The highly public and recriminatory split between US President Donald Trump and his former favorite and aide Elon Musk would be laughable if it weren't so terrifying. Their childish public feud has shown just how insecure (and even out of sorts) the most powerful and richest man in the world really is.
The end came quickly. As early as May 30, Trump called Musk “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators ever born” and presented him with a symbolic gold key to the White House. Musk was leaving his post as head of the Office of Government Efficiency (OGE), but, according to Trump, he was still supposed to advise the administration on federal budget cuts.
Within four days, Musk had blasted Trump's "big, beautiful" spending bill, calling it "a disgrace," and posted a series of screenshots of Trump's old social media posts calling for fiscal discipline. Musk also took credit for Trump's second term as president. Trump responded by accusing Musk of criticizing the bill for ending subsidies for electric cars because it threatened his personal financial interests.
Then it turned to personal insults. Trump wrote that the US government could save billions of dollars by ending subsidies and contracts with Musk's companies, and Musk responded with a post suggesting that the Justice Department was covering up evidence of Trump's ties to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
The altercation may sound shocking, but it shouldn't be surprising. What makes the spectacle so great is Musk's outsized influence and his apparent lack of restraint (partly perhaps due to his well-documented drug use). But being an authoritarian leader is almost always a lone wolf job.
And who knows this better than Trump, who has a long list of acrimonious breakups with longtime associates, such as those with former lawyer Michael Cohen and former communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has also, over the decades in power, occasionally drawn closer to and then distanced himself from a host of influential diplomats. Putin owes his political rise to Boris Berezovsky, the most famous Russian oligarch of the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and an advisor to Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin.
Berezovsky counted on this dark but energetic apparatchik to be his puppet - a useful defender of Yeltsin's legacy and his allies. He did not realize, however, that once he became master of the Kremlin, all the cards would be in Putin's hands. The former mid-level KGB officer became president and held all the levers of the formidable Russian state apparatus, and the oligarch went from "kingmaker" to exile. He died in 2013 in exile at his home near London (the official cause of death is suicide).
The list doesn't end with Berezovsky. Oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky lost his company and spent ten years in prison for daring to challenge Putin. Media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, briefly a close ally of Putin, was banned from the Kremlin, but at least he still walks the streets of Moscow.
And the list doesn’t end with oligarchs. Consider Yevgeny Prigozhin, a criminal who became one of Putin’s most trusted allies. His accomplishments include running a troll factory that spread Russian propaganda abroad and creating the infamous Wagner private military company, which has fought in Russia’s most important (and bloodiest) battles, including in Ukraine.
Prigozhin, however, dared to publicly criticize Russia’s strategy in the Ukrainian war. When his advice was ignored, he led his Wagner mercenaries in a rebel march on the Kremlin, but called it off before it reached Moscow. He “accidentally” died in a plane crash two months later.
All of this is borrowed directly from the typical solitary authoritarian leader, Joseph Stalin. He systematically eliminated his associates, accusing many of them of counter-revolutionary activity. His successor, my great-grandfather Nikita Khrushchev, replaced Stalin’s cult of personality (which tolerated no dissent) with “collective leadership,” where dissidents were partially listened to, but Khrushchev had the final say. However, Leonid Brezhnev seized power from Khrushchev in 1964, and then quickly cracked down on his colleagues who had helped him achieve this.
Turkey also offers an example of how getting close to an authoritarian leader can be dangerous. When Recep Tayyip Erdogan was still prime minister, Fethullah Gulen, one of the country’s most prominent religious leaders, who ran a vast network of media organizations, banking institutions, and Islamist schools, became one of his closest partners in the project of imposing “political Islam” on secular Turkey.
But by the time he became president in 2014, Erdogan was already actively trying to curb the influence of Gulen, whom he saw as a threat to his power. In 2016, a group of disgruntled military officers attempted a coup, and Erdogan quickly blamed it on Gulen, who had been living in self-imposed exile in the United States. When Gulen died last year, Erdogan called him “a demon in human form.”
Musk is unlikely to end up in prison or die under suspicious circumstances. But there is no doubt that his companies will lose favor with the US government. And if one of Trump’s more fanatical supporters, like Steve Bannon, gets his way, Musk could face deportation to his home country, South Africa. After all, Trump needs a message above all else: no one, not even the richest man in the world, can challenge him, because the price will be very high.
But others will try, or he will simply be afraid to try. And so sooner or later, Trump will have to remind everyone again who is boss. The only question is - who will be next.
The author is a professor of international affairs at the New School of New York University
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. (translation: NR)
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