The Muskrat Strikes Back

Robert Reich

Friends,

First, it was over Trump’s nominee to be treasury secretary. The two finalists were Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and Trump’s co-transition chair, and Scott Bessent, the founder of investment firm Key Square Capital Management.

Lutnick turned for help to Elon Musk, who posted on his X that Lutnick would be a better choice for treasury secretary than Bessent, because “Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change. Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.”

I’ve spent quite some time around presidents and president-elects and even advised them about personnel decisions. The most basic rule of such advice-giving is you never make your advice public because it puts a president or president-elect in the awkward position of conspicuously backing you or not.

In this case, Trump didn’t back Musk’s candidate, and business-as-usual Bessent will be treasury secretary.

The problem for Musk isn’t that he lost this skirmish. It’s that he got into it publicly at all.

Strike one against Musk.

Then it was the matter of foreign skilled workers.

Musk posted that they should be allowed into the United States. “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote on X. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.”

But several notable MAGAs, such as Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, disagreed, to put it mildly. Loomer told The New York Times that Musk is “not MAGA and he’s a drag on the Trump transition” and said she believed that Musk is using his relationship with Trump to further enrich himself. “Elon wants everyone to think he’s a hero because he gave $250 million to the Trump campaign. But that’s not much of an investment if it allows him to become a trillionaire.”

Bannon warned Musk, less subtly, “We’re going to rip your face off.”

Trump seems to have sided with Musk on this one, at least for now, but it’s bad form to start or expose a rift among a president’s key advisers.

Strike two against Musk.

Then there was the matter of Musk’s apparent Nazi salute on stage before Trump’s arrival in Washington’s Capital One arena on Monday. Musk says it was misinterpreted. Others condemned it as an intentional sign of solidarity with and outreach to far-right groups.

No matter. The last thing a president needs — even one who’s a neofascist like Trump — is to provoke public worry over his administration’s neo-Nazi leanings.

But let’s not call this a strike against Musk, at least just yet.

The bigger problem for Musk is he just cast doubt on Trump’s first major tech investment.

Yesterday, with much fanfare, Trump announced a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to create at least $100 billion in computing infrastructure to power artificial intelligence — dubbed “Stargate.”

Trump took credit for the companies’ decision to spend up to $500 billion building data centers, which are huge buildings full of servers that provide computing power.

But in two messages on X late last night, Musk said that the venture wouldn’t succeed because it didn’t have sufficient funding. “They don’t have the money," Musk wrote in reply to an OpenAI post on the announcement. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

I don’t know if Musk is correct or if he’s just pissed off at OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman. (Musk has his own AI company and has sued OpenAI and Altman for violating antitrust law. Altman took to X on Wednesday morning to refute Musk’s assertion about insufficient funding.)

But that’s not the point. If you’re a president’s major adviser (and First Buddy, as Musk likes to say), you don’t do a public bowel movement on one of your boss’s first big initiatives.

Strike three.

Musk just moved into his office in the Old Executive Building next to the White House, but he’s already a loose cannon that makes Trump look weak and submissive. I could be wrong, of course, but my guess is Musk is out within a week.

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