JB: One of the earliest headlines involving Trump and Musk that I can remember is from 2017, during Trump’s first term, when Musk quit the White House advisory councils he had been part of over Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord. How well did the two men actually know each other before 2024?
JS: They had no relationship. It was very superficial. Musk thought Trump was kind of an idiot. He sort of had a contempt for him. He was critical of him publicly, and he supported Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president. But last year, he began telling friends he wanted to support Trump secretly, and he shared his ideas at dinners with some of the wealthiest people in the world. He began to suggest on social media that he thought it essential that Biden be defeated, although he maintained publicly he wouldn’t donate to either presidential candidate.
He’d also, for the last few years, been engaging in secret political spending on cultural issues, but he didn’t want his name attached to it. His adviser on political spending was Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest aides. But the moment when he decided to go all in was when Trump was shot in the ear in Butler, Pa. And from that moment, he escalated and escalated his support.
At that time, did Trump and his advisers anticipate Musk playing the role he is now?
No, absolutely not. Of course not. Who could expect this? With Elon Musk, things accelerate so quickly. He went from publicly criticizing Trump to considering it his entire mission in life to get him elected. When that’s your mind-set, it moves very quickly into proposing that he’ll slash government spending himself. He seeded this idea with Trump. Trump doesn’t think about the fine details of trimming government spending. He added $8 trillion to the national debt in his first term, and he gave exactly zero thought to that during the campaign. He was focused on winning. But Musk takes it very seriously. So it moved really fast.
How aware is Trump of what Musk is doing, and how much control does he have over Musk?
Musk is effectively unaccountable. He tells Trump what he’s doing, but it’s not like Trump wants to have a detailed conversation about what Musk is up to at the Office of Personnel Management. Trump, at a very high level, knows what Musk is doing. They talk all the time, but Musk doesn’t report to anyone in a regularized or detailed way. He’s very close to Stephen Miller. He’s close to Russell Vought. He’s really a lone ranger, and he’s running very, very fast. And so far, so long as Trump has given him this broad blessing, that’s it.