in the world sealed the defining alliance of the 2024 US presidential election, with Musk backing Trump's campaign to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars. In return, he took control of a frequently controversial Department of Government Efficiency, ostensibly focused on an all-of-government cost-cutting effort. That tenure came to an end recently, right before a Musk-backed candidate for a key post-leading NASA was torpedoed. What followed was days of posts by the billionaire on his social media platform X heaping criticism on the big, beautiful bill at the center of Trump's legislative agenda. The President fired back, leading to a rapidly escalating war of words that got very, very personal. There’s been some potential signs of a detente recently, but no clear drawdown. What this means for some of the most important industrial champions in America who holds the whip hand in a contest between politicians and CEOs, and whether Musk can continue to strike a delicate balance between often hostile governments, is the focus of this week's Viewsroom. Welcome back to The Viewsroom, the weekly podcast that invites you, the listener, into a lively debate with Breakingviews columnists around the world. I'm your host Jonathan Guilford.

And I'm Peter Thal Larsen. Jonathan, I mean, the last couple of days, I have to say, it's the closest I've ever come, I think, as a business and financial journalist to feeling what it must be like to cover the Kardashians or something. You know, like one of those sort of social media stories where like, oh, so-and-so is unfollowed so-and-so. So-and so has subtly dissed this person on their Instagram feed, like reading the kind of like the back and forth in real time on social media.

And all these people are very online, right? Because it's not just Musk and Trump, it's all of the tech right-wing folks who are kind of like brought into this overall sort of mélange between the sort of like MAGA right and the tech consensus. And so, all of that is like for eagle-eyed watchers is there's a lot of sort of tea leaves to go through.

Yes, and then Steve Bannon gets involved and says Musk should be deported and then Bill Ackman writes some like 20,000-word tweets that are saying they should reconcile. I mean, it's kind of extraordinary, but I think it's sort of easy to forget- I mean it's obviously great like social media drama, but it's easy to get there that there are a couple of a handful of really, really big and important companies behind all of this Tesla, SpaceX, X - Musk's, that the former Twitter now merged with xAI. So, you know, it's become this AI company and various other things. And then there's also there's an international dimension. You know, there's obviously SpaceX is important for the US space effort, but also that Starlink network is used by governments around the world. Tesla has big operations in China. So, I think there's for our purposes, really, that there's a big question, which is what happens now to Elon Musk's empire and there was a feeling at the beginning, when the election happened, that his alliance with Trump was going to benefit him a lot. Now maybe we have to question whether this is bad for all his businesses.

Right, yes, and it is important to note that there have been some conciliatory gestures that intervention by Bill Ackman, it seemed like, maybe Musk was cognizant of that, along with some other commentators in recent days, and he seems to have very much taken a Trumpist line when it comes to the LA protests that have erupted over the weekend. So, we'll see what happens as this kind of like edges forward, there doesn't seem to have been like a big makeup session yet, but fortunately, we have two guests who have been avidly following Musk's role around the world when it comes to these concrete corporate stories. Robert Cyran, Breakingviews' US technology columnist, and Jennifer Johnson, our London-based columnist covering the space race. Robert, Jennifer, you are very welcome to the Viewsroom.

Nice to be here.

Maybe it's best to just set the stakes, and I mean, Rob, you're a student of history. The US has seen the rise of era-defining tycoons many times over, whose relationships to the federal government have often turned hostile. How does Musk stack up to, like, the Carnegies or Rockefellers of old? Like, what is the actual, like, locus of his wealth and industrial importance?

Well, I mean, just take a look at wealth. So, if you take a Look at Carnegie, for example, you know, controlled, steel, and other commodities, he was worth about 1.5% GDP at peak, which would be equivalent to about $400 billion today. So, this is nothing new in the terms of size of absolute wealth. The other thing of course is the importance, like steel was the commodity if you wanted battleships back then, and then later armor, that was the important thing. And now it's more control of both space and the airwaves. So, for instance, his Tesla, that's actually a smaller part of his wealth now. He owns about $120 billion worth of Tesla and about $150 billion worth of SpaceX, so SpaceX is bigger. And the key part of SpaceX is actually Starlink, their satellite network which offers basically mobile satellite connections and broadband connections anywhere on Earth. And so that's extremely important because if you control that, I mean, we've seen in Ukraine how important it was because war army had such an advantage because of that. And that's causing all these governments around the world to question, okay, we have such a huge reliance on this one company. Is it worth it, and can we stand for this, especially when the US is kind of shifting away, and not as close to Europe as it once was.

Jennifer, maybe that's a good point for you to step in there because you've been following this sort of like international element to the space race and my sort of potted history understanding of this is that once upon a time European leaders were very, very skeptical of SpaceX and its whole approach but now it's become sort of crucial to most governments around the world, right?

Yes, it has, and I think the attitude to it going forward is going to depend a lot on which government you're talking about. And I think actually being seen to have some distance from the Trump Administration is probably a slight advantage. The Ukraine situation that Rob mentioned, it was reported by Reuters in February that the Trump Administration was going to shut off Starlink in Ukraine if it didn't get a critical minerals deal. So that certainly scared European lawmakers and they've been seeking an alternative ever since, seeking a local alternative especially. So regardless of whether he finds his way back into Trump's good graces, Musk has established himself as kind of a volatile and unpredictable partner at this point. So, I think that will give European governments pause before committing to sort of further Starlink contracts. Equally, if you're the government of a country that hasn't rolled out much broadband infrastructure, you might still want Starlink regardless of Musk's reputation. It looks like Starlink is going to be granted authorization to operate in India in the coming months. That's fairly significant. So, I think the political consequences for Musk are going to vary regionally, but Starlink has such key infrastructure in certain places and certain industries that it's going to be hard to separate from Starlink and SpaceX in any kind of meaningful way.

Yes, that's kind of the point here, I think, isn't it, Rob, that Musk has pulled back a bit from the government and when he sort of pulled back from his Department of Government Efficiency role, he gave a lot of interviews and sort of one of the arguments seemed to be that he needed to devote more time to Tesla and that being associated with Trump and with this very unpopular cost-cutting efficiency and shutting down international aid and stuff was affecting sales of his Teslas and therefore he was going to have to try and fix that. I guess separating himself from Trump, we can talk later about to what extent that's really happening or not, is that going to help? Can he sort of, do you think he can fix the sort of reputational damage that he's done to himself? With Tesla, but to Jennifer's point, also with international governments when it comes to Startlink?

It depends, really, because for Tesla, they have questions not only of their reputation, but also of how they stack up to competition. We've seen in China, for example, there isn't nearly as much controversy over what he utters and says, but the problem is that Chinese consumers don't think Tesla's stack up to domestic competition. And they're losing market share in a rapidly growing market there. So that's a big problem for them. When it comes to the reputation, yes, it can help, it can't hurt, but it's kind of a false choice to think that there's any wiggle room between the United States and Tesla, I'm sorry, in SpaceX in one way because the US government's about a third, a quarter to a third of all revenues at SpaceX. So, SpaceX is tremendously dependent on them, and the US is tremendously dependent on SpaceX because about 90% of all launches are from SpaceX. So, both of them are caught together. The question is what happens and can they, and what are the dangers for both of them from being stuck in this relationship?

So then, I guess then the question becomes, who has the upper hand in all of this, particularly when it comes to SpaceX? And is it really tolerable for a President or a government to have a situation where this very important contractor who is an integral part of your space program and provides these satellites and all these services is sort of threatening to kind of take away his toys. Do you, do sort of I mean, I can't really think of an analogy. Like, I'm, you talked about Carnegie and Rockefeller earlier. I mean you can also think of Henry Ford, who was very close to various several, several presidents. And, and also kind of even like bought a newspaper and, tried to sort of and actually ran for office. You probably, he's probably in some ways the closest thing there's been in the past to Musk, but never quite this embedded in a government and then ending with something quite so hostile. So, if you had to sort of guess, who do you think gets the upper hand here?

Musk made a huge mistake, I forgot what, a few days ago when he said that he would reconsider the Dragon, they would decommission the Dragon. So, the Dragon takes astronauts up and down to the space station. And it's the only thing the US really has for doing that. And to present yourself as, hey, we're this giant defense contractor, the only the US has in this field and we're not going to do this. That's a huge threat to the United States. He backed down from that. He said, actually, we're not going to decommission it. And then also he made a tweet recently saying that we have the spaceships, they do not, which is the play on the old saying, we have the Gatling gun, and they do not. In other words, this is the reason why the US is so important. We have this weapon that no one else has. It looks like he's trying to re-ingratiate himself with the US, but if the US wanted to nationalize his operations, there's at least some case for it because you can't simply have US government dependent on someone who can just flake out and say, no, we're not going to carry this critical mission for the United States.

Right, and you can have a look at Musk's posts on X, which always may be a more off-the-cuff view into his mind, but he had some post on there where he was saying something along the lines of Trump's term only lasts another three and a half years, he'll be round for another 40. The specific prediction about the health of Elon Musk aside, it is true that, like you say, SpaceX is getting more integrated into governments around the world, from rocket launches to spying programs to connectivity in Ukraine to this and that and the other. And I just kind of wondered, Jennifer, like it seems, as Rob outlined, that this is more or less intolerable for the US government if this moves into some sort of actively adversarial relationship. For Europe, is there an escape valve of sorts? Is there a meaningful new wave of space companies developing or anything like that? Or is it more a question of this is a bottle on growth of SpaceX and Starlink in Europe?

So, the thing about SpaceX and Starlink is that they have no real rivals. So, SpaceX designed these reusable rockets which have made launch cheaper and more accessible. You've got players like Blue Origin, the Amazon space venture, which is working on reusable or partly reusable designs, but they're not in commercial service yet. Then on the Starlink side, it's almost difficult to overstate the competitive advantage. So, they've got nearly 8,000 working Starlink satellites in orbit. The next closest competitor in Europe is OneWeb, which is owned by Eutelsat, which has somewhere in the neighborhood of six to 700 satellites. So, the advantage that SpaceX and Starlink have is going to continue for a while. There aren't immediate alternatives. In any kind of meaningful way. You do have companies like Blue Origin, Rocket Lab is another in the launch space that are kind of working towards replicating these capabilities. You've got Arianespace in France, which has some launch capacity, but they don't have this kind of reusable component which makes launch cheaper and easier and has allowed for the launch of so many Starlink satellites. So, really, there will be, I'm sure, queries from governments that are happening today saying, can we replace Blue Origin? When are your rockets going to be ready for us to use? But the reality is, at least for the time being, there really aren't meaningful alternatives at scale. So that does continue to give SpaceX some level of advantage. In the longer term, all of this mess is probably a disadvantage in the sense that it will give these other developers, the other space players, a huge impetus to kind of move R&D along and get things going. So short term disadvantage for, yes, short, or rather in the short term, there's not going to be a disadvantage for SpaceX because there's no real rivals, but in the long term, hopefully it becomes a kind of more plural industry.

Well, and Blue Origin, I mean, you mentioned, I mean, this is Jeff Bezos’ company, right? And the founder of Amazon and he's throwing a huge amount of money at this and gone up in space himself and his wife's gone up in space and he's obviously like burned quite a lot of his own personal capital realigning his politics. He was, he bought the Washington Post. He was supposed to be the liberal champion. He sort of like endured quite a lot of upheaval at the Washington Post. Amazon, I think, has paid, I'm going to get this number wrong, but I think it's $40 million to Melania Trump to make a movie about her life or whatever, or a documentary. So, he's trying to get his foot, he went to the inauguration, he's trying to get his foot in the door. I mean, this has got to be, surely Rob, this is going to be an opportunity for Jeff Bezos, hasn't it, to ingratiate himself.

It's an opportunity, but to play armchair psychologist, I wouldn't underestimate Trump's ability to hold a grudge. And he has a big grudge against, he's mentioned the Washington Post multiple times of how it's completely unfair to him, the coverage is biased, and he holds Bezos responsible for that. He now has a grudge against Elon Musk. How they stack up, I have no idea. But sure, it's an opportunity because, for a long time it was seen as SpaceX had such a huge advantage in launch costs. There was no way anyone could catch up and Bezos was basically throwing his money away, chasing something that wouldn't happen. And also, Amazon was building a rival to Starlink. They were building their web, basically a network in space. And that was also seen as why are they doing this? Why would you overbuild something that's already there and has a gigantic advantage? You know, when they have even like, again, like 7,000, I forgot the number, 7,000 satellites in space and Amazon has three, that's a huge advantage. But now that's, now that there's reason to see at least why they might have a chance of competing.

Right, and of course the big thing hanging over this that we haven't really mentioned thus far, right, we've looked at this from the European perspective, the US perspective, China is the other big part of the Musk complex, right? Tesla developed a lot of its competitive advantage by going to China and having like a base for cheap exports around the world, was able to crack the world's largest car market and be that kind of first mover in the sophisticated modern EV space. Like you said, Rob, there have been some sales challenges recently but I kind of would it's like Musk was in something of a golden position for a while, because if you are on the opposite side of Trump negotiating over whatever is happening in the trade war right now, maybe Musk is something that you're stepping delicately around because of the relationship to the Trump Administration or something like that. But I just want to kind of like, whether there's any possible implications beyond all of this, like Tesla depends on rare earths, Tesla depends on you know, it's China manufacturing capacity. SpaceX, I presume China wants to have a competitor to SpaceX. I mean, is this potentially risky now that Musk is potentially separating from the Administration in terms of exposure to China's whims?

Yes, China has put plans to launch a giant space network similar to Starlink. Of course, the problem is that would anyone who would use a Chinese network outside, you probably get some African governments to use it if they like the Belt Initiative. You probably have certain governments which are dependent on China or dependent on aid which would use it, otherwise it seems unlikely. But again, the more the United States alienates itself from the world and the more Trump and Musk act this way, you may see governments saying, well, is it really that much of a difference if we use China or America? Or you know and of course, like I said, that's the opportunity for Amazon as well. If you could build a network where it's not seen as a tool of one state, you'd think they would have a huge advantage in neutral countries.

So, this might be the place to wrap up, Jonathan. I just wanted to come back to you. I watched recently this movie, "Mountainhead," which is for those of you who watch "Succession," this is the movie from the latest movie from Jesse Armstrong, who made "Succession." And the sort of the premise is that there are these like four tech tycoons who are sort of getting together, they're all friends and they get together in this set of chalet somewhere in the in the mountains somewhere in the US. And, and they're sort of musing about overthrowing governments and kind of sabotaging infrastructure and how they could sort of easily take over the world. And I watched that and then this whole drama between Trump and Musk unfolded. And it just struck me that, we all tend to- a lot of people tend to think about the corporate tycoons is the real holding the strings of power, and the politicians are just puppets. But it seems to me like this episode shows us that it's really the politicians, or at least at the very least Donald Trump, who kind of holds the whip hand, and everybody else needs to, on some level, needs to adapt to him.

I mean, it's crucial to remember, right? Elon has a half-working robot and a lot of followers on X. Donald Trump has the US Army. I don't think anything fundamentally changes that equation. You have the federal government, for all of the arguments about the size and scope of what US government should be doing at the highest level, the exercise of force is not something that has ever been particularly scaled back or controversial. If anything, the ability of the federal government to push its case when pushed to the extreme tends to be more or less elastic. So totally abstracting from this situation specifically, like unless you have some sort of commanding height or some sort a choke point that is totally existential to the government that cannot be essentially appropriated from you, I don't know and I mean like this doesn't go for just Trump or the US or whatever, this is basic Leviathan stuff, right? I think walking into the mouth of that is a very, very risky proposition. Unless he's actually got a couple of million optimists sitting in a warehouse somewhere who have all learned how to use AK-47, so I don't know if it's possible.

Let's watch this space, see where it ends up.

Absolutely. Alright, and with that, I think that's a good place to wrap. Jen, Rob, thank you so much for joining us on The Viewsroom.

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in. This podcast was produced by Sheryl Peña in New York and Gregory Garner in Toronto. You can listen to a new episode of The Viewsroom every Thursday on the Reuters app or your favorite platform. And don't forget to check out our sister podcast, The Big View, every Tuesday, as well as the other great podcasts from the Reuter's team. Meanwhile, if you're looking for more thought-provoking insights on global markets, be sure to check Reuters Open Interest, or ROI for short. It's the new source for data-driven expert commentary on market and economic trends from Reuters. Find the ROI team's analysis on everything from swaps to soybeans on Reuters.com every day. And finally, if you liked what you heard, please follow The Viewsroom and let us know what you thought. And you can check out our views on the biggest stories in business and finance every day at Breakingviews.com and Reuters.com.