Trump's Tech Bros: The tragedy of Elon Musk

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0:28Murad Ahmed: Learn more at NICE.com. there's a hunter s thompson quote you know when he used to cover politics back in the late 60s and 70s politics is a guilty addiction they are addicts and they lie and they cheat and they steal like junkies and when they get into a frenzy they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit and i think this does speak to a little bit about who musk is as a person that's eft stephen morris speaking about elon musk the richest man in the world the man behind X, SpaceX and Tesla, and the tech titan who got closer than any other to Donald Trump. He is very obsessive and does everything 100 % claims to have slept on the factory floor whilst resolving production issues at Tesla, was at Twitter, you know, 24 hours a day firing people.

1:18I think once he got into politics, he got hooked.

1:21Murad Ahmed: Musk was one of Trump's biggest supporters on the campaign trail. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him re-elected. And when Trump made his return to Washington, Musk went with him as his tech bro-in-chief. So I think to a certain point, when Musk got a taste of this political power, in addition to his kind of business and technological power as well, he just couldn't pull back. And he really went all in and tried to do the same trick on the federal government that he'd done at all of his private companies. But he has found out that that's slightly more difficult to achieve, in particular when the person you've hitched your wagon to is as mercurial and egotistical as you are.

2:00Handpicked by Trump,

2:02Murad Ahmed: Musk was tasked with rebooting the government machine. But his cost-cutting crusade in Washington has faltered. And in recent weeks, the Trump-Musk relationship has collapsed in spectacular fashion. And it's a split that could have far-reaching consequences for Musk's business empire and the Trump administration itself.

2:26Murad Ahmed: This is Tectonic from the Financial Times. I'm Murad Ahmed, the FT's technology news editor. And in this season of the podcast, I'm exploring the relationships between Donald Trump and some of the titans of the tech world. What's really driving those relationships? How are they playing out? And what might they mean for the future of the tech industry in the US and around the world? In this episode, how Elon Musk and Donald Trump's bromance turned into a bust-up. Why did it happen? And what could it mean for two of the most powerful men in America?

3:05Murad Ahmed: To help answer those questions, I spoke to Stephen Morris, the FT's San Francisco Bureau Chief, who you heard from at the top of the show. And to Joe Miller, the FT's Washington correspondent, who spent much of the last five months trailing Musk around DC. I started by asking Stephen, how did Musk end up as Trump's right-hand man, first buddy, the tech-groan chief at the White House? It's kind of an interesting story that sort of started in the summer of last year as Musk became increasingly sceptical of Joe Biden, Trump's predecessor. There are a number of incidents that had happened that left Musk feeling very snubbed by the Democrats.

3:43There was one particular incident at the White House, this big electric vehicle forum, to which he wasn't invited. And General Motors CEO Mary Barra was praised instead for leading the electric vehicle revolution. And this left Musk feeling incredibly bruised. But this was really icing on the cake of what he felt like were a series of very serious snubs from the organization. And over time, Musk kind of resolved to use his money to acquire a degree of political power. There was also an increasing conservative bent to his politics because of his personal situation. Many people credit this to one of his children having gender reassignment surgery, which led Musk to go down this rabbit hole of what he calls the woke mind virus, which he said is being spread by Democrats and some of their allies, which basically he accuses of capturing public discourse.

4:37and he kind of wanted to acquire political power to help eliminate or eradicate that.

4:43Murad Ahmed: And we had one president who couldn't climb a flight of stairs and another who was fist-pumping after getting shot. Fight, fight, fight! The first, I think, public proclamation of support was just a few hours after the assassination attempt when a lot of people actually came out from Silicon Valley and started throwing their weight behind Trump. There's a lot of people out there who need to vote for President Trump, OK? Get everyone, friends, family, people on the street. Put the signs up. Put the hat on. Let's go. We shouldn't also believe that this was purely an ideological thing. Musk is also a very successful businessman.

5:26There is a lot to be gained across his whole conglomerate of companies from being close to the administration, whether it's from smoothing the path to having autonomous vehicles approved at a federal level across U.S. roads or getting more government contracts to go to the International Space Station, the moon, and then on to Mars, you know, getting contracts for Starlink, which is his network of, I think, 7 ,000 going on 8 ,000 satellites, which provide broadband across the globe. If the gamble paid off, and it very much did when Trump got elected, this was a great business platform as well as a social one.

6:02Murad Ahmed: USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! Yes! So Musk goes all in on supporting Trump on the campaign trail and spending a lot of money on his election campaign, apparently some$250 to$300 million of his own money. Joe Miller in D.C., you've been covering Musk in Washington over the last few months. Musk's support ends up with him effectively working for the Trump administration right at the heart of the government machine. How did that happen? I think what happened was that as he moved closer and closer to what we sort of inelegantly call the tech right, one of the animating issues that that bloc tends to harp on about is the growing US national debt.

6:52This is one of the places in which they overlap very strongly with sort of traditional Republicans. These are people from the business world who want to reduce government spending and generally have a very unfavorable attitude towards what they see as a bloated bureaucracy in DC. So what we saw is as Musk became more and more embedded in the Trump campaign, that this became his calling card, so to speak, you know, what he could offer to the administration. He could, you know, do what he did when he walked into Tesla, when he created SpaceX, when he took over Twitter, now X, which is, you know, basically transform these companies by moving very, very swiftly to sort the wheat from the shaft, so to speak, and get rid of any excess spending, excess hiring, and really get things done quicker and for less.

7:49And that's what he thought he could do with the government. And then there was this famous rally at Madison Square Garden, a famous Trump rally, where he was introduced on stage. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the greatest capitalist in the history of the United States of America, Elon Musk.

8:15And he came on and he sort of announced that he could cut two trillion from the annual federal budget, which is almost a third of government spending.

8:29Murad Ahmed: What a great group of people. I've only got one question for you, then I'm getting out of here because this is your stage. But we set up Doge. Yes. How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted$6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget? Well, I think we can do at least$2 trillion. Yeah! Yes. $2 trillion. And then it became this idea that, you know, the world's richest man and perhaps most successful entrepreneur of the century will come into government and be able to cut way more than has ever been cut before. And soon after the election, after Trump won, he announced that this would take the form of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is named after a meme coin that Musk has long embraced.

9:21Trump even said that it had the potential to be as big as the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the US's nuclear weapon. So the ambitions for this outfit, whatever it was supposed to be, were incredibly high from the get-go.

9:37Murad Ahmed: So once Trump becomes president, how does this must project to start cutting government spending play out? So with almost immediate effect after the inauguration, we got word of these young coders and Silicon Valley types suddenly appearing at the US Treasury, at USAID, which is the US aid agency. at various other smaller departments that many people outside of Washington had never heard of. And what happened really was a sort of blitz against the federal workforce. There were tens of thousands of redundancies announced, and it all devolved into chaos very, very quickly. It was incredibly hard to work out what was going on where, but it really was shock therapy to the bureaucracy which is very much what Musk intended.

10:32Murad Ahmed: And Joe you looked at this in an FT Big Read you analysed how real the cuts that Doge said they were making were. What did you find? We ran the numbers on Doge's official accounting and at the time that we did the analysis there were about 175 billion dollars worth of savings detailed on the site. Now it's roughly$180 billion that's claimed. But what we found was that most of that figure could not be verified. And the ones, you know, the sort of tens of billions of dollars worth of savings, which could be matched to existing federal contracts, were either grossly exaggerated or miscalculated. But even if we were to say that there was$180 billion worth of savings, You know, even if we were to concede that, that's still so far short of the original two trillion, which was then revised down to one trillion by Musk.

11:26I mean, we are nowhere near the sort of savings that would essentially bring down the deficit in a meaningful way.

11:35Murad Ahmed: And in your reporting, you spoke to some of the people within the government machine who ended up working quite closely with Doge. One of those people is a very mild-mannered guy called Matt Calkins, who is the head of a company that one may not have heard of if you're not in DC, but you sure have heard of if you work in government. It's called Appian. It essentially does process management for the government. It's embedded in pretty much every government agency, deeply embedded, has been around for decades. And Matt was originally very enthusiastic about this initiative. But then, you know, as Matt puts it, things went very wrong.

12:15And I asked him what went wrong. What went wrong with Doge? All right, it's a good question. First of all, Doge aimed at not all of the targets that deserved to be aimed at. Coming in with a$2 trillion target to cut the U.S. government by$2 trillion. and Doge focused largely on personnel and did not go after entitlements, which is where the true money is spent in Washington, did not go after regulations to get the burden of regulation off the back of the economy, the biggest targets, and Doge did not go after them. So I'd have to start there. That's the number one thing. And this is another. I think we saw Elon the deleter and not Elon the builder.

12:57You can't delete your way to an electric car. You can't delete your way to a rocket. he's a creator as well. And so we saw a four-month attempt to reduce the federal government by$2 trillion, and that was always going to be an exercise in deleting. But I think if it had been more extended, it would have been also an exercise in building. What did Musk not understand about government in your view? It seems from a distance that Musk thought that he was walking into another X or another Tesla. Yeah, that's right. I think Elon has a fantastic belief that he could do things instantaneously. The federal government is harder to reform than Twitter.

13:35I thought it was amazing what he did at Twitter, but the government is tougher by far than that. And there's reasons why it can't change too much. Twitter isn't necessary to anybody's life. And if he literally blows it up, it's okay. If he rolls the dice, if he deletes things that should have existed, if he fires people without whom Twitter can't run, it's okay because none of us actually needed Twitter. We do need the government. The government's there for safety, solidity. In fact, total success, total success in the government is when we don't need to think about it at all.

14:06Murad Ahmed: So Doge seemed to fail on its own terms, but as Matt Calkins points out, he was owning the job for four months. So Joe, why did he leave early? I think the answer is incredibly simple. Musk is someone who is obviously an excellent engineer, an excellent manager and entrepreneur who understands electric cars, understands energy, understands space, has his finger in a whole load of advanced scientific fields. The one thing he clearly does not understand is politics. He doesn't understand the basics of how politics, how the political system in DC and indeed elsewhere around the world functions. He doesn't understand the parliamentary system in the UK very clearly.

14:52He doesn't understand the bicameral system in D.C. And most importantly, he doesn't understand how the political winds blow and the effect that they have. Taking on the government is not like reforming a business that has either public or private shareholders. A few people that you have to convince to stay with you while you cause some temporary chaos in the hope of future gain. The constituency here, the shareholders, so to speak, are the American people. And you cannot go around slashing support for veterans and for the most vulnerable in society, cutting government workers in Republican states, threatening to axe grants that fund cancer research, and the list goes on and on, without there being some political blowback.

15:43And, you know, that political blowback, by the way, started to hit both the Trump administration, which saw very early on that Musk's polling was way worse than Donald Trump's and was actually a drag on Donald Trump's popularity, but also on Musk's own businesses.

16:03Murad Ahmed: Stephen, there was a lot of pressure, particularly from Tesla, for him to return to his businesses, right? Tesla was getting hammered on sales, not just in China, where it faces increasingly strong competition, but in kind of its heartland of California and across Europe as well. The UK, France, Germany, you know, wealthy people, environmentally conscious, and who generally thought for a long time Elon Musk was a pretty good thing, helping electrify the world's automobiles. But as the sales dropped, so did the share price quite precipitously. After an initial 30 % jump in the days after Trump won the election, it very quickly reversed as the sales figures came out as Musk's political activism increased.

16:44And I think, you know, a couple of months ago, we saw a few very interesting things come out. There was a report which was ultimately denied that a Tesla board member had reached out to headhunters to just, you know, sort of have a little taste, a little inkling of what it might look like if they were to try and pick a new CEO for Tesla, either somebody to come in to succeed him or to replace him directly. Tesla, you know, as I said, denied this. And indeed, the board are now looking at giving him, you know, another big bumper pay package to try and keep him engaged as he revolutionizes Tesla and tries to turn it into a company that's all about humanoid robots and autonomous driving.

17:21But I think, you know, that can be interpreted as a warning, as a shot across his bow. It's like you do actually have to spend some time, if you're the CEO of a company, in Austin, in Texas, rallying the troops, driving forward the technology and doing your job. Otherwise, what's all the money and what's all the backing for? A lot of his other companies are kind of, he's delegated deputies to run them, whether it's Steve Davis, the kind of guy who helps with his family office, or Gwynne Shotwell, the very accomplished woman who runs SpaceX. They can get on without him. Tesla is his baby, like at the center of his empire.

17:55And he really does insist on running it himself. And it's also where a lot of his wealth is tied up.

18:02Murad Ahmed: Okay, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, let's talk about Musk leaving Doge and how that turned into a huge bust up with Trump.

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19:16Enjoy.

19:20Murad Ahmed: So this confluence of factors leads Musk initially to say that he's stepping back from Doge and spending more time with Tesla. At the end of May, he announces he's leaving government altogether and there's a press conference, a send-off, a love-in between Trump and Musk. I just want to thank Elon and all of his people. Elon gave an incredible service. Nobody liked him. And he had to go through the slings and the arrows. Thank you, Elon. Thank you. Take care of yourself. Thank you. And then just days later, there's this massive bust-up between the pair of them. Joe, what happened? Well, I think we have to go back a little bit before the press conference to really sort of set the scene.

20:07Musk was deeply frustrated with the Trump administration pretty much from the point in February at which the administration launched its trade war and imposed those sweeping tariffs on many countries, but most importantly for Musk on China. Now, Musk has been very open in the past that he is not a fan of tariffs or indeed any trade barriers. He believes they should be ideally reduced to zero. And he made these views known very, very clearly within the administration to Trump himself several times. and not to put too fine a point on it, he lost in the power struggle within the administration. He lost.

20:50And in his view, that was particularly galling because of who he lost to. He lost to people like Peter Novaro, Trump's trades are, who he then went on to call a moron, someone he really does not hold in very high esteem at all. And someone, by the way, who hasn't been particularly kind about Musk in the past either. And it was a major slap in the face. He was supposed to be this top consigliere to Trump and he couldn't get him to kind of back down from his signature policy, which was harming his businesses. And then to sort of compound the blow, very soon after that, Trump began touting his so-called big, beautiful bill, this tax bill, that the administration is, as a priority, trying to push through Congress, essentially because a bunch of tax cuts are running out at the end of the year if it's not passed.

21:40But in order to get this bill through, the administration essentially had to offer various things to the various factions in the Republican Party, and it adds trillions to the deficit. So not only does it go contrary to some of Musk's policy choices, but it essentially obliterates even the small savings that Doge has supposedly made. And this increasingly infuriated him. He started to essentially speak out against the bill on Twitter. He called it an abomination. He came out publicly saying he didn't support the tariffs. He suggested he would no longer back political candidates. He wouldn't do any more political spending.

22:24Still, he never really lashed out against Trump himself. And that was a key Rubicon he didn't appear to cross. And then we had that sort of friendly send-off in the Oval Office. And it seemed that the administration had managed to orchestrate a soft landing, one in which there was clearly a fissure on policy. But on personal terms and on the key political stage, Musk would remain a Trump ally. And then everything went off the rails.

22:57Murad Ahmed: Talk us through how it all went off the rails. I mean, we spent a day and a night watching a flurry of tweets between them, which got increasingly personal. The first sort of shot across the bow was Musk called the bill a massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill. Trump basically said that Musk had gone crazy, that he was very disappointed in Musk. Look, Elon and I had a great relationship, but I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot. And I'll be honest, I think he misses the place. I think he got out there and all of a sudden he wasn't in this beautiful Oval Office.

23:41I'll tell you, It's not, he's not the first. People leave my administration and some of them actually become hostile. I don't know what it is. It's sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it, but I don't know what it is. Then Musk said Trump would have lost the election without his support and said Trump was ungrateful for the 250 million and more that he spent on the campaign. He went as far as to suggest that Trump was somehow implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, without any evidence he suggested that. And so we had this, what was, what had been an incredibly warm relationship that had ended somewhat peacefully, just implode in real time on social media.

24:30And it looked like that this was it, that there was no way back from here. And that, you know, the two people with the loudest megaphones on Earth would now be at each other's throats.

24:44Murad Ahmed: Stephen, what do you think the potential underlying reasons for this fallout are? Trump said it was all to do with scrapping tax credits for electric cars. You know, Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles. And, you know, they're having a hard time, the electric vehicles. And they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy. Musk has actually long said that EV tax credits benefit Tesla's rivals who are far less successful in building and selling electric cars than him. And it was no surprise that the EV mandate was going to disappear. So I don't necessarily think the EV mandate has anything to do with it.

25:25But obviously, we then got this big, beautiful bill. And it was kind of the worst of the worst if you're looking at it from a pure business, globalist supply chain perspective. and you know maybe there is a grain of truth that there was pork for everyone else the oil and gas industry steel etc but nothing for electric vehicles but i certainly don't think that that was the core reason of it i just don't think musk is used to bending the knee to anyone especially when it damages his personal wealth and his business interests and even though joe you know has laid out very clearly how naive musk was in certain elements of politics calling anything sponsored by Donald Trump, a disgusting abomination is always going to provoke an equally violent reaction.

26:07And he must have known that, or at least had some of the sensible people around him telling him that. And it just really escalated from there. Now, Trump is the US president. A lot of Musk companies rely on very lucrative long-term government contracts. And after being told that he was ungrateful and the bill he was sponsoring was a disgusting abomination, Trump then said, one of the things we can do to cut the government budget, which Doge hasn't been able to do is by cutting Elon Musk's contracts. So this kind of billionaire, if Trump is indeed a billionaire, tit for tat, escalated over a period of about six to 12 hours to extraordinary vitriol.

26:42And we'll see whether either of them are able to make peace or row this back. I mean, everybody kind of knew that there was going to be a break between the two men, that they would say things like, well, the stage isn't big enough for both of them. But I don't think anyone expected something this abrupt this violent or this public.

26:59Murad Ahmed: Joe, from all the people that you've spoken to, why couldn't Musk accept the soft landing that was given to him, his way out on good terms? Have you got any sense of why it happened this way? I think that's an incredibly interesting question. And I think the answer is really that this is a sort of Chekhovian tragedy of someone completely misunderstanding where power lay and indeed where his power lay. Stephen is 100 % right when he says that Musk didn't really need much from the government, even the EV tax credit cut, you know, fine, he could have swallowed that, etc. What he didn't seem to have accounted for is if he fell out with Trump, how much Trump could hurt him and who held the cards in that scenario.

27:50And, you know, I've never really bought into this idea that the only reason that Musk went into government, the only reason he supported Trump was to get some sort of boost to his then sort of 400 billion fortune. I mean, you know, maybe he could have maneuvered government in a way to drop some regulations that were affecting his companies. Maybe he could have even boosted, you know, SpaceX's share of the NASA budget, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, these are not things that the world's richest man desperately needs. What he desperately did need was affirmation from the world's most powerful man, a feeling that he was in a position to hit back at what he calls the woke mob.

28:29and he could swallow everything else so long as he felt he was getting those things, so long as he felt that he was transforming Washington, being able to save democracy itself, quote unquote, which is something he kept on banging on about. And he was increasingly finding out that he was suffering the fallout from trying to do those things while not really getting any of the benefits. And, you know, there were a series of small things that happened through his time in government. But, you know, from the reporting that we've done in the last few weeks, speaking to people since Musk soured on the bill and then the spectacular fallout, there were some things that hit closer to home.

29:14There is a guy called Jared Isaacman, who is a billionaire who has flown missions for SpaceX, who was nominated to lead NASA. He is a friend of Musk. And by all accounts, he was considered to be an incredibly good nominee for that position, incredibly competent and qualified. And on the very same day of Musk's farewell of that Oval Office press conference, Jared Isaacman got a call from someone in the White House saying, you're no longer the nominee. And he's been very upfront about this and said it's because essentially he thinks his fortunes were tied to Musk's. And the administration was sending a message.

29:54And I think that for Musk was the final straw. It was too much to bear that he had, in his view, given everything to supporting the Trump campaign. And he'd gone to bat for them time and time again. And now not only was he having to watch a trade war play out that he didn't agree with, watch this bill undo Doge's work. but also the people that he had recommended personally for government positions being defenestrated. And there was no way that a man like Musk, who has, you know, I think by all accounts a brittle ego, was then going to go gently into the good night.

30:29Murad Ahmed: Stephen, now we're left with the fallout. What does this all mean for Musk now? It's hard to say. I mean, he's still the world's richest man. He still runs some of the world's most important companies, including those involved in AI, autonomous driving, basically runs the US and the rest of the world's space program and satellite launches. So his position is still very strong, but he has doubtless been weakened by this. Everyone knew Trump and Musk would fall out, but falling out this severely probably wasn't expected. In the last few days, we have seen some attempts from musk to rebuild bridges and apologize he says he regrets some of the tweets that he he not a full apology about about trump some being the key word there he said i went too far i would accuse somebody of uh being involved with anything epstein was up to um it's going to take a lot more rowing back than just a a single sentence of apology on on twitter but i think it is a realization maybe after the bruising experience both physically and metaphorically that Musk has had in the past few weeks, that Trump is, in fact, probably the more powerful of the two.

31:39He's gone back to Tesla. They have a big few months ahead of them. They're going to start launching autonomous Teslas going around Austin in Texas, as it looks to compete with Google's Waymo in driverless taxis. They've built a humanoid robot called Optimus that they're infusing with real world AI technology. They say they've built a humanoid robot. Well, they have a robot and it dances. Whether or not it's all being controlled by a human behind the scenes is very much up for debate. But Musk certainly has enough to go back to and get on with. We have earnings for some of those companies coming up.

32:15We have new fundraising rounds for his private AI company XAI and SpaceX soon. And it'll be interesting to see if there is any souring of sentiment. A lot of people thought his relationship with Trump would strengthen his hand in all of his companies. There's no doubt that it helped boost his power. We'll see if there's a commensurate decrease in their appetite for Musk's companies now that there's been a falling out to the extent where he might actually be persecuted rather than promoted by Trump.

32:43Murad Ahmed: Stephen, there are other ways that Musk could be hurt by the fallout. There are other tech titans who are trying to get into Trump's circle as closely as they can, almost definitely to benefit themselves. Who are they and how could they benefit as a result of the row that's happened between Musk and Trump? The two that spring most clearly to mind are Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta slash Facebook, and Jeff Bezos, who runs Amazon, and the rocket company Blue Origin. Arguably, SpaceX is only legitimate competitor. If you're Jeff Bezos, you're probably seeing a generational opportunity to win more contracts for your rocket company, whether it's in the International Space Station, the Moon, or Mars.

33:28must look to have it completely locked down whilst he was an ally of Trump's. If he's now an enemy, maybe there's a bit of a gap there. Bezos owns a newspaper called The Washington Post. He's already told the opinion page that it's not allowed to run any anti-Trump editorials anymore, and it must support libertarianism and freedom around the world, whatever that means. And we're also seeing Zuckerberg make big donations, try to compete with Elon Musk in AI, and also try and wrest some of the power that X has as the leading social media network back to Facebook and Instagram and the other properties that it has.

34:06So Musk seemed to have outmaneuvered, as he usually does, all of his rivals late last year and for the first four months, four or five months of this year. But now it seems that he may have actually done himself more lasting damage, at least for the duration of the Trump administration, leaving little gaps for his rivals to sneak through.

34:22Murad Ahmed: Okay, so one final question for you both. At the time of recording, it's still difficult to see how this relationship will play out over the longer term. I wonder, though, has this foray into politics by Musk, has it actually been a huge mistake? I think if you'd asked me two weeks ago, before we had this Twitter, true social flame war, I would probably have said it was about 50-50. Musk had gained a lot of power for his other companies. Sure, Tesla sales dropped. He'd become more unpopular with many segments of the population, both in the US and internationally. But basically, he'd actually secured a lot of goodwill with the president and stood to make some benefits.

35:03But from sort of failing at Doge, smirching his own personal reputation, severely imperiling Tesla's ability to sell cars and therefore fund its AI and robotics future, and then making an enemy of the US president, I think we have to look back at it and say, getting involved in politics in itself, was not a misstep, but getting involved and ending it in the way that he did is a huge error of judgment. Perhaps one that we, considering his past form, we could have predicted. Joe? I tend to agree with that. I think that it's possible over the next few months that, you know, there will be a bridge that is built between Musk and Trump again, and that the fallout isn't quite as bad as it seems from where we stand.

35:47But nonetheless, I think the lens through which we should view this is how successful musk could have been had he played it slightly differently you know when he'd come into government or when at least when doge was announced at the end of last year it attracted a lot of bipartisan support from some very interesting characters people like bernie sanders on the left who said you know we could be with you on this if you went after defense spending for example and you know you could have seen a scenario in which musk went into government with quite a lot of bipartisan support, quietly and methodically made his way or got his team to make their way through government departments, stayed out of international politics, didn't go after Keir Starmer or the AFD.

36:31And when it came to Trump's more controversial politics, perhaps, you know, kept his counsel to himself or advised behind the scenes and emerged next year with a bunch of his allies inserted in government, with more SpaceX contracts than ever, with a very close and warm relationship with the most powerful man in the world, and with friends across the aisle. Instead, he's got none of those, or at least a lot less of any of those. And I think that is the real story here.

37:01Murad Ahmed: And it's a hell of a story, one that I'm sure that we'll keep on giving. Stephen and Joe, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. That was Joe Miller and Stephen Morris speaking to me about the breakdown of the Musk-Trump bromance and what it could mean for both of their futures. In the next episode, another titan of tech, Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon. As we heard, Bezos is Musk's only real rival in the space arena. But it's at another of his businesses that Trump has taken a keen interest, the Washington Post, one of America's most prestigious newspapers. And Bezos wants to keep in with the president.

37:40Murad Ahmed: So is he reshaping the post to become more Trump-friendly? And how could that change American media? What we're seeing is a lot of yielding to pressure or threats or worries about being in conflict with this particular president on the part of the owners, while journalists in the field are continuing to do their work. That's next time on Tectonic. You've been listening to Tectonic with me, Murad Ahmed. This episode was produced by Josh Gabbert-Doyon. The senior producer is Edwin Lane, and the executive producer is Flo Phillips. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giavinka. Original music by Metaphor Music.

38:19Murad Ahmed: Manuela Zaragoza and Topher Forges are the FT's acting heads of audio.

38:37The new episode of The Next Five is all about CFOs in an AI world. Patrick Villanova at Blackline joins me. CFOs are inherently risk averse. We have to be very prudent when we implement AI. As does Olya Brasi at Highgate.

38:52Murad Ahmed: My rule is no human owner means no go live. And Gina Gutsight at FTI Consulting. There's no excuse. You're the CFO. You're signing the name to the financial statements. Listen to The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy. Capital raising is being redefined in real time, from macro disruptions and shifting investor expectations to AI-driven demand and the rise of private credit. When headlines can tilt markets overnight, how can companies stay on course? Strategic Alternatives, the RBC Capital Markets podcast, explores how corporates and investors are navigating new pathways to raise capital, create value, and drive growth.

39:32When conditions change, alternatives matter. Listen to Strategic Alternatives, available wherever you get your podcasts.