By Daniel Béland

June 8, 2025

What many observers saw as unavoidable has finally happened: the breakup of the political alliance between billionaire Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump. This unusual bromance went up in flames in a very public fashion through the posting by both men of nasty posts on social media.

For instance, President Trump posted the following about Musk on the Truth Social: “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”

This led Musk to publish a series of posts attacking the President on his X (formally Twitter) platform, claiming that, without him, Trump “would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate” and even suggesting in a re-post that Trump should be impeached.

This was a dramatic moment, especially because Musk played such a key role within Trump’s team during the presidential campaign and since the latter’s return to the White House in January. His role within the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) proved especially prominent and controversial. Temporary in nature and not an actual department despite its name, DOGE’s stated purpose was to modernize “federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”.

But its actual role has proved much broader, and more tactical, as it has waged targeted spending cuts through the shuttering of government agencies, the defunding programs and mass layoffs, including at longstanding policy and communications entities such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Voice of America (VOA), and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), all instruments of American soft power whose degradation satisfies the aspirations of America’s geopolitical rivals.

The viral February footage of Musk brandishing a chainsaw offered to him by Argentinian populist President Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) became the symbol of DOGE’s politically transformative mission.

Barely three months later, however, Musk announced that he was leaving DOGE and the federal government at the same time as he started to criticize publicly the anticipated cost of the President’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” budget reconciliation legislation. While it features large cuts to social programs including Medicaid, such cuts cannot compensate for the massive tax cuts it features, which explains why it would add a projected total of $2.4 trillion to the [federal] deficit, a reality that betrays the stated deficit-reducing mandate associated with DOGE.

The fact that things blew up between these two men should not upstage the broader historical and political significance of their ephemeral yet consequential White House collaboration.

This ideological and policy disagreement over government spending is a key factor behind the end of Musk’s partnership with Trump. To this we can add policy differences over trade, as Musk openly supports free trade and opposes the Trump’s tariffs, stating on X that they would soon trigger a recession.

Beyond real policy divergences, the fact that both Musk, the wealthiest person on the planet despite recent stock market losses related to his political role, and Trump, whose narcissism has been a widely discussed rationale for his decisions, have oversized egos was certainly a contributing factor in their very public and dramatic “divorce.”

More important, the fact that things blew up between these two men should not upstage the broader historical and political significance of their ephemeral yet consequential White House collaboration. This is true because their collaboration perfectly illustrates the excessive role that wealth has played in distorting outcomes in US politics, especially in this century.

A key development here was the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that reversed longstanding campaign finance rules and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections, and launched a protracted debate on whether “money is speech” and “corporations are people” per the broad takeaways from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion.

The Citizens United ruling resulted “in a fusion of private wealth and political power unseen since the late 19th century,” per the Brennan Center for Justice. This situation facilitates and elevates the role of billionaires within the US political system. Such a reality, and the fact that the Republican Party under Trump serves the interests of the wealthy despite its populist rhetoric, was very much on display at the January 20 inauguration ceremony, where three tech billionaires — Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — sat near President Trump.

The high profile of these three ultra-rich men at that ceremony made me think of what C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite nearly 70 years ago. For this Columbia University sociologist, “the power elite” reflected the close social integration of corporate, military, and political elites in the United States after World War II.

Today, tech billionaires are increasingly central to the US governing elite and they are well connected within both political and defence circles, something perfectly illustrated by Musk, an economic and political actor whose companies have massive contracts with the US Department of Defense.

Yet, as political scientist Peter Drier argues, we can no longer talk about a coherent “power elite” because, in the United States, “those at the ‘command posts’ today are less a well-organized ruling class and more a parade of Trump acolytes, opportunists, and those willing to look the other way.”

This evolution is illustrated by the recent divorce between Musk and Trump, which might give hope to those who seek to protect democracy against the fusion of economic and political power and the direct threat it poses to US democracy.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University. He is currently visiting Heidelberg University as the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award.