Leah Feiger: Well, I mean, because it’s the safer option. This is the richest man in the world and the president of the United States. I would like to believe that there is thought behind any of this.
Zoë Schiffer: 100 percent.
Leah Feiger: And that’s exactly what a bunch of these conspiracy theorists have been saying over the last 24 hours. Senior reporter David Gilbert published a story today about how the entire conspiracy world thinks that the Musk-Trump breakup is a psyop, it’s “5D chess.” It’s messy, messy, messy. We’re talking posts of people just being like, “No, no, no, this is their plan. It’s all to goad the Democrats into publishing the Epstein files fully.” It’s kind of wild to behold, honestly, but I think we’re about to see a bit of a fissure in Republican politics really for the first time in about eight months, nine months; they’ve had a good run.
Zoë Schiffer: OK, I feel like we need to take a few steps back and just talk about how did we get here?
Leah Feiger: Is their relationship still useful to each other? Elon Musk is still the richest man in the world, and as annoyed as Trump may be right now, they still have a lot of shared vested interests. Musk has a lot of contracts with the US government that he probably doesn’t want to risk. They have some Qatari interests. There’s a lot of business there, but this bill seems like it’s becoming a sticking point. We’ll have to see.
Zoë Schiffer: Right. And I feel like to that point, one of Musk’s main, at least public, grievances about it is that it adds to the deficit, but also one of the provisions in the bill is that it reduces electric vehicle credits. Obviously, this is an issue for Elon Musk and Tesla. So how much of that do you think is impacting his views here?
Leah Feiger: Again, I can’t get fully into his head, but as much as Elon Musk has been like, “Reduce the deficit, reduce the deficit, this is the goal of DOGE, we’re going to cut $2 trillion,” that don’t even really exist in US federal spending. So in terms of cutting the deficit, it’s hard for me to actually ascribe his motivations there. Does he care? I’m not 100 percent convinced. Does he care about Tesla? Absolutely, and you’re exactly on the money with the EV credit. I mean, I think it was something last year, Tesla had spent at least a quarter of a million dollars lobbying on behalf of the electric vehicle tax credit that gets cut in this bill. And that’s a lot of money, that’s a lot of time. Musk also was reportedly doing a lot of advocating for the credit behind the scenes, and so I could very much see this kind of being a little bit of a, “Screw you. I did all of this for you, I asked for this one really big thing, and you still have it in there anyways.” And like you said about the egos, I could really see it in so many ways coming down to that, and I have to mention, because this has also been going on, obviously things have not been super smooth sailing for Musk with the White House 100 percent of the time for the last few months, and the other thing that’s come up in the last few days, which has come up before, is Musk has really liked picking people that are taking certain government positions. A couple of days ago, it was over the weekend, I believe, this man named Jared Isaacman, who is this Musk ally, was nominated for NASA administrator, and Trump has removed that. And Musk has run into these issues with Scott Bessent, secretary of the treasury, with Sean Duffy from transportation. And so it’s hard to say exactly what the one thing is, but all of this together, the EV tax credits, the not being able to actually say who’s going to be in charge, I could see this being very much not enjoyable for him, let’s just say.
