Leah Feiger: Nicely, I imply, as a result of it’s the safer choice. That is the richest man on the planet and the president of america. I want to imagine that there’s thought behind any of this.
Zoë Schiffer: one hundred pc.
Leah Feiger: And that is precisely what a bunch of those conspiracy theorists have been saying during the last 24 hours. Senior reporter David Gilbert printed a narrative at the moment about how your complete conspiracy world thinks that the Musk-Trump breakup is a psyop, it is “5D chess.” It is messy, messy, messy. We’re speaking posts of individuals simply being like, “No, no, no, that is their plan. It is all to goad the Democrats into publishing the Epstein information absolutely.” It is sort of wild to behold, actually, however I believe we’re about to see a little bit of a fissure in Republican politics actually for the primary time in about eight months, 9 months; they’ve had a superb run.
Zoë Schiffer: OK, I really feel like we have to take a number of steps again and simply discuss how did we get right here?
Leah Feiger: Is their relationship nonetheless helpful to one another? Elon Musk continues to be the richest man on the planet, and as irritated as Trump could also be proper now, they nonetheless have a variety of shared vested pursuits. Musk has a variety of contracts with the US authorities that he most likely would not wish to danger. They’ve some Qatari pursuits. There’s a variety of enterprise there, however this invoice looks like it is changing into a sticking level. We’ll need to see.
Zoë Schiffer: Proper. And I really feel prefer to that time, considered one of Musk’s major, at the least public, grievances about it’s that it provides to the deficit, but in addition one of many provisions within the invoice is that it reduces electrical car credit. Clearly, this is a matter for Elon Musk and Tesla. So how a lot of that do you assume is impacting his views right here?
Leah Feiger: Once more, I can not get absolutely into his head, however as a lot as Elon Musk has been like, “Scale back the deficit, scale back the deficit, that is the purpose of DOGE, we’ll reduce $2 trillion,” that do not even actually exist in US federal spending. So by way of slicing the deficit, it is exhausting for me to really ascribe his motivations there. Does he care? I am not one hundred pc satisfied. Does he care about Tesla? Completely, and also you’re precisely on the cash with the EV credit score. I imply, I believe it was one thing final yr, Tesla had spent at the least 1 / 4 of one million {dollars} lobbying on behalf of the electrical car tax credit score that will get reduce on this invoice. And that is some huge cash, that is a variety of time. Musk additionally was reportedly doing a variety of advocating for the credit score behind the scenes, and so I may very a lot see this sort of being a little bit little bit of a, “Screw you. I did all of this for you, I requested for this one actually large factor, and you continue to have it in there in any case.” And such as you stated in regards to the egos, I may actually see it in so some ways coming all the way down to that, and I’ve to say, as a result of this has additionally been occurring, clearly issues haven’t been tremendous clean crusing for Musk with the White Home one hundred pc of the time for the previous couple of months, and the opposite factor that is come up in the previous couple of days, which has come up earlier than, is Musk has actually favored choosing individuals which can be taking sure authorities positions. A few days in the past, it was over the weekend, I imagine, this man named Jared Isaacman, who is that this Musk ally, was nominated for NASA administrator, and Trump has eliminated that. And Musk has run into these points with Scott Bessent, secretary of the treasury, with Sean Duffy from transportation. And so it is exhausting to say precisely what the one factor is, however all of this collectively, the EV tax credit, the not with the ability to really say who’s going to be in cost, I may see this being very a lot not pleasing for him, let’s simply say.
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