The Elon-Trump Bromance Crashes and Burns

Elon, I want to thank you, President Trump said in a cabinet meeting in March. What he is, is a patriot. He s become a friend of mine . . . He has never asked me for a thing.

Yet just days earlier, the president had learned something that reportedly discomfited him deeply: The New York Times reported that the Pentagon was scheduled to brief Musk on a military plan relating to a potential war with China. The president learned of the meeting via the Times report, which infuriated him.

What the fuck is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn t go, Trump said, according to an Axios report. POTUS still very much loves Elon, but there are some red lines, an official explained to Axios. Elon has a lot of business in China and he has good relations there, and this briefing just wasn t the right thing.

As Trump himself explained to reporters, Certainly you wouldn t show [military plans] to a businessman, adding, Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that.

The snafu ended not with the firing of those who set up the meeting, but with those who presumably leaked it. Yet the episode changed how Trump saw Musk; the Times called it a rupture between the president and the tech mogul over Musk s potential conflicts of interest.

Of course, the president was right: While Teslas made in the U.S. are by and large produced here, many of the Teslas Musk sells across the globe are produced in China, as is some 40 percent of its battery supply chain, meaning his fortune, to some degree, rests on being in the good graces of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. It would have been a monumental conflict of interest for Musk to have been in that meeting.

This was not the only interest Musk reportedly sought to exploit behind the scenes. The Wall Street Journal reported that during the president s much ballyhooed trip to the Middle East, Musk worked hard to try to derail a deal between the United Arab Emirates and his competitor Sam Altman s OpenAI, if the deal didn t include his own AI start-up. Musk reportedly went so far as to warn a firm belonging to the brother of the president of the UAE that their plan to build the world s largest AI data center in Abu Dhabi with OpenAI had no chance of President Trump signing off on it unless Musk s xAI was included in the deal, reported the WSJ.

via www.thefp.com

Batya Ungar-Sargon

This reads like a story planted by the WH but it’s still plausible. Everyone’s always working their book it seems. For some it’s their families back home. For others it’s their childhood dream of “making the human race interplanetary.” My heart’s more with the former. They tend to be the least represented.