The world has little choice but to watch the fiery breakup play out in real time.
The marriage of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump was (while it lasted) unhinged and doomed, like the train wreck of George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Both dramas mined the ugly power of cruelty, and they ended on similarly pathetic notes. “Was it all bullshit?” Trump reportedly asked, referring to Musk’s MAGA theatrics — Martha-like in his regret at the loss of their shared fiction.
They played a psychological game — with each other and the world — intended to wreak havoc, a word whose roots are in the ideas of plunder and pillage, before coming to mean destruction more generally. On Thursday, as the partnership collapsed, they embodied all the definitions. Trump accused Musk of feeding at the government trough and threatened to cut off his plunder. Musk retaliated with the nuclear allegation of a possible cover-up of Trump’s ties to the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
No relationship has room for more than one narcissist. This fact alone was probably terminal for the Trump-Musk marriage, but it did not help that the two billionaires are so much alike. Effective teams have complementary traits, not redundant ones. Trump and Musk both specialize in bellicose social media, share flitting attention spans and are standouts in shamelessness. Whatever dank psychological wellsprings supplied the water for these weeds were sure to be overtapped.
