Musk and Trump Were Never Friends, Which is Why They Might Reconcile

Elon Musk now says he went “too far” last week in unleashing his incendiary criticisms of Donald Trump.

Whether you agree with Musk’s revisionism will depend on your perspective. If you concur with Trump’s shape-shifting worldview or have a soft spot for his reality-show authoritarianism, you’ll agree that Musk exceeded the bounds of tolerable discourse and should repent for his verbal sins against the president.

Similarly, if you own Tesla shares, which took a heavy pummeling after the MAGA götterdämmerung involving Musk and Trump, you might also welcome the Tesla CEO’s expiatory volte-face. Distressed Tesla shareholders might not be concerned with Musk’s conformity to Trump’s ideology and policies — if you can meaningfully define those capricious and volatile precepts — but they were concerned about the plunging value of their stock portfolios. You can’t blame them for such pragmatism. A plummeting stock portfolio tends to concentrate the mind.

If you’re Elon Musk, you might also reassess your impulsive outburst in the cold retrospective light of self-interest. Surveying the financial wreckage and darkening business prospects wrought by the intensifying exchange of verbal ICBMs with Trump, you might desire a rapprochement, or, at minimum, a cessation of hostilities. That’s where Musk seems to find himself now, wishing to row back furiously from the deathly precipice at the edge of the white-water rapids.

Disinterested observers might think it’s too late for Musk to retreat. I disagree. Allow me to explain my reasoning.

Musk and Trump came together in a relationship of mutual convenience. They were never friends. While the term has been bastardized by the commercial exigencies of social media, the dictionary definition of friend is as follows: “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.” The word originates from the Old English frēond, which is of Germanic origin, related to the German freund, which the Oxford English Dictionary tells us is “from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to love’, shared by free.” (Brief digression: If you omit the “r” from friend, you get fiend, an entirely different proposition.)

It’s Just Business

I have real friendships. I’m sure you do, too. Real friendship is based on affinity, respect, trust, and common interests or avocations. Trump and Musk got together purely because they each offered something of business value to the other. Trust was never part of the equation, nor — I would argue — was affinity, other than that both men grew up privileged and possessed vast wealth, influence, and power. Trump looked at Musk and saw dollar signs and influence over a desirable demographic, and Musk looked at Trump and saw a bizarre populist charm that could be harnessed and exploited for Musk’s business benefit.

There was no true friendship between Musk and Trump, which is precisely why they might be able to bury the hatchet. If an actual friendship had crashed and burned so spectacularly, I’m not sure that it could be salvaged. The sense of betrayal, the loss of trust, and the emotional wounds would be profound. The fracture to the relationship would like be irreparable.

As for Trump and Musk — who had no friendship to lose — no real personal trauma was incurred, and no feelings were hurt. From the start of their partnership, each saw the other as an objectified means to specified ends. How can you be hurt by an objectified means? You might be disappointed, you might wish the conflict had never become so blindly destructive, but you’re not personally hurt because you were never emotionally or personally involved in the relationship. It was just business, transactional in nature.

You know what? It’s still just business, which means, if the thesis holds that Trump and Musk can derive mutual business benefit from working together, they might find a resourceful way to mend broken and razed fences.

The Trust Factor

It does lead one to ask whether people like Trump and Musk can form true friendships. Maybe they have real friends, but the relationship between Musk and Trump would not seem to clear the first hurdle.

Conversely, one can understand why young professional athletes, suddenly multimillionaires when they sign their first big multi-year contracts, continue to spend time with longtime friends from their old neighborhoods. The old friends knew them when they had nothing, or at least not as much as they have as professional athletes. Back in their amateur period, amid relative innocence, personal bonds were solidified by the glue of affinity, neighborhood camaraderie, and shared interests. If you were in the now-spiffy shoes of the professional athlete, you would probably trust your friends from the old neighborhood more than you would the throng of new acquaintances and hangers-on who suddenly encircle and besiege you.

Allow me to add and recount a modest episode from my life that illustrates a salient point I’m trying to make regarding the differences between friendships and relationships of dispassionate utility.

Not Your Friends

Many years ago — I won’t say how many, for I wish to protect the reputations of the guilty and the innocent — I worked in business development for a company involved in network security. The particulars of what the company did aren’t relevant to the purposes at hand, so what I’ve noted, though generic, will suffice.

What is relevant is that a colleague and I, in our business travels, occasionally had dinner and drinks with a member of the company’s board of directors. The board member ostensibly befriended us, generously paid for meals at high-end restaurants, and seemed genuinely and keenly interested in our opinions and perspectives on our company and the larger industry to which it belonged. Later — I’ll get to that shortly — we learned that his interest in us was not a function of our intellectual brilliance, irresistible charm, effervescent personalities, or witty repartee. He was using us to obtain information, effectively for leverage, in a boardroom conflict with the CEO and other board members.

How did we learn of his subterfuge? On a subsequent business trip, we were accompanied by the CEO, who drove us at high speed along Pacific Coast highway to a national park. On a walk in a moody forest, he informed us that he knew we had discussions with our friendly board member. More to the point, the CEO decreed that our association with the board member must end. Implicit in his edict was the threat that continuance of the illicit relationship would potentially result in termination of our employment. As he was rebuking us in the deepest woods, amid the shelter of towering trees, he said: “These people are not your friends. That guy doesn’t care about you.”

Those words stayed with me, and for good reason.

We learned that much of what we said to the board member in presumed confidence was later disclosed, with direct attribution, to the CEO and other board members. We were stooges, human props in a boardroom vaudeville act.

So, no, the board member was not our friend. He was, however, uncommonly skilled at dissimulation, leading us to believe that he thought we were wonderful company and fascinating personalities. In reality, we were merely cogs in the machine, means to an end.

Relationships of Convenience

I didn’t grow up among wealthy, corporate types, so I learned a lot from the episode. Whatever naïveté I retained about the corporate world and the nature of business melted away. Afterward, I put my guard up, and it stayed up. I developed a protective reserve, like an armored shell. The lessons I drew from that saga made me a more conscientious professional as well as a more cautious person.

As for the board member, he would have said what he did was just business. I have no doubt he would have meant it.

Whatever that board member was to us, and we to him, we weren’t friends. The friends I retain today offer no value apart from genuine friendship to me, and I — now in the dotage of retirement — offer no value apart from friendship to them. We’re friends simply because we have common interests, a shared personal history, and a strong liking for each other’s company. We make one another laugh, too, which counts for a lot. It’s a simple thing, but it’s invaluable.

In the world of business, which frequently involves calculated self-interest and convoluted machinations, things are more complicated. In that context, true friendships are much harder to establish and maintain. You’re brought together in business contexts by circumstance and economic necessity. Warmth can develop — and there are many people I’ve met along the way who have become true friends — but you have to get outside your narrowly prescribed business function to determine whether a relationship qualifies as a friendship.

What Musk and Trump had, and may have again, was a business relationship, not a friendship. They’ll never be friends, but their business interests might realign, perhaps sooner than you think.