LAST WEEK the 2024 fantasy movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire entered the Netflix Top Ten at No 3 in the United States. Cinema audiences appear to have an unquenchable thirst for monster movies. Japan’s Godzilla, as a franchise, comprises a body of 33 films; its American competitor, King Kong, has 13. The two were first brought face-to-face in 1962 with King Kong vs Godzilla. Americans like monster movies, but ‘monster versus monster’ movies go one better.
Such epic battles are steeped in Western mythology. Homer’s Iliad is as much about battles between gods as between human combatants such as Achilles and Hector. Boxing is perhaps our nearest modern equivalent; one thinks of ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’ in 1974, the match-up between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. Psychologically, mankind seems to be drawn to battles of creatures or people possessed of superpowers, hence Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). As psychologist Charles Harper Webb has observed, ‘[Humans], like all great apes, evolved to be hyper-aware of hierarchies. Best hitter, fastest runner, best student, most popular – the ranking starts young, and – police chief, pop star, billionaire, president – never stops.’
Now there is keen anticipation in the media for the upcoming battle between the two great apes of the moment: president-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Despite the bromance between the two, who appear to have been conjoined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club since the presidential elections, one would assume from the media headlines that they are destined to end up fighting each other in a clash of modern-day supermen.
Legacy media outlets (such as CNN, BBC, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Guardian, Independent, Reuters and Telegraph) have all sported articles that suggest the Trump-Musk alliance will end in tears. David Nasaw, the Andrew Carnegie biographer, has cited the example of President Theodore Roosevelt who took the great industrialist’s money and then ignored him. He wrote in the New York Times: ‘So sorry, Elon Musk, but the bromance is not going to last . . . there’s room for only one star, one genius in the Trump White House . . . you will probably join the long list of genius businessmen donors who were casually discarded after they had served their purpose.’
Prima facie, they would seem to be an odd pair. Donald Trump is 78; Musk is 53. Trump was born into a wealthy New York family, while South African Musk arrived in North America with nothing. Trump is an Ivy League graduate and property developer; Musk is an engineer and autodidact who has mastered everything from rockets to artificial intelligence.
Yet there are more similarities than differences. Both are family men, albeit in unconventional ways. Another family thing that they have in common is a British grandparent. Trump’s grandmother came from Stornoway, the capital of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Musk’s grandmother came from Liverpool, where family members grew up with the Beatles. According to Musk’s father, Elon would like to buy Liverpool Football Club.
Both Trump and Musk are fans of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship, i.e. cage fighting) in Las Vegas. Dana White, President and CEO of UFC, who built it over the last 20 years from a $2million company to a $12billion corporation, has been a major backer of Trump. The UFC fights in Las Vegas have every appearance of being Trump rallies. Indeed, part of the Trump-Musk appeal is their shared interest in the sports of working-class America. Supposedly, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni would support the mooted martial arts fight between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in the Colosseum in Rome; if it took place, it would be a superhero match comparable to Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), where the titular hero fights the Red Skull.
Both Trump and Musk are anglophiles who are alarmed by the leftward shift in British politics. In different ways, they have launched attacks on European governments: Trump remains angered by Europe’s failure to pay its fair whack in support of Nato; Musk is a fan of Alice Weidel, the party leader of AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), and is shocked by Germany’s ‘uniparty’ of the CDU (Christian Democratics) and the SPD (Social Democrats) blocking her path to political power.
Trump and Musk both rate Giorgia Meloni, Europe’s least woke and most effective leader. This fact, along with Trump’s appointment of Susie Wiles as the first female presidential chief of staff, belies the oft-cited trope that Trump is a misogynist.
In their own spheres, they are both business supermen. Donald Trump’s building of a property brand around a combination of his own egocentric personality and high-risk debt was unique. He parleyed his brand into a phenomenally successful media career with The Apprentice, which he produced and starred in for 11 years until 2015.
Musk made a $178million fortune after PayPal was sold to eBay. With this capital, he placed two outrageous bets. First, he developed Tesla as the world’s first mass-market electric car company. Second, he started SpaceX, the first commercial rocket company which now has a 90 per cent share of the global launch market. With almost 7,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, SpaceX’s Starlink broadband services have 4.6million users. Their numbers are growing at over 300 per cent per annum. Both high risk bets paid off.
Other Musk ventures followed, including Neuralink, The Boring Company (a high-speed tunnelling company) and xAI, an artificial intelligence company which, from a standing start two years ago, was valued at $50billion during its recent fundraiser. There is X (formerly Twitter), the social media site that banned President Trump. Musk, in a funk about Twitter’s curtailment of free speech, controversially bought it. The price at $44billion was inflated, but Musk’s aim to ‘help humanity’ has restored global freedom of speech. It is now the world’s most reliable source of news. Needless to say, both men abhor the incompetence and left-wing political bias of most legacy media.
In a pure numbers game, Trump’s net worth is $5.5billion, whilst Musk’s is $416billion. If making money were a superpower, Musk would be the winner by a stretch. However, money is not the only superpower; as President, Trump commands ultimate power. Despite the rise of China and Xi Jinping, the US President is still considered to be the world’s most powerful leader. Trump’s first election victory in 2016, for a man who had never held political office, was a remarkable achievement, but, after his defeat in 2020, to win again in 2024 was a political resurrection for the ages.
Against a concerted effort by a Democrat judiciary to destroy him, Trump has demonstrated the superpower of resilience. Moreover, his survival of two assassination attempts would seem to endow him with godlike powers that would make even Zeus blink. Musk may be richer but for the next four years Trump is the man.
There is the question of whether Trump and Musk have compatible political objectives. In terms of their broad political journey, they are virtually identical. Trump has been called a Nazi by the Democrats so often that it is difficult to remember that he was a Democrat for most of his life.
It was Trump’s political genius to recognise that the Democrats had abandoned their core support in Middle America. President Barack Obama, an elitist who was all-in on globalisation, identity politics and climate change, took the Democrats so far to the left that he created a vast political gap, one so huge that Trump was able to drive a coach and horses through it. In contrast, Hillary Clinton, who cleaved to the new ‘woke’ ideologies, antagonised the Democrats’ socially conservative middle and working-class base.
Musk tracked a virtually identical path to Trump. In the past, Musk queued for six hours to shake Obama’s hand. In 2020, he voted for President Joe Biden. Musk has argued that his liberal values are unchanged, rather that it was the Democrats who left him. Last October, Musk explained on X that ‘the Democratic Party has moved so far left that it has left centrists behind’.
Musk’s path has a familiar ring to it. It is the same one followed by leading Trumpian politicians, such as Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard; media figures, such as Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin; techies, such as Marc Andreessen and the ‘crypto’ Winklevoss twins; and billionaire hedge fund managers, such as Bill Ackman and Scott Bessent, the latter being Trump’s pick as Treasury Secretary.
If Trump’s and Musk’s political paths from classic Democrat to MAGA Republican are similar, what about specific policies? Will King Kong and Godzilla fall out over those? It has been speculated that Musk could lose hundreds of millions, if not billions, should Biden’s inflationary and absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act be repealed. However, Musk has repeatedly stated that he is opposed to tax credits on EVs. As for Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ attitude to carbon energy, Musk is perfectly sanguine. To podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk admitted: ‘We’re going to need to burn fossil fuels for a long time . . . [I am] not in favour of demonising the oil and gas industry.’
Regarding reductions in government employees and regulation, both Trump and Musk appear to be enthusiastically in sync with Argentine President Javier Milei’s extraordinary ‘chainsaw’ approach to bureaucracy. The result is that Trump is putting Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency.
As for the war in the Middle East, both Trump, a hero in Israel, and Musk seem to be equally pro-Jew and pro-Israel. In a video posted by Bloomberg Technology on YouTube, Musk said: ‘Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish. I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I am, like, Jewish by association.’
With regard to Ukraine, Musk is firmly behind Trump’s low intervention, ‘Jacksonian’ approach to foreign policy – the opposite of Biden’s aggressive neo-con, ‘regime change’ foreign policy, which is favoured by America’s military-industrial complex. Musk, who in his provision of Starlink communications has done more than any other individual to help Ukraine, nevertheless believes, like Trump, that a deal needs to be done to stem the horrendous bloodletting of a war that has exhausted both sides. They both believe that Ukraine should be a neutral country.
It is China that represents the greatest challenge to the Trump-Musk bromance. It is thought that Trump is considering tariffs of 40 per cent or more on Chinese goods. This would hurt Tesla, a significant importer of Chinese batteries. Considering Musk’s huge investment in Shanghai and his close relations with the Chinese government, it is possible that he could become an important interlocutor between the two countries.
Speculating on whether Trump and Musk will end up fighting each other provides great copy. Given the left-wing dominance of legacy media, it is also fantastical wish-fulfilment fantasy. Of course, there could be a bust-up between two men whose huge egos are matched only by the magnitude of their achievements. Still, there are other possibilities: their respective ages and super-skills are complementary, not competitive.
Does Musk see a father figure in Trump? Does Trump see in Musk a chip off the old block, a risk-taking ‘adopted’ son? Perhaps both are true. A King Kong vs Godzilla divorce is a possibility, but so is a co-operative Batman and Robin outcome. I would wager a small sum on the latter.
