18 February
Daggers out for Elon Musk
This latest Bannon salvo at Musk reflects the sharpening of already rough-edged rivalries within Trump’s circle between hard-core populists (like Bannon) and hyper-libertarians (like Musk). For his part, Musk has mostly ignored Bannon’s attacks. In a recent tweet, Musk dismissed Bannon as “a great talker. Not a great doer.”
That may be in part because Musk knows Bannon and others have little real leverage to use against him. In past administrations, members of the president’s party in Congress or major party donors could use their influence with the chief executive to sideline an unpopular aide. But Musk’s money gives him a potent weapon to use against lawmakers fearful of well-funded election challengers, and no donor has ever offered a candidate more than Musk gave Trump in 2024. Former Trump Communications Chief Anthony Scaramucci predicts that though the president won’t “jettison” Musk, his influence on Trump is “not sustainable.” We’ll see.

17 February
The anti-Musk protest movement is expected to ramp up with Congress on recess
(AP) — Donald Trump is the president, but billionaire Elon Musk is the focus for thousands of Democratic activists launching a protest campaign this week to fight the Trump administration’s push to gut federal health, education and human services agencies.
Hundreds of protests are scheduled outside congressional offices and Tesla dealerships, with organizers hoping to send a pointed message to members of Congress who are on recess this week.
The backlash still hasn’t approached the intensity of protests during and after Trump’s first inauguration eight years ago. But a loose coalition of Democrats and progressives is coalescing around Musk’s rise as Trump’s top lieutenant and his purge of the federal bureaucracy.

11 February
Musk appears at White House defending DOGE’s work but acknowledging mistakes
President Donald Trump’s most powerful adviser, Elon Musk, made a rare public appearance at the White House on Tuesday to defend the swift and extensive cuts he’s pushing across the federal government while acknowledging there have been mistakes and will be more.
Musk stood next to the Resolute Desk with his young son as Trump praised Musk’s work with his Department of Government Efficiency, saying they’ve found “shocking” evidence of wasteful spending. The Republican president signed an executive order to expand Musk’s influence and continue downsizing the federal workforce.

8 February
In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear
Shrink government, control data and — according to one official closely watching the billionaire’s DOGE — replace “the human workforce with machines.”
(WaPo) The [Department of Government Efficiency]DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation’s capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president.

27 January
Bill Gates calls Elon Musk’s embrace of far-right politicians abroad ‘insane shit’
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist calls fellow tech titan ‘super-smart’ but guilty of ‘overreach’
Bill Gates has labelled Elon Musk’s embrace of far-right politicians and attempt to interfere in the politics of other countries – including the UK – as “insane shit”.
Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, said that his fellow multibillionaire tech titan was guilty of “overreach”. “It’s really insane that he can destabilise the political situations in countries,”….

24 January
Trump Bets It All on OpenAI
Earlier this week, he unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman.
By Matteo Wong
(The Atlantic) The project, known as Stargate, is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and several other corporate partners that aims to invest $500 billion over the next four years in America’s AI infrastructure: data centers, energy plants, power lines, and everything else needed to develop superintelligent computer programs. The first data center, already under construction, will soon be dedicated to training OpenAI’s next models.

22-23 January
Trump staff ‘furious’ after Musk trashes AI project
“It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the president,” said one ally of the president.
(Politico) Some of President Donald Trump’s key aides and allies are furious with Elon Musk for publicly trashing his $500 billion artificial intelligence mega-deal [that Trump called “tremendous” and “monumental” just a day prior].
… It is highly unusual for a senior adviser — Musk — to criticize a president’s initiatives in public, and his broadsides renewed speculation within GOP circles about whether he and Trump will eventually have a falling-out.
OpenAI Goes MAGA
Sam Altman has once again put himself in a position of power—this time by sidling up to President Trump.
By Karen Hao
(The Atlantic) …Elon Musk…co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others, but the two had become fierce rivals. As “first buddy” to Donald Trump, Musk was suing OpenAI while rapidly building up his own AI venture, xAI, whose chatbot, Grok, has become a central feature on X.
OpenAI has once again reestablished its dominance. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate Project, a joint venture between SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI to pump $500 billion of private-sector investment over four years into building out U.S. AI infrastructure, with the intent of securing America’s leadership in AI development against China. Very little is known about how any of this will work in practice, but OpenAI is speaking as though it will reap most of the rewards: In its blog post announcing the partnership, it said that all of the infrastructure will be “for OpenAI.” The company’s president, Greg Brockman, underscored the point on X: “$500B for AI data centers for OpenAI.”
Why Trump’s AI plan made Elon Musk flip out
A feel-good photo op just triggered a billionaire slapfight. Here’s what’s really at stake.
(Politico) At the White House on Tuesday, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son confidently predicted that “artificial superintelligence” will kick off America’s “golden age.” President Donald Trump beamed as Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison announced a $500 billion investment in an American scheme to unlock the potential of super-powerful AI.
The goodwill didn’t last 24 hours.

21 January
The Tech Oligarchy Arrives
Donald Trump’s inauguration signaled a new alliance —for now— with some of the world’s wealthiest men.
(The Atlantic) What wealthy donors could get in return for their support of Trump remains an open question. Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocket-ship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter, the social-media giant he later took over and renamed X. (A lawyer for Musk has said he did “nothing wrong.”) When Trump promised in his inaugural address to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” the cameras panned to Musk, whose SpaceX is racing Bezos’s Blue Origin. …
Tech titans take center stage at Trump inauguration
(Today Show) A lineup of tech titans including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, were front and center at Donald Trump’s inauguration — with seats in the first row in front of some cabinet nominees. NBC’s Hallie Jackson reports for TODAY on the new ties between the president and billionaire CEOs.

18 January
How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?
(NYT Opinion) On Sunday evening, the night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, scores of luminaries from across the New Right are expected to gather for a dinner and gala called the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel. … [T]his upstart coalition of thinkers may be best described simply as the intellectual wing of Trumpism. … [The gala] seems intended to mark the ascent of a new counterelite with aspirations to supplant the existing establishment in everything from high politics to business and culture. But this is a loose alliance, colored by rivalries and complex divisions.
… When Elon Musk endorsed Mr. Trump, putting a great deal of personal money and energy into the project of MAGA populism, he joined figures like the venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks and the crypto exchange founder Tyler Winklevoss in what represents one of the most surprising and disruptive alliances in American political history. Tech emerged as an alternate power center to the Republican establishment. Silicon Valley money filled in for dollars lost from the traditional donor class. As the presidential transition took shape, tech figures stepped in to supply elite human capital, as they put it, to staff the new administration.

12-18 January
Trump Just Handed Steve Bannon a Big Weapon in His War With Elon Musk
The onerous new immigration bill would empower state attorneys general to force wholesale visa denials. It turns out Bannon can use this to his advantage in the MAGA civil war over immigration.
(The New Republic-TNR) Republicans may not know it yet, but they’re in the process of handing Steve Bannon a powerful weapon to wield in his war with Elon Musk over visas granted to high-skilled immigrants. This could further divide the MAGA coalition over immigration—and badly inconvenience Musk, who is trying to protect those visas from a ferocious assault being waged by Bannon and his allies.
The weapon in question, it turns out, is buried in the Laken Riley Act, the controversial bill that would mandate the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of minor nonviolent crimes.
Eugene Robinson: The Great MAGA Schism of 2025 is only getting uglier
War of words between Musk and Bannon shows gap between rhetoric and reality
Donald Trump hasn’t been inaugurated yet, and already two bellicose titans of the MAGA universe are waging total war — against each other.
… This war of words between two insufferable blowhards reveals a consequential schism in the MAGA world — and the yawning gap between MAGA rhetoric and objective reality.
It is an article of faith among some of Trump’s most loyal and avid supporters that immigration is a bad thing, period. In this view, the H-1B program is nothing more than a way for tech companies to hire foreign workers who can be paid less than American citizens and who cannot complain or quit because of their immigration status. Bannon speaks for this group when he calls for “a 100 percent moratorium on all immigration until we get this thing sorted.”
Musk and other tech leaders see the program as a way to maintain U.S. technological primacy by attracting the most creative and talented engineers from around the world. Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s partner in the advisory “Department of Government Efficiency,” goes much further.

As Trump prepares to take power, MAGA can’t stop the ugly infighting
A new clash between Stephen K. Bannon and Elon Musk epitomizes the fraught and bellicose confederation that surrounds Donald Trump.
(WaPo) …because Trump has proved so malleable, there is a premium on being the one in his ear.
That dynamic is already leading to a rash of infighting over who grabs that ear and guides both Trump and his base.
And the fight over what Trumpism means has gotten quite ugly quite quickly.
Steve Bannon derides Elon Musk, vowing to limit influence over Trump
By Jeff Stein
President-elect Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon is ramping up public attacks on billionaire Elon Musk amid an intensifying debate on the right about Musk’s influence in the incoming administration.
Bannon has also criticized Musk’s support for a skilled-worker visa program that led to a bitter rift last month between far-right activists and Trump’s tech executive supporters, who see the program as a crucial lifeline for Silicon Valley.
Trump ultimately sided with Musk in that dispute, but Bannon said he is preparing a broader effort to limit the Tesla executive’s ability to shape Trump’s agenda.

10 January
Elon Has Appointed Himself King of the World
After helping Trump win the election, the world’s richest man is turning his attention to Europe.
By Ali Breland
(The Atlantic) Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. … After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”
Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics.

8 January
There is little the US can do to constrain Elon Musk. But here are some ideas
Robert Reich
Musk is not the first person in history to be seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although this may be the first time so much power is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.
(The Guardian) …politicians everywhere now recognize his capacity to pour money into their parties and political campaigns, as he did by investing a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected.
He also owns X, formerly Twitter, which (as of December 2024) has 619 million monthly active users. He has manipulated X’s algorithm to boost his own posts, which now reach 210 million.
But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be president of the United States.
For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in the US can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X.
Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least:
Enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
Maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
Refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
Disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company.