Did Elon Musk Win the Election for Trump?

The election is over, and Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House. The next several months—and maybe years—will be spent analyzing what actually tipped this election, but we at WIRED Politics Lab have a theory: Elon Musk. Throughout the election season, and especially in the homestretch, Musk used his influence and platform to try to shape the results. Today, Leah sits down with Vittoria Elliott and Timothy Marchman to discuss whether it worked.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Vittoria Elliott is @telliotter. Tim Marchman is @timmarchman. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Well, I want to thank you all very much. This is great. These are our friends. We have thousands of friends in this incredible movement.

Leah Feiger: Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House. He declared his victory in the early hours of Wednesday morning, from his campaign headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe beyond.

Leah Feiger: The win was decisive, almost shockingly so. Many of us are still figuring out the big factor that pushed the country hard to the right. Here at WIRED, however, we have a theory, and we’ve been reporting on him for a while: Elon Musk.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Who did you say?

[Archival audio]: Elon.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Oh, let me tell you. We have a new star. A star is born, Elon.

Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. As we discussed on the show a few weeks ago, Elon jumped into the political conversation this cycle in a big way, endorsing Trump, joining him at rallies, and putting a lot of money behind him, over a hundred million dollars. Did his influence make the difference for Trump, and what happens now? Joining me today to talk about all of this and more is WIRED’s director of science, politics, and security, Tim Marchman. Hey, Tim.

Tim Marchman: Hey, glad to be here.

Leah Feiger: Glad you’re here too. Also joining, is WIRED senior reporter Vittoria Elliott. Hey, Tori.

Vittoria Elliott: Hey, Leah.

Leah Feiger: Quick check-in guys. How are you both doing?

Vittoria Elliott: I don’t know what day it is.

Tim Marchman: I really need to just go to the park and read a Victorian novel, or play shuffleboard or something.

Vittoria Elliott: That sounds great. Honestly, I wish someone would prescribe me some seaside time, like they used to.

Leah Feiger: Instead of seaside time and instead of reading a Victorian novel in the park, we should just talk about Elon Musk. Right? That also sounds incredibly fun to me.

Tim Marchman: I think we’re going to be talking about Elon Musk for the next four years. I, for one, can’t wait.

Leah Feiger: Let’s get into it. So, the big question to me, and I think to probably all of us, is did Elon Musk make this happen? Is he responsible, or at least quite responsible, very responsible, largely responsible for this Trump victory? What do you think?

Vittoria Elliott: I don’t think that he made it happen all his own. I think we have seen a lot of demographic shifts in the groups that support or feel aligned with the Republican Party, or at least with Donald Trump. But I definitely think there are very valuable sectors of the population that Musk did motivate.

Leah Feiger: Tim, where’s your head here?

Tim Marchman: I would actually disagree a little bit with Tori, and I don’t think there was probably a measurable impact from what Musk did, because the thing that Musk brings above all else is this overwhelming attention vortex. He is constant, he’s ubiquitous, he is non-stop, he is pushing 1,000 things at any one time, and he commands attention as the richest man in the world. That is also true of Donald Trump. Donald Trump upends conventional laws of electoral politics because he is a celebrity of long-standing, and he knows how to manipulate the news cycle. So, while there was certainly value to what Musk did, and I wouldn’t say it was worthless or anything like that, in terms of attributing specific demos or could a political scientist quantify how much he was worth the polls? I think that would be really tricky to do, because if he’s a 100 out of 100 on the getting attention and driving attention to things scale, so is Trump. You can’t have more than the maximum. So, that’s where I wonder if he really had an effect. Where I would say his most crucial impact probably was in, I feel like it’s becoming a cliche, but creating a permission structure for other people, especially other tech leaders, to come out in support of Trump. Which even as recently as in the summer, it was fairly rare. There was a lot of hesitancy to really come out full-throated as MAGA. I think when Musk did, that allowed a lot of other people too.

Leah Feiger: He really, really came out though. I mean, I don’t know if I totally agree with you about, you can’t go bigger than the higher, etc. Yes, Trump had the audience, he had the people that were about to lie down at his feet. But Musk brought in an entirely new population. He has over 200 million followers on X. He runs and owns X. He has set those algorithms. We’re looking at something entirely different.

Vittoria Elliott: But I think to add to that, I don’t think it’s just a permission structure for Tech CEOs to funnel their money to Trump. Silicon Valley has had a libertarian, right-leaning strain for a really long time. But I think also, there might have been people in that space of white men fan base that Musk really does cultivate, that obviously can be a bit more diverse than that but that is a lot of it, who may have again felt Trump curious. But certainly felt, I think, more energized for him once Musk was onside. Talking to voters in Pennsylvania, people really were like, “We have the smartest man in the world on our team. We have the inventor of all of these incredible things.” I think it also offered, while it may have lowered Musk in the estimation of some of the people on the left, I think in many ways Musk was able to use a little bit of the clout that he had left to make it look like Donald Trump was really actually bringing the best minds onto his side.

Leah Feiger: So, obviously, Tori, you were in Pennsylvania a lot this month. You’re there right now. You watched all of this go down. You were also at the first rally that Trump brought Musk out to in Butler, Pennsylvania, in early October. Talk to us specifically about the people that you were chatting to. Was there anyone who was like, “Oh, I was sour on Trump, but then Musk entered?” Or was it just an additional? What are we talking here?

Vittoria Elliott: It was an additional. But it was really, I think it was like people were really, really stoked. I think they felt that it added more legitimacy to Trump, to have someone who the media and other leaders have built up over the better part of almost two decades at this point, coming in and saying, “Trump is the right leader and this is the way forward.” I think my sense is there’s a real frustration, especially with younger voters, about the idea, the future doesn’t look as bright as they were promised it was going to be. One thing Musk does with his talk of space travel and electric cars, is make the future sound exciting, in a way that I think is appealing to people. So, that was definitely the vibe that I got from people in Butler, that they were excited that he was there, they were excited about his ideas. Again, that they felt it lent their candidate a lot of legitimacy to have someone so smart and so accomplished siding with him.

Leah Feiger: Let’s get into his actual pack that he dumped millions and millions of dollars into, America Pack. How big of an impact do you think that it had in swing states? What did they do with the money, the ads and videos they ran? I’m curious for all of your thoughts here.

Tim Marchman: Well, he donated at least $118 million. There are more financial disclosures to come, so we’ll eventually find out how much in total. As far as the Get Out to Vote operation that he had subcontracted to him, as far as I can tell the money was basically set on fire. I don’t think it did anything aside from incur at least one lawsuit. One can surmise that there are going to be more coming from workers.

Leah Feiger: I mean, we have to obviously talk about all of our WIRED reporting here. Very proud of our team and our lovely freelancer, Jake Lahut. But over this last week, WIRED’s been reporting on conditions that were really, really extreme. Canvassers said that they were driven around and seat-less and seatbelt-less, U-Haul fans, they weren’t paid on time, they were forced to work sick. It sounds like such a mess, and yet here we are obviously with a Trump victory.

Tim Marchman: Yeah. But Elon doesn’t miss the money. He has $250 billion on paper, and it’s hard to get your head around what an inconsequential sum $100 plus million is relative to that. I live in Philadelphia, so I was getting some mailers from America Pack. They were pretty erratic and weirdly targeted, and it doesn’t seem like it was much of a genius operation there either. But I don’t think any of it much mattered one way or the other. There’s academic research that really casts doubt on the efficacy of door knocking and calling and sending people things, that doesn’t persuade people. What it does is maybe connect a campaign with people who wouldn’t know how to vote. So, even if that money didn’t get really tangible results upfront, that’s still one thing. But it goes back to that point about attention. Elon Musk is personally pulling out $100 million dollars plus out of his pocket and putting it on the table to support Donald Trump, sends a huge message. Of course, ultimately to him, what that probably is is an investment in influence. Donald Trump is somebody, if you give him $100 million dollars, he’s going to have a good table for you at Mar-a-Lago. He’s going to take your phone calls and he’s going to open the doors of the White House to you. So, if we’re looking at it in the narrow sense of like, was this optimized efficient spending? Is this what a money-ball campaign would’ve done? No, I think he could have flushed it down the toilet and gotten about as much out of it as he did. In terms of it furthering his agenda and really irrevocably tying him to Trump and to MAGA, and signaling that he was truly all in, yeah, it did that. Because Trump could have lost, and if Trump had lost there possibly could have been consequences for Musk.

Leah Feiger: We’d be having a different conversation right now. I mean so much of it did feel like a stunt while it was happening too. The million dollar per day stunt, that was such a news grab. That was a headline grab, that was an SEO grab. Obviously his efforts were super, super different from the Harris campaigns, in ways that I am sure that we’ll continue unpacking over the weeks and months ahead. But Tori, you created a timeline earlier this week that we published, that really tracked from the entire last month of Elon Musk. What’s your takeaway from that? What can we glean from everything that he was doing, tweeting, sharing, donating, all the way down to Peanut the squirrel, what’s our month takeaway?

Vittoria Elliott: Oh, my God. You said earlier this week and I was like, this week? That can’t be right. You can view a lot of what Musk was doing over the past month as really… Expert calculation around that, particularly around the state of Pennsylvania, which was the swing state. So, showing up at the Butler rally on October 5th, was such a big thing. Not only because it was western Pennsylvania, which is a key area of the state, but also because that is where the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump occurred. So, it was this big symbolic thing, and that’s where Musk debuted his in-person support for Trump. I think that was extraordinarily calculated. The fact that he committed to spend $45 million a month on the America Pack when he first endorsed Trump. He didn’t necessarily spend that in those trenches or whatever, but it was about grabbing the headlines and again, showing how much he believed in it. I mean, this is a man who promotes meme coins on his platform. If you think about it in that way, he’s very good at this, driving short bursts of attention around stuff. I think towards the end of the election, similarly with the $1 million giveaway, that’s something that generates real headlines day after day, people are watching it. They’re wondering where that person is going to be. For the people that had the opportunity to get that million dollars, which was only people in swing states, you’re generating interest, you’re generating attention, you’re signing the petition. Suddenly he has the attention for this thing and that can inch into something else. I think that’s really what we saw. Even down to the Peanut the squirrel thing. He spent the last weekend before the election, we thought he would be out, we thought he would be stumping. Instead he was somewhere inside, tweeting about a squirrel named Peanut that was internet famous. I think on October 30th, it was confiscated from its owners by animal control in the state of New York, and euthanized because it also lived with a raccoon that had been adopted and the state said it could possibly have rabies. The entire weekend was just bombarded with memes about Peanut. He made it political so quickly. It was, “This is what happens when you live in a Democratic state. This is what they’ll do. Why are they doing this and not going after Epstein?” That is all shit-posting, but really attention grabbing.

Leah Feiger: No, I mean it was a play for the through line of the election. We talked about Elon Musk every single day, what he was contributing, what he was talking about, what he was doing well, what he was doing poorly and his spheres of influence. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back with more on Musk’s influence over the 2024 election results, and how he tapped into the Manosphere. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Let’s talk for a little bit about Musk’s other big source of power and influence, his online presence and the online platform that he owns. How did he use X during the last couple of months and what effect do we think that it had?

Vittoria Elliott: He super-powered Trump talking points that were at best mis-informative, at worst disinformation, particularly talking points around undocumented immigrants being able to vote, and Democrats wanting to give undocumented immigrants citizenship to turn all swing states blue.

Leah Feiger: No. He had conspiracy theories coming out of everywhere, truly hitting every single great talking point. He was sharing them with such urgency and with such speed, and the way that his algorithm works they were just popped up in my personal feed constantly.

Vittoria Elliott: All the time. I mean, again, I point out to literally everyone, even before he purchased the platform, Musk was a Twitter super user. He was one of, I think, the 10 most followed people on the platform. So, even if the algorithm was not weighted towards him, which there’s suspicion to believe that it is, he would still have incredible reach.

Tim Marchman: It’s so overpowering. I think of it like a drone swarm attack, where you just send out cheap drones and you send out endless quantities of them and you overwhelm air defense. Before the break, we were talking about Peanut the squirrel. Do you know what Peanut the squirrel overwhelmed on X? The release of audio of Jeffrey Epstein describing Donald Trump as his best friend of 10 years.

Vittoria Elliott: Wild.

Tim Marchman: Talking about how Trump would sleep with his friend’s wives. That’s not to say that he didn’t have his own ties to people like Bill Clinton, because he did. But just through sheer volume of nonsense, he’s able to take an issue like that, own it and become the protagonist of it. It’s fascinating.

Vittoria Elliott: One of the Peanut memes was literally saying, “Why do Democrats have money to euthanize a squirrel, but not to investigate Epstein’s client list?” It is just, you can’t make it up.

Leah Feiger: Full circle. Terrible. Of course, simultaneous to all of this, he’s getting out the vote. He has over 200 million followers, like we said, on X alone. I’ll never forget this, this honestly changed what the election looked like for me. It was in early October, and Musk was tweeting out, telling people to register to vote in Pennsylvania, and in Arizona. Then including the link for voter registration. We were looking at analytics, and I think it was something like 30 million people saw these posts, and one million people clicked the links. That is so many people. Do you know how many Harris canvassers and doorknockers there had to be, or influencers, that the campaign is subcontracting in order to even sort of compete with that? So, he has an onslaught of conspiracy theories and boosting absolutely bananas people on the platform that were kicked off years ago and then welcomed back on. And also getting out the vote. It was this trifecta of terribleness, and effectiveness.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. Well, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk’s tweets from the day he endorsed Donald Trump until October 25th, reached over seven billion views. That to get that kind of impression you would need, in ad buys you would need to pay $24 million to get that kind of reach on X, if you were just getting that reach via ads. He is this really priceless communications asset.

Tim Marchman: I just read an oral history of the New York Post. It’s a great book. It’s called Paper of Wreckage. I’d recommend it to anybody, it’s very entertaining. Near the end of the book someone calculates that Rupert Murdoch probably lost a billion dollars. Nominal, they figured about three billion, adjusted for inflation, on the New York Post every year, [inaudible 00:19:07]. Fox, at the same time, was throwing off a billion dollars in revenue every year. He made it up elsewhere in his empire. In a lot of ways, that’s how I’ve been thinking about Musk, is just as a very traditional media baron who owns a megaphone and uses the megaphone.

Leah Feiger: The new Rupert Murdoch.

Tim Marchman: Yeah. He’s a self-styled futurist, a Tony Stark, all that. But he’s also a very familiar figure, right out of one of those Victorian novels

Leah Feiger: That you desperately want to be reading on-

Tim Marchman: In the park reading.

Leah Feiger: … a park somewhere. Yes, soon.

Tim Marchman: We know this kind of figure. Just somebody who owns a mass media outlet and uses it to promote his interests. That is exactly what you’re describing there.

Vittoria Elliott: For a story that we published yesterday about how Musk has, by rolling back all of these protections at what was formerly Twitter, he’s a flown cover for a lot of other tech companies that have also rolled back their protections, but not quite as violently. One of the former Twitter employees I spoke to for the piece said, “You know, Musk is a smart man fundamentally. Not about everything, but about a lot of things.” We have a long history in this country of really rich people owning newspapers, like Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post. But Musk realizes that social media is media and the better play if you want to control the conversation is not necessarily to own a paper, but to own the platform.

Leah Feiger: Obviously we’ve all been talking about this in our group Slacks and have been for some time, but the elephant in the room is the online bro culture and the Manosphere, and the podcast bros that have really shaped this election. Musk is obviously a member of this cadre and has become one of its leaders. Talk to me about some of these views and how you guys think that this has impacted what we’re seeing here right now.

Vittoria Elliott: Oh, damn. I have so many feelings. I think it’s particularly telling that instead of being out on the campaign trail on Monday, Musk spent almost three hours in a studio in Texas with Joe Rogan. I think that should indicate to all of us how important someone like Joe Rogan, who was hesitant with his endorsement, but has definitely been a pillar on the more acceptable end of the Manosphere, to think about how important he is as a figure for that community. Young men, young disaffected men, are not exactly the most reliable voting demographic. So, to me, actually waiting until the last minute makes a lot of sense, because I think if that endorsement had come out in August, it would’ve been really easy for that to lose steam. But you’re talking about a group of people for whom that sort of sustained political engagement is not really their vibe. But to have it come out the night before the election, so it’s actually a more immediate choice off of the back of that endorsement, makes a lot of sense to me. I think when we’re talking about this, we’re talking about the Manosphere. Some of the views that Musk has parroted from its darker depths have been anti-diversity, equity inclusion initiatives, this emphasis on childbearing and child-rearing. Musk has at least 11 children that we know of, with at least three different women. This very pro-natalist view, this view that people should be having big families, that they should be having children, and implicit in that, that women should be child-rearing, and that women’s obligation is to use their body for creating children and for the perpetuating of the human species.

Tim Marchman: When I think of the Manosphere, I think Andrew Tate, an accused sexual trafficker who overtly tells sexually frustrated young men that women’s bodies are there for their use, and purports to give them instructions on how to sexually enslave them for their own sexual satisfaction and to make money. Everything is downstream of that. From direct Tate imitators, to people who are way on the far other end of the Manosphere and are more or less respectable, they’re still swimming in the same water. We’ve all seen the statistics about how for many large, complicated social reasons that we don’t fully understand yet, young men, a lot of them, they aren’t having sex, they aren’t going to college, they don’t have friends. There’s a big pool of these people who, disaffected almost doesn’t get at it, they’re cut off from all this. They’re cut off from a rounded life.

Leah Feiger: The podcast bros bring them back into the light.

Tim Marchman: Bring them into this. The unifying thread here is not just a generalized misogyny, but a view of women as tools to be used by and for men. When you pair that with an opportunity to vote against a woman, to vote against a woman who Taylor Swift has supported, to vote against a woman who’s promising to restore access to abortion, it really does make a lot of sense. Like candidly, a lot of the reason I thought Harris had a really good shot and I was leaning towards thinking she was going to win, I was feeling relatively sure within the confines of a 50/50 race that she had the marginal advantages. One of the big ones was just, she was looking to turn out older women, very reliable voters. He was looking to negate that advantage by getting crushed by less in certain demographics, reducing the marginal edge. A key part of that was young men, and I didn’t really see it. It happened. That’s a political reality that will be very important going forward.

Leah Feiger: Do we think that these online men, and by extension Elon, then actually provided that crucial turnout that tipped the election to Trump?

Tim Marchman: I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a key part of the coalition. I mean, the exit polls are still a little shaky. It’s not like we’re looking at the really detailed ones that we’re going to get when the voter files are released. But, yeah. That seems to be a key part of assembling a coalition for Trump. There was a big turn among Latino men. Young men voted for Harris, but it was just by a couple of points. There was a shift there and there was a shift in some areas of up to, I think in the order of 25 points in some swing states. It was real.

Leah Feiger: It was massive.

Tim Marchman: Yeah. I don’t think it’s as neat and easy as saying that they provided the margin. You can look at other groups and attribute it to them. But they were a big part of it. There’s no doubt that the Manosphere and directly pandering to this very specific misogynistic ideology worked. I mean, and that’s really horrifying to think about.

Vittoria Elliott: Well, and I think when we’re talking about Latino voters or one of any background, a lot of cultures throughout the world have patriarchy, a strain of patriarchy, baked into their kind of conservatism. I think pulling on that is a reliable way to get men across demographics to feel like there’s something in it for them. So, I definitely agree that there was definitely an emphasis on men voting. Scott Pressler, who founded the Early Vote Action Group, which was funded by Musk, moved to Pennsylvania and dedicated most of this year to turning out Pennsylvania. Was tweeting about, “Men stay in line.” Stephen Miller was also talking about men-

Leah Feiger: Charlie Kirk.

Vittoria Elliott: … voting.

Leah Feiger: This was the thing.

Vittoria Elliott: Exactly.

Tim Marchman: With all of that said, I don’t want to let guys my age off the hook. Trump’s core demo, the one that won him the election, was Gen X men. That’s it.

Leah Feiger: 100%.

Tim Marchman: It’s middle-aged white men. That’s his core constituency.

Leah Feiger: To bring this back to Trump for a moment, Trump loved this. Trump absolutely loved watching all of these influencers and podcast bros and Manosphere types, trip over themselves to invite him on and post their clips on TikTok and X and make the rounds. It was everywhere. It was so clearly a delightful part of this campaign to him, and one that they clearly did very effectively. I’m still really playing out just how in some ways grateful Trump is to Elon Musk for all of this elevation too. Elon watched the results come in with Trump. Have we ever seen anything like this before, in terms of relationships in that way, heading straight into the White House?

Tim Marchman: I can’t think of a really direct parallel. One of the things that really worries me about it is Elon Musk is a major defense contractor.

Leah Feiger: Yeah.

Tim Marchman: The word fascism has been thrown around a lot, but at its most basic, fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. We now have a major defense contractor who has an app that’s on hundreds of millions of people’s phones, who owns satellite technology, who owns rocketry technology that’s critical to the US, who owns cars that are recording 24/7, millions of them on the roads. He’s somebody who seems tipped to be at most a shadow president, and at least a key advisor in the White House, will have a lot of say over defense, national security. That is really… You can’t really talk enough about how worrisome that is.

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, also, can I just say that I don’t think we frame Musk as a defense contractor enough, because-

Leah Feiger: I think that’s true.

Vittoria Elliott: … like SpaceX and Tesla, we’re like, he’s this magical inventor. It’s like, no. He’s a defense contractor.

Tim Marchman: He’s a welfare case. He’s suckling on the public teat.

Vittoria Elliott: He’s a welfare king, and he also is a defense contractor. If a president was watching the results come in with the CEO of Raytheon, people will be losing their shit.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. Let’s take another quick break, and when we come back, what happens now? Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. We’re going to skip Conspiracy of the Week this week. Instead, let’s spin this forward a little bit and talk about what we can expect to see in 2025 and beyond. So, Tori and Tim, what happens now for Elon Musk? What’s his expected return on investment here?

Vittoria Elliott: Well, to start off, the New York Times did an interesting analysis that showed that just in federal contracts, we’re not even talking about anything beyond that, just in contracts his companies have gotten from the federal government, Elon Musk’s companies have gotten 2.2 billion plus. So, I think we’re going to see more and more money being funneled towards Elon’s companies. Areas of the government that were once public are going to increasingly be privatized, often to his benefit. I think Blue Origin’s never going to see another NASA contract. I think particularly with his Government Efficiency Commission that he says he’s going to head, I think we’re going to probably see a lot of overlap between that and some of the goals of Project 2025, of cutting government employees, cutting the lifetime employees who really keep the wheels turning between administrations, and installing loyalists. I think it’s important to note also, when Musk took over X, there was a lot of scrutiny over the fact that employees from his other companies were being sequestered in that acquisition to advise, to give technical support. I would not be surprised if we see some bleeding over in that way with government as well.

Leah Feiger: Tim, what do you think?

Tim Marchman: I think we’re going to see an aggressive lack of regulatory oversight over companies that are doing things like putting computers in people’s brains, and creating large amounts of space junk that are making it difficult to see the stars. I also think that we are going to see a gutting of the civil service, because Musk is using the rhetoric he used with Twitter and he has used with other companies about bloated, wasteful government spending. We all know this, but the government does not actually spend all that much relative to its scale in a discretionary fashion. The government spends money on defense, which Donald Trump is not going to cut. It spends money on social security and Medicare, and interest on the debt. Everything else is pretty trivial. There’s not really a huge opportunity to cut out trillions of dollars in wasteful spending. What there is is probably going to be an opportunity to look at something like the Forestry Service and say, “Look at these loaded government bureaucrats sitting there watching trees.”

Leah Feiger: I mean, like goodbye National Parks question mark? There’s-

Tim Marchman: If you want to talk about people who are making fairly modest sums to do things that are important for society, I think they should be very worried that their jobs are at risk. I think it’s a very realistic possibility that that could completely disrupt the ability of the government to function at its core, basic responsibilities, overseeing public lands, weather monitoring, you name it.

Leah Feiger: What government role do you think Musk is angling for and what does that mean for the future of tech and tech regulation?

Vittoria Elliott: I don’t know that Musk is someone who wants a specific role.

Leah Feiger: You don’t see him sitting outside the Oval Office, chief of staff?

Vittoria Elliott: No, I think-

Leah Feiger: I mean, I don’t either, to be clear.

Vittoria Elliott: I think-

Leah Feiger: He wants influence, he wants power.

Vittoria Elliott: He wants influence. He wants to be an advisor. That’s because, I don’t think he would ever really want to, quote/unquote, work for Trump. Both he and Trump are people who conceive of themselves as alpha males, top dogs. They both are people who want to grab attention. I don’t see either of them being willing to subjugate their egos for the other person. So, I perceive that he would probably be more like a floating advisor, doing what he’s done with a lot of his companies. Which is like, he’s like, “I’m going to be an expert on space now. I’m going to be an expert on cars now. I’m going to be an expert on social media and free speech now.”

Tim Marchman: For all the reasons you just outlined, this is why I think the one thing I’m sure of is that there is going to be a nasty and dramatic fallout. There is no way two egos of this size can coexist. These are two really thin-skinned, petty, catty men who like to take to social media to say bad things about people they don’t like. So, if we are going to get nothing else out of this dystopian and horrifying dynamic, we are going to get the nastiest, meanest posts of all time from these two men about each other. I would say within the next couple of years. We’ll look back in a couple of years and see if I was right.

Leah Feiger: I’m so excited for the fallout. For the election, I would’ve argued that Trump needed Musk more than Musk needed Trump. Now we’re at perhaps a role reversal situation. There’s going to have to be a little bit of kowtowing, I’d assume. What do you guys think?

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think Musk is willing to demure to him in certain ways, it seems. But again, I think if Donald Trump believes that Elon Musk is ever going to be his employee, he’s got another thing coming.

Tim Marchman: Yeah. I think the dynamic changes completely because the fact is that Trump has made clear he will abuse the powers of the federal government at will, and the Supreme Court, has made clear that no one can do anything about that. So, he has all the leverage. If they have a falling out, if Musk doesn’t want to do something Trump doesn’t want him to do, all of a sudden he can become a very zealous regulator of this fellow who has a lot of interest with the federal government, and needs friends in Washington, that can turn a dime very easily. So, in the bigger strategic picture, you wonder if Musk hasn’t just delivered himself into the hands of a man who has turned on every one of his allies over the years in a very nasty fashion.

Leah Feiger: But maybe Musk thinks he’s going to be different.

Vittoria Elliott: “But he’ll be different with me.”

Leah Feiger: We’re going to see. At the very least, I am so glad to be figuring this all out and discussing it with the two of you, and the rest of our lovely WIRED Politics team. Shout out to the rest of them for really keeping us going this week. That’s it for today. Thank you so much, Tori and Tim, for joining us.

Vittoria Elliott: Thank you, Leah.

Tim Marchman: Thanks for having me.

Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and give us five stars. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please, please write to us at [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. This episode was produced by Sheena Ozaki. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer. Will Purton mixed this episode. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast, and I’m your host, Leah Feiger. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.