Oh, to be a fly on the wall at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort or perhaps, a fly caught in the hair plugs of businessman Elon Musk, when the bromance of the decade imploded like one of Tesla’s semi-trucks on an icy incline.

The latest billionaire bar brawl in the headlines features Musk, the perma-pivoting tech pope of libertarian X, calling for Trump to be impeached. The same Trump he recently drenched in cash, MAGA merchandise and Muskian praise. The same Trump who fluffed him with a fictional cabinet post, handed him the budget knife and parroted his absurd claims about a “white genocide” in South Africa.

Now, it has all gone sideways.

What happened? A lovers’ quarrel over tariffs and taxes? Did the stock market plunge too deep for Musk’s brittle ego to absorb? Is something deeper brewing, something obscured behind the patriotic hashtags and choreographed punch-ups?

The year of living deliriously

It had become clear by late 2024 that Musk and Trump were locked in a full-throttle bromance. Joe Biden, the US president and Democratic Party candidate, had withdrawn from the race after a humiliating debate defeat.

Musk, who once straddled the political centre like a yoga teacher in an ethics class, had become a full-blown sugar daddy of America’s Grand Old Party. He pumped nearly $250 million into Trump’s campaign and even joined rallies, belly on display, decked up in Trump merchandise.

In return, Trump gave him a ceremonial helm at the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, a bureaucratic fever dream intent on turning governance into a crypto meme.

Musk responded with what appeared to be an episode of Black Mirror written by Ayn Rand. Thousands of US federal workers were sacked. Entire programmes gutted: the US Agency for Global Media, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, Ebola prevention, food aid – all tossed aside.

Trump called him a “genius patriot”. Musk called him “a friend”. For a moment, their union seemed unshakable.

Then came the snap.

The tweet heard around Wall Street

On June 5, Musk, freshly resigned from DOGE and clearly nursing a bruised portfolio, logged onto X and set the internet ablaze. He denounced Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (a title presumably conceived during a fever dream in an Arby’s car park) as a “disgusting abomination”.

Musk claimed it would balloon the US deficit by $2.5 trillion and reposted calls to “fire all politicians”, including one sly repost calling for Trump to be impeached.

Trump, as thin-skinned as ever, responded on his Truth Social account like a jilted contestant from The Apprentice: “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!.”

Within hours, as Reuters reports, shares of Tesla, Musk’s company that manufactures electric vehicles, plummeted by 14%, wiping out roughly $150 billion in market value.

So much for market stability. Or adult supervision.

Ego vs empire

Let us be honest. Musk does not play second fiddle. He is used to rooms full of nodding heads as he rants about AI, Mars, and the “woke mind virus”. Trump, on the other hand, only shares the stage with himself. Their fallout was inevitable. What made it explosive was timing.

Musk’s businesses are suffering. Trump’s tariffs have hit Tesla like a brick. Protests have recast Musk not as a genius but a neo-feudalist with a rocket fetish. Turning on Trump may have been a desperate attempt at rebranding: “Look! I am still the edgy rebel billionaire. Down with the swamp. Up with the vibes.”

Civil rights and democracy?

DOGE was a bloodbath. Programmes supporting global health, media freedom, and human rights were savaged. Federal workers were forced to justify their roles through humiliating email chains. Musk’s supposed “free speech absolutism” on X transformed into coordinated censorship, especially against critics of Trump.

Yet Musk had no problem amplifying claims of “white genocide” in South Africa and calling for punitive measures against the African National Congress. It was a dog whistle so loud, it cracked glass in Soweto.

Trump embraced these claims and offered refugee status to white Afrikaners, eagerly slotting the narrative into his anti-globalist, nativist pitch.

Neither man is shedding tears for democracy. They are simply fighting over who gets to drive the bulldozer.

The new party gambit

Now Musk is floating the idea of a new centrist party in the US “for the 80 percent in the middle”. It is the kind of vague, populist piffle that sounds profound until you realise it’s just a shiny distraction.

Is he serious, or is this another Muskian fever dream, like colonising Mars by teatime? A third party could be a vanity project, a way to siphon off GOP voters miffed at Trump’s deficit-busting ways.

But Musk’s track record, pouring millions into Republican campaigns, suggests he is more likely to bankroll a splinter faction than build a centrist utopia.

This tweet-roll, anyway, is enough to rattle a fragile GOP already torn between MAGA zealots and Reagan necrophiliacs.

More likely, Musk wants leverage.

So what now?

Musk is licking his wounds, firing off erratic posts on X. Trump continues his deficit-fuelled joyride through the US Congress. The bromance is over. The receipts are public. His contracts with the US government are under threat. And, as always, it is the public, Americans and otherwise, left footing the bill.

Civil society is disoriented. Markets are volatile. The so-called sensible centre has been reduced to a tweet thread.

What is the takeaway? There is none, really. No fresh insight. No profound lesson.

If I were a trained psychologist, I might describe this clash as a case of unresolved daddy issues and masculinity gone rogue. But I am a student of policy and politics, so I would call it what it is: God complexes. Musk and Trump are cut from the same cloth, narcissists who feed on chaos and applause. Do not let the schoolyard insults fool you.

This feud is a crack in the polished façade of American plutocracy. But it could be anywhere – India, Germany, Brazil. Musk’s pivot to critic-in-chief may be a genuine stand against fiscal lunacy, or it may simply be a cynical manoeuvre to save his own skin. Trump’s threats to dismantle Musk’s empire could be the tantrum of an autocrat or a strategic bid to hold his base.

Either way, democracy and civil rights are mere collateral damage in their endless game of thrones. The bromance did not collapse over principle. It collapsed over profit. Not because one of them grew a conscience, but because their interests stopped aligning.

And if we are smart, we will stop watching the cage match and start noticing who is looting the arena while we are distracted.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate from the Willy Brandt School and Central European University.