Elon Musk has posted that he regrets the comments he made in his recent online spat with President Trump. He posted today:
I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2025
At Foreign Policy, James Crabtree explains that it was inevitable that Musk would lose, as corporate titans often do when engaging in fights with government leaders. He writes:
The widely predicted breakup of Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump has finally and inevitably come to pass. Having recently departed his role as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the tech billionaire began to criticize Trump’s subsidy-filled budget bill, kicking off a war of words on social media and a resulting political firestorm.
What follows is likely to be a messy and vengeful separation that will do damage to the reputations of both men and the United States as a whole. But ultimately, this will be a lopsided fight in which the billionaire and his business empire, not Trump’s administration, will suffer most.
Musk is about to learn a broader lesson that extends far beyond U.S. politics. Corporate interests often wield unhealthy and outsized influence in global autocracies. Yet from China under President Xi Jinping, to Russia under President Vladimir Putin, to India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a common pattern emerges: When business titans and political leaders fall out, it is the former who lose. Put another way, Musk has just picked a fight that he almost certainly cannot win.
At the start of the year, I argued in Foreign Policy that speculation about a likely split between Trump and Musk missed a wider point about what they might achieve by working together. In the end, their partnership lasted longer and had greater influence than many detractors predicted.
Read more here.
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