'Think carefully': How a single Trump threat should have cronies panicking
Michelle Goldberg, opinion columnist for The New York Times, issued a stark warning to business leaders to thoroughly consider President Donald Trump's musings that he might well terminate Elon Musk's "governmental subsidies and contracts" over a lack of fealty.
Trump made the threat on Truth Social "at the height of the juvenile flame war on Thursday between the world’s richest man and its most powerful one," Goldberg wrote.
Musk had just publicly trashed Trump's "big beautiful bill" as a wasteful "abomination," causing Trump to lash out: "The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!"
"All the tech oligarchs and business titans who’ve thrown in with Trump, apparently deciding that strongman politics are good for business, should think carefully about that post," Goldberg wrote. "In it, you can see the transition to a new kind of American regime."
Goldberg argued that Musk owed his government contracts and resulting business success "to liberal democracy and the very bureaucratic, technocratic structures that he’s spent the last few months trying to destroy."
From now on, however, Musk and other U.S. billionaires will owe their success to the whims of Donald Trump who will "wield the power of his office to crush his enemies," she wrote. "That’s why stock in Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, plunged while he fought with Trump, losing, astonishingly, about $150 billion in market value on Thursday."
Goldberg claimed that the spat taught Musk a tough lesson in deregulation at the expense of fealty to a cult leader.
"In trying to liberate themselves from regulation," Goldberg argued, the billionaires have "trapped themselves in a posture of deep, even existential submission. When the rule of law gives way to the cult of the leader, there are lots of opportunities for personal enrichment, but only for those who stay in the leader’s good graces."