One, Big, Beautiful Breakup | WIRED

Leah Feiger: Well, I mean, because the safest option. He is the richest man in the world and the President of the United States. I would like to believe that there is a thought behind all this.

Zoë Schiffer: 100%.

Leah Feiger: And that’s exactly what a bunch of these conspiracy theorists says in the past 24 hours. Senior journalist, David Gilbert, has today published a story about how the conspiracy world thinks that the rupture of Musk-Trump is a shrink, it’s 5D failures. It is messy, messy, messy. We are talking about messages from people who said to themselves: “No, no, no, that’s their plan. That’s it for Democrats to fully publish Epstein files.” It’s a bit wild to see, honestly, but I think we are about to see some crack in republican politics for the first time in eight months, nine months, they had a good race.

Zoë Schiffer: Okay, I have the impression that we have to take a few steps back and talk about how did we get here?

Leah Feiger: Is their relationship always useful to the other? Elon Musk is always the richest man in the world, and as annoyed as Trump can be at the moment, they have a lot of interest completely shared. Musk has a lot of contracts with the American government that he probably does not want to risk. They have Qatari interests. There is a lot of business there, but this bill seems to become a point of collision. We will have to see.

Zoë Schiffer: RIGHT. And I have the impression that at this point, one of the main grievances of Musk, at least public, is that he adds to the debt deficit, but also one of the provisions of the bill is that it reduces the credits of electric vehicles. Obviously, this is a problem for Elon Musk and Tesla. So, how much do you think it has an impact on his opinions here?

Leah Feiger: Again, I cannot put myself fully in his head, but as much as Elon Musk said: “Reducing the deficit, reducing the deficit is the goal of Doge, we are going to reduce $ 2 million”, which do not even exist in American federal spending. So, in terms of reducing the deficit, it is difficult for me to attribute his motivations there. Does he care about it? I am not 100%convinced. Does he care about Tesla? Absolutely, and you are exactly on money with EV credit. I mean, I think it was something last year, Tesla had spent at least a quarter of a million dollars by lobbying in the name of the tax credit on electric vehicles which is reduced in this bill. And it’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of time. Musk would also have done a lot of plea for the behind the scenes, and so I could see this kind of being a little of A, “go. I did all this for you, I asked for a very great thing, and you always have it anyway.” And as you said about Egos, I could really see him in many ways, and I must mention, because it also continued, things are obviously not very smooth for Musk with the White House 100% of the time for a few months, and the other thing that has come in recent days, which has come before. A few days ago, it was during the weekend, I believe, this man named Jared Isaacman, who is this musk ally, was nominated for the administrator of NASA, and Trump deleted this. And Musk encountered these problems with Scott Bessent, secretary of the Treasury, with Sean Duffy of Transport. And so it is difficult to say exactly what is the only thing, but all this together, the EV tax credits, the fact of not being able to say who will be in charge, I could see that it is not very pleasant for him, let’s just say.