THE EXTREMELY PUBLIC and increasingly unhinged breakup of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has caused chaos in DC, forced Silicon Valley executives to pick sides, and wiped more than $150 billion off Tesla’s market cap.
But in the conspiracy-theory-addicted corners of the internet, the feud between Musk and Trump is nothing more than a fake, planned distraction. After Musk posted on X about Trump’s alleged relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire charged with sex trafficking of minors—“@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” Musk wrote. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”—conspiracy theorists were convinced this was all a plan to trick Democrats into calling for the Epstein files to be published.
Rather than admit that two of their favorite people have fallen out and are making increasingly dire threats against each other, QAnon folks prefer to believe that this is all part of a scheme cooked up by the pair in recent months.
“Smooth-brained folks who haven't been paying attention and don't understand that kayfabe is in play, actually believe Trump and Musk are fighting,” AwakenedOutlaw, an anonymous X account that promotes far-right talking points with over 300,000 followers, wrote on Thursday evening. Kayfabe is a decades-old term used in the world of pro wrestling to describe how wrestlers maintain the illusion that fights are real and that their hatred of their opponents extends outside the ring.
