Trump vs Musk: Call the breakup poetic justice. Call it karmic crypto-collapse. Just don't call it surprising
When two men believe the world revolves around them, it's only a matter of time before their orbits collide. And when they do, the explosion isn't quiet. Rather, it's a full-blown Twitter meltdown with echoes loud enough to rattle both Wall Street and Mar-a-Lago. And boy, we are watching the best cosmic collision since Pluto got downgraded.
Welcome to the spectacular implosion of the Trump–Musk bromance. What began as a mutual admiration society of billionaire chest-thumping and red-hat flirting has now devolved into the kind of public breakup even the Real Housewives would find a bit too messy.
Let's rewind.
Once upon a time, in the golden age of post-truth politics, Elon Musk, the tech messiah, meme lord, and part-time Mars enthusiast, decided to dip his toes into political kingmaking. A neat little $277 million was funnelled into the Donald Trump campaign machinery. In any other part of the world, this would be called oligarchic meddling. In the United States, it's called 'Super Tuesday'.
Trump, ever the transactional romantic, reciprocated by giving Musk a cosy seat at the regulatory table named DOGE, where he could quietly dismantle watchdogs, neuter climate policies, and make capitalism great again (for Tesla stock). Love was in the air. Or maybe, it was just the fumes from Musk's Boring Company flamethrowers.
But like all ill-fated love stories, this one came with red flags. Musk's reputation, once burnished with visions of space colonies and clean energy, began to crumble under the weight of layoffs, lawsuits, and livestreamed tantrums. Turns out, being the adult in the room is hard when you're too busy rebranding Twitter into an unpronounceable algebra problem.
Enter phase two: Reputation rehab.
Suddenly, Musk was 'distancing' himself from the Trump administration. He quit councils, tweeted vaguely progressive things, and flirted with the idea of centrism, all while pretending he hadn't spent the past four years quietly enjoying deregulation like a raccoon in a trash buffet.
But this Thursday? The façade shattered.
In a tweet that will one day be studied in both communications courses and FBI depositions, Musk posted: 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files.'
He even had the gall to add: 'Have a nice day, DJT!'
That wasn't a mic drop. That was a nuke in 280 characters.
And let's be honest: If anyone was going to try to cancel someone else using Jeffrey Epstein, it was always likely to be Musk.
Trump, unsurprisingly, didn't take it well. His reply was less subtle than a red tie in a wind tunnel: Musk is 'crazy,' and perhaps more worryingly for SpaceX investors, he threatened to cut off government contracts.
Suddenly, two men who once shared bromantic photo ops and mutual disdain for accountability were hurling legal threats across a billion-dollar battlefield. Kanye West (of course) tried to play counsellor, tweeting something along the lines of 'bros don't fight, we love you both'. Unfortunately, love is dead and so is Kanye's credibility.
And yet… are we really witnessing the final act?
Let's not forget: Trump has made up with worse. Just ask Marco 'sweaty little man' Rubio or Ted 'your wife is ugly' Cruz. With Trump, personal insults are just foreplay. It's politics as WWE: Everyone's bleeding, but it's still part of the script.
Still, there's something deliciously different this time. This feud doesn't feel like kayfabe. It feels real. Real messy. Real vindictive. Real stupid. And that makes it… kind of beautiful?
Because if 2025 is going to be yet another parade of rich men yelling into microphones about how oppressed they are, the least we can ask for is a little entertainment. Preferably the kind that ends in lawsuits and meme wars.
So, grab your popcorn. Watch the world's richest man implode on the platform he owns, while being roasted by the guy he helped elect. Call it poetic justice. Call it karmic crypto-collapse. Call it what you will.
Just don't call it surprising.
After all, in the immortal words of the internet, 'This you?'
sudhanshu.mishra@indianexpress.com
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The Hindu
27 minutes ago
- The Hindu
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Mint
27 minutes ago
- Mint
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Business Standard
27 minutes ago
- Business Standard
US-EU trade deal wards off escalation, to raise costs for firms, consumers
President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have announced a sweeping trade deal that imposes 15 per cent tariffs on most European goods, warding off Trump's threat of a 30 per cent rate if no deal had been reached by August 1. The tariffs, or import taxes, paid when Americans buy European products could raise prices for US consumers and dent profits for European companies and their partners who bring goods into the country. Here are some things to know about the trade deal between the United States and the European Union: What's in the agreement? Trump and von der Leyen's announcement, made during Trump's visit to one of his golf courses in Scotland, leaves many details to be filled in. The headline figure is a 15 per cent tariff rate on the vast majority of European goods brought into the US, including cars, computer chips and pharmaceuticals. It's lower than the 20 per cent Trump initially proposed, and lower than his threats of 50 per cent and then 30 per cent. Von der Leyen said the two sides agreed on zero tariffs on both sides for a range of strategic goods: Aircraft and aircraft parts, certain chemicals, semiconductor equipment, certain agricultural products, and some natural resources and critical raw materials. Specifics were lacking. She said the two sides would keep working to add more products to the list. Additionally, the EU side would purchase what Trump said was USD 750 billion worth of natural gas, oil and nuclear fuel to replace Russian energy supplies, and Europeans would invest an additional USD 600 billion in the US. What's not in the deal? Trump said the 50 per cent US tariff on imported steel would remain; von der Leyen said the two sides agreed to further negotiations to fight a global steel glut, reduce tariffs and establish import quotas that is, set amounts that can be imported, often at a lower rate. Trump said pharmaceuticals were not included in the deal. Von der Leyen said the pharmaceuticals issue was on a separate sheet of paper from Sunday's deal. Where the $600 billion for additional investment would come from was not specified. And von der Leyen said that when it came to farm products, the EU side made clear that there were tariffs that could not be lowered, without specifying which products. What's the impact? The 15 per cent rate removes Trump's threat of a 30 per cent tariff. It's still much higher than the average tariff before Trump came into office of around 1 per cent, and higher than Trump's minimum 10 per cent baseline tariff. Higher tariffs, or import taxes, on European goods mean sellers in the US would have to either increase prices for consumers risking loss of market share or swallow the added cost in terms of lower profits. The higher tariffs are expected to hurt export earnings for European firms and slow the economy. The 10 per cent baseline applied while the deal was negotiated was already sufficiently high to make the European Union's executive commission cut its growth forecast for this year from 1.3 per cent to 0.9 per cent. Von der Leyen said the 15 per cent rate was the best we could do and credited the deal with maintaining access to the US market and providing stability and predictability for companies on both sides. What is some of the reaction to the deal? German Chancellor Friedrich Merz welcomed the deal which avoided an unnecessary escalation in transatlantic trade relations" and said that we were able to preserve our core interests, while adding that I would have very much wished for further relief in transatlantic trade. The Federation of German Industries was blunter. "Even a 15 per cent tariff rate will have immense negative effects on export-oriented German industry," said Wolfgang Niedermark, a member of the federation's leadership. While the rate is lower than threatened, "the big caveat to today's deal is that there is nothing on paper, yet," said Carsten Brzeski, global chief of macro at ING bank. With this disclaimer in mind and at face value, today's agreement would clearly bring an end to the uncertainty of recent months. An escalation of the US-EU trade tensions would have been a severe risk for the global economy," Brzeski said. This risk seems to have been avoided. What about car companies? Asked if European carmakers could still sell cars at 15 per cent, von der Leyen said the rate was much lower than the current 27.5 per cent. That has been the rate under Trump's 25 per cent tariff on cars from all countries, plus the preexisting US car tariff of 2.5 per cent. The impact is likely to be substantial on some companies, given that automaker Volkswagen said it suffered a $1.5 billion hit to profit in the first half of the year from the higher tariffs. Mercedes-Benz dealers in the US have said they are holding the line on 2025 model year prices until further notice. The German automaker has a partial tariff shield because it makes 35 per cent of the Mercedes-Benz vehicles sold in the US in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but the company said it expects prices to undergo significant increases in coming years. What were the issues dividing the two sides? Before Trump returned to office, the US and the EU maintained generally low tariff levels in what is the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world, with some USD 2 trillion in annual trade. Together the US and the EU have 44 per cent of the global economy. The US rate averaged 1.47 per cent for European goods, while the EU's averaged 1.35 per cent for American products, according to the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. Trump has complained about the EU's 198 billion-euro trade surplus in goods, which shows Americans buy more from European businesses than the other way around, and has said the European market is not open enough for US-made cars. However, American companies fill some of the trade gap by outselling the EU when it comes to services such as cloud computing, travel bookings, and legal and financial services. And some 30 per cent of European imports are from American-owned companies, according to the European Central Bank. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
