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Elon Musk calls for US President Donald Trump to be impeached as extraordinary feud escalates
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- Authors
- Hugo Lowell, Andrew Roth
- Published
- Jun 5 2025
- Word count
- 856 words
Oh wow, this has actually escalated quickly...
We'll see if it has any lasting relevance. Either of these people talking mad amounts of shit and then having nothing happen would be nothing new.
Supposedly Musk has already backtracked on canceling the Dragon production. I wouldn't be shocked if this all blows under in a week.
Granted I also wouldn't be shocked if it does spiral wildly and Musk winds up eating it. I don't see how Trump "loses" in this.
I would agree with you if not for the Epstein list accusation. That's targeting a real fault line in the right - a lot of the conspiracy crowd have been very frustrated that they haven't released some damning evidence that everyone they hate was in on Epstein's sex ring. Now someone who has good credibility with the right and has actually been inside the administration makes an accusation like this. There's real potential for rifts and infighting here IMO.
That was a definite hand grenade for Donald. How's he going to argue that the guy who had the inside track to any and all gov information is now making up lies about his connection to Epstein?
The "Have a nice day, DJT!" was the icing on the cake. I wonder what other things Musk might have on Donald?
I feel like that one I can predict : he won't. Cheetoboy doesn't debate, or offer counter-argument, or try to walk his audience through logical paths. He spews rhetoric until he finds what the audience responds to. His response will likely be:
Companies have spent billions building AI that can have coherent conversations. I think any one of us could build an AI-Trump out of tin cans and spare light bulbs in our garage in an afternoon.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft did it on accident a few years ago :D
You're treating a group that i'm sure you'd normally call irrational as if it's rational.
To an extent, they actually are, but the whole problem with conspiracy theories is they work backwards from the desired result. "I believe X, so show me evidence Y that supports it".
Thus I sincerely doubt there's many left on this issue, who still support trump/musk, who are suddenly going to rift because of this. We've already got people in this topic thinking that they're play acting because it's some sort of secret strategy, and the same logic will work for them.
But nobody is working backwards from a belief that trump and musk are best friends, their cooperation is fairly recent. There are musk fanboys and trump fanboys, both groups that take their words as gospel.
They're working backwards from the belief that they're super people who are helping them and fighting "evil" or whatever.
If anything you're going to get a lot more of both fanboys saying that "oh yeah well i don't want to talk about him..." for the other guy and that'll be it. They're still voting for republicans and trump, and they're still buying teslas and using grok.
I don't think there's a short term loss for Trump except for endangering the Big Ugly bill. But that's a loss I'll accept for now.
Long term this definitely seems to be unraveling the GOP. Took long enough. There's clearly too many ideologies bundling together that clearly disagree with how to move forward. And they call the DNC disorganized
I very much doubt this is the thread that unravels the GOP. I see no reason why, at it's most extreme outcome, it doesn't just become the usual "musk is a rino" or whatever and things trundle along.
By itself, no. I do think it's unraveling as we speak, though. And we're only 5 months in out of 48. Plenty of time to implode.
Slowly, and then all at once.
Isn't that a line from a John Green book? I haven't read his young adult novels but I've watched enough vlog brothers to recognize the line.
Yeah, that's a line from his novel The Fault in Our Stars from the character of Hazel Grace. I believe the whole line is:
"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."
Looks like he's responsible for that formulation; kind of echoes 'gradually, then suddenly' as Hemingway put it
Ah, like the economy he had part in destroying.
Right?! I was expecting them to descend into mud slinging by March, but it seems like they just held it together long enough for more pressure to build.
They're just making up for lost time, I guess!
Though there's definitely a side of me that's like, "This is just some weird kayfabe shit...We'll see how long this spat lasts."
I was too busy playing Mario Kart yesterday to bother looking at the news. Last I'd seen Musk was geeking in the oval office and now he's gone so full circle he's sounding sane again?
Clearly, all the world's problems are a result of me observing them, I'll go ignore the news for a little longer and see what happens. I'm gonna go unlock Spider-Man in THPS2.
haha, no.
But by sheer coincidence, a couple of things he's said - like a broken clock being right twice per day - are not totally unreasonable. Because he hasn't said them from a good place - why only now calling for impeachment? Because his fee fees got hurted. Why only now sharing this information he apparently already had about Trump and Epstein? Fee fees. It's still BS. Just not totally wrong, either. heh
I said "sounding" for a reason! You can poke your head out of a K-hole sometimes after all. More wagging the dog.
And I just used your comment for a jumping-off place, intending my first tiny paragraph to be humorous <3
These are too extremely horrible, childish, and immoral people who have immense power.
This article was posted yesterday on The Atlantic:
No One Can Offer Any Hope
It's partly a personal story about how some specific people have been harmed by what Trump, Musk, and the Republican Party have been doing. It also ends with a note about how we got here. It's a collapse of morality and standards.
There is also a live thread.
semi-OOTL - what is this referring to ?
To add additional context, it's been claimed that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is the one who gave him the black eye.
Musk had a black eye on his last day in the Oval Office, and he claimed it was because he asked one of his kids to hit him in the face.
Which is such a normal thing to use as your cover story...
"Masterful gambit sir"
I had “Elon and Trump feud” as the free space on my bingo card ahahaha
I genuinely had "Musk Co ad from the white house" in my predictions but expected a Starlink or Space Ex plugs in press briefings. That Tesla show on the lawn was above and beyond any sense and I just accepted that we live in the tragedy circus timeline.
But after that and the South African "refugees" I figured they were good for at least a year. Even the most toxic couples have a honeymoon period. When they get a Doge after a few weeks thinking it's going to last. But it just destroys everything and is the catalyst for the falling out.
Yeah, most likely they're going spit out Musk and pretend that any damage is upon him in order to seize more power. But the whole Epstein thing may well keep haunting them.
I'd say that Musk is the likeliest to lose if its a permanent fallout, but that he will do some serious damage to the Baby Food Dispenser Who Must Not Be Named.
Musk has a big megaphone with Twitter.
It will be interesting to see how this goes. If nothing else it distracts Trump from his other priorities.
Vance scares me at least as much as Trump, so yeah.
A reasonable conspiracy theory is that the tech oligarchs are ready to replace Trump with Vance, who is Thiel's puppet.
I've noticed a few stories lately about how Trump is losing his cognitive ability very quickly and won't be able to finish his term. While true, this is also probably a strategic leak to prepare people for Trump's resignation.
From the beginning I've assumed that Trump would not finish his term. I think he will end up resigning for "medical reasons".
It's hard to know what's true because everyone involved are criminal sociopaths.
There's a conspiracy that the oligarchy is masterminding all of this. I find that implausible because America's business elites are clearly unhappy with the economic uncertainty and chaos that Trump has wrought. They want a continuation of the neoliberal order that underpins their wealth: free trade and stable economic policy.
I think the truth is more mundane: Trump and his allies, current and former, are immature and impulsive or just stupid. Not long ago it came out that Trump only softened on tariffs because his pro-free trade advisors took advantage of his pro-tariffs advisor's absence to literally run to his office and talk him down. There are no masterminds or master plan.
Musk has already feuded with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman. It seems reasonable to assume that he doesn't care what other tech moguls think.
They're also not masterminds. This isn't some masterful 4d chess play. Most politics is shotgunning shit at a wall to see what sticks. I'm sure lots of these people wouldn't mind having someone they think could be on a shorter leash, but I'm pretty damn certain Trump isn't leaving before the end of the term, and of course possibly after.
So unless they KNOW he's going to fall apart so badly he can't function, I don't see much to this.
It's also impossible to know which is better or worse without trying them both as president. Ugh. Vance is younger, smarter, has more energy. Trump has hired terrible people and unleashed them.
Tariffs are Trump's obsession. Vance is a white nationalist but we don't know his personal views on many of Trump's idiosyncratic policies.
This is really it. If these two could just keep their squabble going on long enough to push the disgust-o-meter for their followers to notice, I'm hopeful that it'll mark the premature beginning of the end for this shitty movement
Don't threaten me with a bad time!
Honestly he has such a huge narcissistic ego I don't see any way he willingly relinquishes power. As much as I'd love to see him go away and never be heard from again, I'm not keen to be looking at Vance in power either.
That's not a conspiracy, it's just straightforwardly true. They don't like Trump and would much prefer someone more stable and controllable, and Vance is both of those. So if given the option, they would 100% definitely prefer Vance.
The only question is whether they're able to replace Trump - so far they haven't been able, but they're obviously working on it with Vance just like they tried to build up DeSantis in 2022ish. It's not clear if or when it will be politically feasible to replace Trump, and Trump is obviously making it hard to replace him. He might just die and the MAGA base disintegrate without him.
Pedantry: if it's true, then it is a conspiracy (a group of people conspiring to commit crimes). A conspiracy theory is when someone asserts without evidence that there's a grand conspiracy behind some otherwise explainable events.
Meta-pedantry: the idiom should be "conspiracy hypothesis" or "conspiracy conjecture" if there's no evidence.
I don't think it necessarily follows in this instance, as the thing that the person you replied to described does not necessitate the actors involved conspiring together (they can independently have the same desires, motives, and goals because it materially benefits them). Even if they are, it may not even necessarily be a crime -- ousting someone from the political sphere for your own personal gain to buy more power for someone you think is easier to manipulate is usually not illegal.
Manufactured or not, this is all a distraction from masked ICE officers kidnapping people in the street. I will enjoy some popcorn, but don't forget about other truly awful events happening while this grabs everyone's attention.
Your comment reminds me of this chart I saw the other day. It shows the importance of strong counter messaging from Democrats/the left and the effectiveness of the Trump-Bannon strategy to "flood the zone."
Sidenote: I came across this when looking for that poll. Shout out to Chris Van Holland.
I don't think it's an orchestrated distraction. It's just a bunch of stuff happening all at once. The ICE raids, the Big Ugly bill, the Harvard attacks, and probably a half dozen other things that don't immediately come to mind.
Exactly, to me this a ploy to distract from the fact of everything happening around Trump and Musk.
I don't think it's fake, but it can be easy to lose focus.
Yea the focus is squarely on this feud, so any politician worth their salt would be able to use any of trumps media events to push through policy and agendas that benefit them and harm others.
Do you genuinely think this is a planned/fake event?
Yay mutual evil-person meltdown? Spontaneous divide and conquer?
I mean, it's weird and kind of random, but I'll take it I guess. Hard to imagine any change away from trump being outright worse than what we currently have.
On the other hand, I've found it's a fools bet to gamble that a situation can't get worse...
Meh. I think this all blows over in a week or two and it'll be like they were never buddies. Trump will do Trump and Musk will do Musk.
At least that's what seems to happen after every other big thing we think will cause them to implode.
I saw a funny comment chain on reddit today under a post about Trump selling his Tesla.
Here's an explanation for the jokes in case it is needed: MAGA claimed for years that the January 6 insurrection and riot was peaceful, called the insurrectionists and rioters patriots, and asked for their release. Then Trump pardoned all of them when he was reelected.
Then more recently, some people were protesting Musk's DOGE actions by vandalizing Tesla vehicles and chargers and showrooms. There was some prominent republicans, including JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Elon Musk who called them terrorists. Several people were charged with domestic terrorism and the FBI even launched a task force
So the jokes are about hypocrisy and abuse of power, which are currently very low hanging fruit.
Russian official comments about offering Musk political asylum
As if the whole mess couldn't get crazier. Imagine Musk actually getting deported, and then shipped to Russia - when Trump licks Putin's boots.
I mean, it fits the timeline I guess. But what insanity man.
There have already been analogies to the Putin/Prigozhin split. If I was Elon, I might take ground transportation in future.
Stay clear of windows above the ground floor as well.
I'm wondering if it would be a good thing for Elon to get killed by Trump some way or another. It might cause a correction of the system as many different rich people try to get Trump impeached.
I'm sure it will be plausibly deniable - perhaps a "ketamine overdose" instead.
That's one of the problems with letting sociopaths have the power of national governments. They can command so many capable people with dark skills and point them at anyone they wish to harm.
Yes but the competing oligarchs will probably have the power to figure out if that's been done. Honestly a decent chance the associated Signal chat log gets shared with a reporter.