I wrote a piece about Musk today and I sure wish I’d read this one by Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker in the Atlantic (gift link) before I did. This lede is something else:
Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was shouting at Elon Musk in the halls of the West Wing last month, loud enough for Donald Trump to hear and in a language that he could certainly understand. Bessent and Musk were fighting over which of them should choose the next IRS leader—and, implicitly, over Musk’s bureaucracy-be-damned crusade. Without securing the Treasury chief’s sign-off, Musk had pushed through his own pick for the job. Bessent was, quite obviously, not having it.
The fight had started outside the Oval Office; it continued past the Roosevelt Room and toward the chief of staff’s office, and then barreled around the corner to the national security adviser’s warren. Musk accused Bessent of having run two failed hedge funds. “I can’t hear you,” he told Bessent as they argued, their faces just inches apart. “Say it louder.”
Well!
A ton of good stuff in this. We don’t know where it’s all going to end up:
Musk struggled to adjust to life outside his companies, where his whims reigned supreme and he rarely needed to build consensus. “He miscalculated his ability to act just completely autonomously,” one outside Trump adviser told us. “He had some missteps in all of these agencies, which would have been fine because everyone acknowledges that when you’re moving fast and breaking things, not everything is going to go right. But it’s different when you do that and you don’t even have the buy-in of the agency you’re setting on fire.”
Musk also found himself clashing with other Trump advisers on policy questions that could take a bite out of his personal fortune. The billionaire argued against the administration’s tariff bonanza—at one point, he urged “a zero-tariff situation” between the United States and Europe—and publicly attacked Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, calling him “dumber than a sack of bricks.” In late March, according to a New York Times report, Musk was preparing to receive a secret briefing from the Pentagon on the country’s planning for a potential war with China. After the Times story published, Trump posted on social media that Musk’s trip to the Pentagon would not include any China briefing. But the report prompted a public outcry, including over Musk’s many potential conflicts of interest.
“You could feel it, everything changed, the fever had been broken,” the longtime Trump ally and Musk foe Steve Bannon told us in a text message about the Pentagon uproar. In Bannon’s view, government officials had opted to leak to the Times rather than directly confront Musk or bring their concerns to the president—a troubling sign, he told us, of Musk’s outsize power.
Now Trump-administration officials wonder just what will happen to DOGE once Musk pivots elsewhere. In some cases, DOGE employees have already become more formally enmeshed in the administration, taking on official roles within government agencies. A top Musk aide is now the Interior Department’s assistant secretary of policy management and budget, and a DOGE point person to the Department of Energy is now chief of staff. One administration official told us that Musk’s much-vaunted—and initially chaotic—reductions in the federal workforce are now coming to fruition across the government, but in a more organized fashion.
I’ll believe it when I see it. The agency heads are all MAGA dolts and they have either antagonized or fired all the people who know how to do things. I suspect it’s going to continue to be a big dud.
We’ll see. Trump still loves that the richest man in the world is his toady. He’s not going to be totally ostracized. But the days of Musk’s dominance are over.