If Elon Musk and Donald Trump Make Up, Don’t Be Surprised

For all the insults that Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump traded on Thursday, don’t be surprised if they make up again days from now. In the meantime, they both benefit.

Elon Musk was once known for doing things. The entrepreneur reached a new peak of fame on Thursday for saying things. It was mostly bad things about President Trump.

The spat was revelatory, it was epic, it was historic, at least according to the thousands of earnest and excited commentaries that were instantly published.

It was also a well-timed outburst.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump did not have a feud five days ago and might not have a feud five days from now. Until proved otherwise, all of this is theater. Think of it as the political version of professional wrestling. For a few hours, everyone was diverted by the spectacle of a brawl between the world’s richest man and its most powerful person.

Mr. Trump took a break from tariffs and deportations. For Mr. Musk, the episode was even more valuable. His wealth comes from the promise that Tesla, his electric car company, will own a significant slice of the self-driving future. The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi business is next week in Austin, Texas. Skepticism abounds. The more attention it gets, the bigger a disappointment it could be.

Mr. Musk’s SpaceX business is even more problematic. For all its promise to set up colonies on Mars, it is having trouble with the basics. The ninth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship program a few days ago saw both the reusable booster exploding and, 40 minutes later, the rocket itself blowing up. It wasn’t the first such failure, either.

“We will look back at this period in history and realize that letting a billionaire’s ego drive innovation — rather than as part of a collective effort, as seen with Apollo and the Saturn V — was a grave mistake,” Will Lockett, a frequent Musk critic, wrote in his newsletter.

Comments like that about Mr. Musk’s ventures used to be rare. For years now, the 53-year-old has been promising the future, and biographers, journalists and analysts — not to mention the public — have generally been dazzled enough to buy into it. He has done real things. Tesla was a genuine accomplishment. His fans point to many others.

Mars, however, is a long way away. Space is big, and rockets are hard. But people want to believe anyway. Here’s what an early biography had to say about how Mr. Musk would literally be sending us to the heavens in a decade:

“SpaceX may well be sending up rockets every day, taking people and things to dozens of habitats and making preparations for longer treks to Mars.” Oh, and his electric vehicles would simultaneously revolutionize transportation.

If only. The biography was published in 2015, but there are no rockets going to “dozens of habitats” in the sky and there is no revamped transit system on Earth, either.

Instead of Mars, we wake up every day to the Musk Show, a spinoff of the Trump Show — something else that dates back to 2015. It’s an entertainment program. Mr. Musk is always before us, eternally promising, rarely delivering, moving on but never leaving the spotlight.

And who can deny that so many love him for it? If you had work to do Thursday afternoon you were excused for not noticing, but for the professional commentariat — basically anyone with Mr. Musk’s X app on a phone — it was Christmas and their birthday and Election Day all rolled into one.

For months, people have wondered if anyone could stand up to Mr. Trump. Distinguished law firms and eminent universities crumpled like tissues. Paramount, the media company that owns “60 Minutes,” the most respected and feared television news program of all time, reportedly tried to give Mr. Trump $15 million to settle a lawsuit. He said no because it was not a big enough surrender.

And yet there was Mr. Musk, only a week ago Mr. Trump’s best friend and comrade in the destruction of the federal government, setting up a poll on Thursday asking if it was time to create a new political party. Saying the Trump tariffs would cause a recession in the back half of the year. Saying Congress is spending America into bankruptcy. Saying the files on the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein hadn’t been released by the government because Mr. Trump was in them.

The episode illustrated yet again the principle that if you are going to get into a fight, it helps to own a powerful social media platform. Mr. Musk’s post about Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein drew 132 million views as of Thursday night, according to X, which the tech billionaire bought in 2022. Mr. Musk knows this is really a popularity contest, not a moral battle. He reposted a crony asking: “President vs Elon. Who wins?”

Someone else wrote, “The worlds greatest fiction writers couldn’t have conceived of a timeline like this.” Mr. Musk immediately reposted that, adding the emojis for “100 percent" and “laughing while crying.” The inescapable conclusion was that Mr. Musk was having fun.

For others, it was less amusing.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s childish nonsense,” said Gigi Sohn, a senior fellow at the Benton Institute think tank and former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said, “This is an unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the One Big Beautiful Bill because it does not include the policies he wanted.” X declined to comment.

It was only a few days ago that Mr. Musk announced he was done in Washington and returning to his companies. But the demands of show business are relentless. For all the apparent split between him and the president, Thursday showed again just how much like Mr. Trump the entrepreneur has become. They are competing for our attention.

In less than a year, Mr. Musk has greatly accelerated his political involvement, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Mr. Trump elected, then arriving in Washington to fire and demoralize as many government employees as he could. From his perspective, the last six months must be at least a qualified victory. It would seem a bad idea to imperil his ever-expanding government business.

The only real thing to happen Thursday afternoon was that Tesla’s stock fell 14 percent. Investors were worried the episode would prove damaging. Some analysts were so excited they lost control of their metaphors.

“This feud does not change our bullish view of Tesla and the autonomous view but clearly does put a fly in the ointment of the Trump regulatory framework going forward,” wrote Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities. “It’s another Twilight Zone moment.”

His bottom line: “It’s not good for either side.”

Unless, of course, it is good for both sides. What if, only days or hours from now, the president and Mr. Musk reconcile? It will be like Mr. Trump’s tariffs all over again: Now they’re high, now they’re lower, now they’re postponed. The story must change so the show can go on.

Just don’t expect a trip to Mars anytime soon. Heaven can wait.

Cecilia Kang contributed reporting from Washington.