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The Tech Oligarchy Arrives

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 01 › tech-zuckerberg-trump-inauguration-oligarchy › 681381

On the day of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a group of his top billionaire donors, including the casino magnate Miriam Adelson and the future Republican National Committee finance chair Todd Ricketts, hosted a small private party, away from the publicly advertised inaugural balls.

It was the sort of event that carried no interest at the time for the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He greeted Trump’s first presidency by publicly identifying his wife’s parents and his own ancestors with the immigrants targeted by Trump’s early executive orders. “These issues are personal for me,” Zuckerberg wrote in a public letter of concern a week after Trump took office.

But this month, as the same donors made plans for Trump’s second inauguration, Zuckerberg successfully maneuvered to become a co-host of their black-tie event, scheduled for tonight. The party quickly became one of the most sought-after gatherings of the weekend, overwhelming organizers with RSVPs from people who had not received invitations.

Even more striking: Zuckerberg sat in front of Trump’s incoming Cabinet in the Capitol Rotunda at his inauguration—at the personal invitation of Trump himself, according to two people briefed on the plans who, like some other sources interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.)

[Charlie Warzel: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this]

Zuckerberg was not alone. Trump’s inauguration events featured a Silicon Valley smorgasbord, with leaders from Apple, Google, and TikTok in attendance, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Several of the tech moguls also joined a small prayer service this morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Later, they blended in with the Trump clan directly behind the incoming president as he officially assumed power just after noon, like honorary family members.

The scene announced a remarkable new dynamic in Washington: Far more so than in his first term, the ultra-wealthy—and tech billionaires in particular—are embracing Trump. And the new president is happy to entertain their courtship, setting up the possibility that Trump’s second turn in the White House could be shaped by person-to-person transactions with business and tech executives—a new kind of American oligarchy.

Eight years ago, Trump landed in Washington in a fit of defiance, denouncing in his inaugural address “the American carnage” wrought by “a small group in our nation’s capital.” Four years later, he left as an outcast, judged responsible for the U.S. Capitol riot and a haphazard attempt to undo the constitutional order. He returns this week with a clean sweep of swing states and the national popular vote, the loyal support of Republicans in Congress, and the financial backing of corporate donors who are expected to help the inaugural committee raise twice what it did in 2017. Organizers of the Women’s March, which stomped on Trump’s 2017 inauguration by sending hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets, settled for a series of unremarkable Saturday gatherings. The Democratic opposition, which treated Trump’s first term as an existential threat, now lacks an evident strategy or leader.

Like nearly every entity that has tried and failed to bend Trump to its will—his party, his former rivals, his partners in Congress, and his former aides among them—the tech elites largely seem to have decided that they’re better off seeking Trump’s favor.

[Read: ‘If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump’]   

Just months ago, Trump released a coffee-table photo book that included a pointed rant about Zuckerberg’s $420 million donation in 2020 to fund local election offices during the coronavirus pandemic, an undertaking that Trump called “a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” “We are watching him closely,” Trump wrote of Zuckerberg, “and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”

But since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg has worked to get himself in the new president’s good graces. The Meta CEO traveled to Mar-a-Lago; added a Trump pal to his corporate board; extolled the importance of “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast; abandoned the Meta fact-checking program, which MAGA world had viewed as biased; and personally worked with Trump to try to resolve a 2021 civil lawsuit over Facebook’s decision to ban him from the platform, a case that legal experts once considered frivolous.

Bezos, meanwhile, worried aloud in 2016 that Trump’s behavior “erodes our democracy around the edges” and spent his first term taking fire from the president for the aggressive reporting of The Washington Post, the newspaper that Bezos owns (and where, until recently, we both were reporters). Now Amazon, like Meta, has given $1 million to the 2025 inaugural committee, and the company recently announced it would release a documentary about, and produced by, the first lady, Melania Trump. Even Musk, who spent more than $250 million last year to elect Trump and now is one of his top advisers, called for the aging Trump to “sail into the sunset” as recently as 2022.

“In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump marveled at a mid-December news conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

The sheer quantity of money flowing to, and surrounding, Trump has increased. In his first term, he assembled the wealthiest Cabinet in history; this time, his would-be Cabinet includes more than a dozen billionaires. Sixteen of his appointees come not just from the top one percent, but from the top one-ten-thousandth percent, according to the Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization. Democrats, too, have long kept their wealthiest donors close, inviting them in on policy discussions and providing special access, but never before have the nation’s wealthiest played such a central role in the formation of a new administration.

As recently as last week, before the inauguration proceedings were moved indoors because of cold weather, a donor adviser got a last-minute offer of $500,000 for four tickets, according to the person who fielded the call and had to gently decline the request. Trump’s 2017 committee raised $107 million, more than twice the 2013 record set by Barack Obama, and spent $104 million. So far this year, the 2025 inaugural committee is expected to raise at least $225 million and spend less than $75 million on the inaugural festivities, according to a person familiar with the plans. At least some of the unspent tens of millions could go to Trump’s presidential library, several people involved with fundraising told us.  

Trump’s first inauguration had all the markings of a hastily arranged bachelor party put on someone else’s credit card. Trump’s company and the 2017 inaugural committee ultimately paid $750,000 to the District of Columbia to settle claims of illegal payments, including allegations of inflated charges to a Washington hotel then owned by Trump. (Neither entity admitted wrongdoing.) This time, the inauguration organizers have been more disciplined, and donors have been eager to reward Trump’s victory.  

“People were prepared, so when he did win, Trump was looking for checks,” a person involved in all of the Trump campaigns and both inaugural events told us. “Once Elon got in there, that was kind of the holy water that allowed all the other tech guys to follow. They all followed each other like cattle.”

What wealthy donors could get in return for their support of Trump remains an open question. Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocket-ship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter, the social-media giant he later took over and renamed X. (A lawyer for Musk has said he did “nothing wrong.”) When Trump promised in his inaugural address to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” the cameras panned to Musk, whose SpaceX is racing Bezos’s Blue Origin; Musk raised both thumbs and mouthed “Yeah!” as he broke into an ebullient grin.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Existing federal ethics rules were not designed to address the possibility of the world’s wealthiest people padding the pockets of the first family through television rights or legal settlements. The Trump family’s recently announced cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, creates yet another way for the wealthy to invest directly in an asset to benefit the commander in chief. “There is no enforcement mechanism against the president under these laws,” Trevor Potter, a former general counsel for the late Arizona Senator John McCain’s campaign, told us.

Even as Silicon Valley elites try to ingratiate themselves with the incoming president, some of Trump’s populist supporters are murmuring that the emerging tech oligarchy is diluting the purity of the MAGA base. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who has clashed in recent weeks with Musk over immigration policy, has fashioned himself as the field general for a fight against the tech bros and their outsize influence on a president eager to cut deals.

“He’s got them on display as ‘I kicked their ass.’ I’m stunned that these nerds don’t get anything to be up there,” Bannon told us last week, referring to the tech leaders appearing in prime camera position at Trump’s inauguration. “It’s like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot.”

For now, the ragtag populist figures like Bannon who defined Trump’s early years in politics are still celebrating. Roger Stone, the convicted and subsequently pardoned Trump kibitzer, attended inauguration events in his anachronistic morning suit—with plans for evening white tie. The British MP Nigel Farage hosted a party Friday at the Hay-Adams hotel, while former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson managed to get a ticket for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

On Thursday, Bannon threw his own party, titled “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” or “A New Order of the Ages,” at Butterworth’s club on Capitol Hill. Drinks included, perhaps predictably, the Covfefe Martini (vodka, Fernet, espresso) and the Im-Peach This (gin, peach, Cocci Americano). Bannon arrived fashionably late and was followed from the moment he ducked through the door by a mob of iPhone documenters, and even a man with a flashbulb. He received an impromptu line of frenzied well-wishers that one British journalist quipped was “as if for the Queen.”

[Read: The MAGA honeymoon is over]

As seared foie gras and freshly shucked oysters moved through the room, Bannon urged his supporters to “set new lows tonight,” reminding them that once Trump took the oath of office on Monday, “then the real fun happens.”

“You have two to three days to get sober,” he exhorted. “Go for it!”

The tech barons also fanned out through the city in celebration. The next night, across town, Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dined at Georgetown’s new hot spot, Osteria Mozza, sitting at a window table with leaders of the Post. On Saturday, Palantir and the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel hosted a party at his Woodley Park mansion; a bow-tied and mop-topped Zuckerberg arrived before the sun had fully set. And yesterday, Trump called Musk up onstage during his pre-inauguration rally inside the Capital One Arena—“C’mere, Elon!” he growled—briefly ceding the spotlight to the Tesla executive and his young son X.

During the 2024 election, many liberals and some conservatives feared that Trump’s second term would usher in a new kind of American autocracy, à la Hungary. But on its first day, at least, Trump’s new administration seems, more than anything else, oligarchal—albeit one where the transactions mainly flow one way, at least so far.

“They’re lining up to obey in advance. because they think they’re buying themselves peace of mind,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism who has been critical of Trump, told us. But, added Ben-Ghiat, who noted the overlap between autocracy and oligarchy: “They can give that million and everything can be fine—but the minute they displease Trump, he could come after them.”

Elon Musk Imagined a Cover-Up

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › elon-musk-england-grooming-gangs › 681339

Updated at 1:55 p.m. ET on January 16, 2025

Imagine that a foreign-born billionaire buys Facebook, asks its engineers to boost his own posts, and then introduces a payment system that rewards users for pandering to his whims and prejudices.

Also imagine that the billionaire happens across a news report on the death toll in Iraq following the allied invasion back in 2003, and links that carnage to the intelligence failures that were used to justify the war. Bristling with righteous outrage, our fictional billionaire then suggests that the state and the media have covered up this whole incendiary topic.

This was how Elon Musk sounded to many Britons after he belatedly discovered the organized child-sexual-abuse networks known as “grooming gangs.” Here was a real scandal: Networks of adult men, primarily British citizens of Pakistani descent, had trafficked and raped young girls in towns across England, over many years, aided by failures of local governments and the police. But the scandal wasn’t new, nor had reporters ignored it en masse. “You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” Musk insisted at one point during his multiday spree of posts on X, his social-media platform. Never mind that a legacy media outlet—Rupert Murdoch’s London Timesfirst broke the story of the child-sex-abuse ring in Rotherham, 14 years ago.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s horrified reaction to the scandal, which appears to have been prompted by a viral post on New Year’s Eve, is entirely justified. However, it comes quite late, and demonstrates his usual self-centeredness: His thinking seems to be that if he didn’t hear about the scandal during the 2010s, then surely no one else did, either. His ownership of X, and his alliance with Donald Trump, gives him the power to force any issue he likes into the political conversation. Lately he has used that power to intervene in European politics, berating British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, boosting the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland, and attacking the European Union for its efforts to regulate his businesses. Starmer’s opponents on the right, including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, have been quick to echo Musk’s interest in the grooming gangs—even though Badenoch’s party was in power as the story originally unfolded.

The Times reporting kicked off dozens of prosecutions, multiple public inquiries, and even a primetime British Broadcasting Corporation drama. The story was well known enough that one of the police whistleblowers appeared on a celebrity reality-television show in 2018. The news even reached America: In 2014, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed that “what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class.” The ethnicity of the perpetrators mattered, he argued, but so did the status of the victims—working-class girls whom the police saw as “‘tarts’ who deserved roughly what they got.”

Musk’s newfound revulsion at the details of the abuse is entirely justified—read the sentencing reports if you have the stomach for it. “Girls were raped callously, viciously, and violently,” the judge told nine men convicted of grooming offenses in the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012, adding, “Some of you acted as you did to satiate your lust, some to make money out of them. All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect.”

The sexual abuse of children occurs in all human societies, but the forms it takes are culturally dependent. Like school shootings in the United States, grooming gangs are a particular type of crime that emerged from the laws and social conditions of a specific time and place. The gangs are not representative of the whole picture of what researchers call “group-based child sexual exploitation”—a phenomenon that in Britain appears to be dominated by men who are white, as you would expect from the makeup of the population. (England and Wales are more than 80 percent white, census data show; “Asian ethnic groups” are about 9 percent of the population.) Most grooming-gang defendants in the cases that have attracted media attention, however, were men of Pakistani descent. Many were connected to the nighttime economy, such as by running minicab firms and delivering takeout. They primarily targeted vulnerable girls—runaways or those who lived in foster homes. We know all this because of extensive reporting, testimony by victims and whistleblowers, and the bravery of politicians such as Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, two Labour Party members of Parliament who were shunned by their own side for speaking out.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk’s X endgame]

It is entirely reasonable to ask why they were shunned. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the racial dynamics of the grooming gangs made English towns extremely reluctant to face what was happening. Local South Asian communities were afraid to report the perpetrators in their midst. Police did not record complaints or investigate the issue actively; by some accounts, race riots in Oldham in 2001 made police emphasize “community cohesion” over what should have been their primary concern—dismantling organized-rape gangs regardless of the demographics of the perpetrators. White members of municipal councils fell into a pattern of assuming that problems among British Pakistanis were best left to their fellow councilors from that community. “Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the council overcompensated too much,” one local officer told an investigator in 2015. “It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist.”

Living through this story, experiencing the slow accretion of details and convictions and inquiries in real time, clearly felt very different from learning about it all at once. One of the main complaints to have surfaced since Musk reheated this story is that much of the original coverage was piecemeal and overly restrained: Had gangs of white men been trafficking immigrant women, it might have prompted a reckoning comparable to America’s protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. What qualifies as a “reckoning” is arguable—but I agree that the left would have raised hell about such a story, as the right has done with this one.

In response, some commentators, on both the left and right, have called for a “national conversation” about the gangs. What that conversation would sound like, however, is the tricky part. Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent right want? Is the answer militant secularization of Britain? Or a renewed insistence that the United Kingdom is a Christian country? Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.

Although Musk is powerful enough to draw new attention to the Rotherham scandal, polling suggests that most Britons see his interventions as opportunistic. The X owner has a deep animus toward Starmer, the Labour prime minister, whom Musk sees as an enemy of free speech in general and of his platform in particular. Many of Musk’s posts called for implausible scenarios such as the King dissolving Parliament or the country holding fresh elections, adding to the sense that Musk had not deeply researched the topic before picking up his phone to post.

Nonetheless, the Conservative opposition, led by Badenoch, pandered to him, demanding a fresh national inquiry to “join the dots.” That reverses the Tory position of a year ago—back when the party was in power and had the ability to commission whatever inquiries it deemed necessary. (In 2019, the future Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that investigating historic sex abuses was money “spaffed up a wall.”)

Badenoch’s decision to echo the Musk line also minimized the work that the Conservatives did do in government to tackle rape gangs. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a “grooming gangs task force” that has helped police make more than 550 arrests. The Tories also accepted that some sentences given to gang members had been too lenient, and proposed to create a new aggravating factor in sex offenses involving grooming. That will likely be included in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring, alongside a mandatory-reporting measure requiring social workers and others to notify police when they suspect children are being abused. Despite all that progress, Badenoch understands that calling for a new investigation is one of the few ways for an opposition leader to attract attention. (Today, Labour caved and promised a “rapid audit” and more funding for local inquiries.) Just as the activist left sometimes refuses to believe that civil-rights victories have been achieved—remaining instead in a state of politically lucrative perma-war—so the right will not claim victory in having already forced Britain to take these gangs seriously. Conservatives want the fight, not the win.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Intriguingly, Britain’s other right-wing party, Reform, has been less harmoniously in tune with Musk in the past couple of weeks than the Tories have. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has joined Badenoch in calling for a new nationwide inquiry into the gangs. But he has refused to fulfill a peculiar demand from Musk: to normalize the pseudonymous agitator Tommy Robinson, whom the far right credits for making the grooming scandal public. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is not a folk hero. A founder of the xenophobic English Defence League, he risked collapsing one of the grooming trials by filming the defendants outside it. He is also a convicted mortgage fraudster and is currently in jail for contempt of court in a different case.

Robinson badly needs mainstream support to shake off his thuggish reputation, and Musk has taken up his cause. “Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk declared on X. He also faulted Farage—who has sought to keep racist “bad apples” out of Reform—for distancing himself from Robinson. Farage “doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk complained. Once again, the billionaire seemed out of touch with the British political scene: Farage, a key champion of Brexit, is the most successful leader that the British populist right has ever had. Reform won more than 4 million votes in last year’s election and looks set to make big gains in local contests in May.

To many Britons’ relief, Musk seems to be moving on to other subjects, including the California wildfires. His intervention has presented liberals with a difficult terrain to navigate. Yes, his interest was opportunistic. Yes, he spread conspiracy theories as well as the true scandalous details. But at least part of his instinctive reaction was correct: This was and is a scandal that shames Britain, as the Times asserted in 2012. It just isn’t a hidden one, thanks to the many victims and whistleblowers who have brought it into the open , beginning more than a decade ago. They deserve the tribute of having their bravery acknowledged.

Elon Has Appointed Himself King of the World

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2025 › 01 › elon-musk-europe-politics-germany › 681284

Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.