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Elon Musk Has Been Told to Stop Outshining Trump: Trump Is the King, Not Elon

Posted By Andrew Simpson On In 2024 Election,Economy,Opinion,Politics - News Analysis | No Comments

The thing about internet trolls is that they often bite off more than they can chew. Imagine how Q must feel right now. He thought he was clever with the whole Pizzagate thing, and now he has to maintain a steady stream of lies, lest he face some massive backlash from his cult-hungry sycophants.

Elon Musk is now facing a similar situation. He trolled his way right into the White House, next to his new best buddy, real-life troll Donald Trump. But where internet trolls are generally satisfied with online infamy, real-life trolls desire real-life infamy — or more aptly put, fame.

There is nothing in the world, aside from money, that Donald Trump wants more than to be the most popular person on the planet. Failing that, he’ll take most widely-known, most infamous, most ubiquitous household name, or even most hated. Yes, I honestly believe Trump wouldn’t even mind being the most hated, as long as he was rich and powerful and omnipresent.

Musk is threatening the superlative nature of Trump’s existence with his own, and it could cost him dearly.

Elon Musk, it seems, has not learned the axiomatic truth of being near Donald Trump: Never eclipse Dear Leader, or face the consequences. Privately, Trump has already expressed mild dissatisfaction with the level of attention that Musk has been getting as “First Buddy,” even though his vaunted position in the White House was presented on a silver platter by Trump himself.

He doesn’t have an actual position, of course. But you remember when Dick Cheney was elected to the lowly position of Vice President. That’s an office for also-rans, a place for the ambitious to wait their turn for the presidency, not to effect change in any meaningful way,

We saw how that played out. Sure, Dubya was at the table while the big boys talked about Iraq and Afghanistan and the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. Snarling Dick Cheney was the mastermind.

Thankfully for Cheney, Bush either didn’t care or didn’t even notice that he was a figurehead (and a stupid one at that).

In an interview with CNN’s Elizabeth Wagmeister, former CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter (who is back with CNN this year) sat down to discuss his new book and Elon Musk’s role in president-elect Trump’s political orbit.

Wagmeister, introducing Stelter, goes over some headlines about Musk “learning” to navigate in the Trump sphere, and warns that Elon has very nearly broken the “cardinal rule” of being near Trump, which is never to outshine the boss.

She immediately asks Stelter, the author of the new book Network of Lies, about the fact that so many people are coming to Elon Musk as a diplomat to bridge relations with the incoming president. As an example, the CEO of TikTok — a network that Trump once sought to ban on the grounds that the Chinese company could be a national security threat (and a threat to his Truth Social platform) — has already come to Musk asking what he should expect in the coming presidency.

“This really speaks to the ‘soft power’ that Musk already has and is going to have in the months to come,” Stelter said, “assuming, as you said, that this relationship doesn’t wear off between Trump and Musk.”

He went on: “Even though Musk isn’t going to have a formal Cabinet position, his ‘soft power’ is, arguably, even more influential. So we’re going to continue to see stories like this, where there are examples of, in this case, the CEO of TikTok, trying to get through to Musk, and thus to Trump.”

But the Tesla giant should be aware that friend-of-a-friend access like this almost always leads to backlash, especially if China, or even TikTok, is seen to have gained an upper hand at any point after he facilitates meetings or deals that Trump is drawn to.

As the conversation goes on, the two CNN personalities discuss Musk and his cohort Vivek Ramaswamy and their “department” of government efficiency that Trump has granted them to act as Office Space Bobs [1], sort of “efficiency experts” that would cut $2 trillion from government spending on “unnecessary” programs.

It’s clear that Musk isn’t slowing down on the internet troll highway with the way he’s approached “DOGE,” his pet name for the fake department. As Wagmeister points out, the two seem to be using it as much to promote their own personal brand — with a possible podcast in the works — as they will to help Donald Trump “drain the swamp.”

But the most salient point is that Trump himself seems to be leaning into the idea of becoming not just a troll in real life, but an internet troll as well. Elon Musk has helped him pave the way.

As Stelter puts it:

You think bac to the first Trump presidency, and all of the debates that were had about Trump’s tweets, and how seriously to take the president’s tweets. And there were a lot of arguments back then [saying] “Don’t read too much into it, don’t take it seriously.”

Well, flash forward 8 years. The incoming President Trump is joined at the hip by the owner of the old platform Twitter, now known as X. And every tweet Musk posts is now scrutinized very carefully for clues about what he might do or not do. So I think this solves, this ends the argument about how important these social media platforms are.

The conversation then turns to Musk “trolling” about buying MSNBC from Comcast, when he made similar “jokes” about buying Twitter… Just before he actually bought it.

You can watch the interview in two parts here.