The relationship between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk has become a defining subplot in the shifting landscape of Trump 2.0. Leaks and insider accounts now suggest that their alliance is becoming tenuous, punctuated by the Wisconsin Supreme Court loss, apparent disagreement regarding recent tariff policies and Musk’s growing withdrawal from social media support for Trump’s economic policy.
Whether Musk remains a key advisor or is on the verge of being cast aside like others before him, what matters most is understanding the anatomy of his influence, and what his increasingly erratic behavior reveals about the direction of the right.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has come under scrutiny for its composition and the backgrounds of its members. Notably, members like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old engineer whose rapid ascent has raised questions about vetting processes. Further controversy surrounds DOGE staffer Marko Elez, who resigned after racist tweets, including statements such as “normalize Indian hate,” surfaced.
Although the tweets were widely condemned for their insensitivity, Elez was rehired at the behest of JD Vance. These instances underscore concerns about Musk’s hiring choices and the potential implications of entrusting significant responsibilities to a relatively inexperienced cohort. This is becoming all the more evident as leaks from whistleblowers demonstrate that, after DOGE gained access to the NLRB’s servers, there were attempted logins from Russian IP addresses using newly created DOGE credentials — demonstrating either vast incompetence or high treason.
Somewhere along the way, Musk went from quirky “Reddit” billionaire to full-fledged reactionary. This is not an exaggeration; it’s documented.
The new administration has taken a particular interest in the “plight” of the Boer, of course this probably has nothing to do with the paying subscriber to an openly pro-apartheid Twitter account. His political endorsements are also openly disturbing, most notably his support for far right movements across Europe, like the AfD in Germany and Călin Georgescu, a Romanian nationalist who idolizes the country’s Nazi collaborationists and has claimed that Trump is actually in favor of “MIGA,” or “Make Israel Great Again,” an antisemitic dogwhistle.
Make no mistake, the usual sophistic argument of economic alignment cannot be made here, Georgescu’s economic policies include mass nationalization, proving that Musk’s political ideology isn’t some strange strain of capitalism but an erratic, reactionary mess driven more by cultural grievances than economic logic.
While Musk’s political power expands, his personal life unravels in public view. While most billionaires keep their failures private, he parades his. In 2024, he disowned his transgender daughter, calling her a victim of the “woke mind virus” — a claim she’s condemned as grotesque. His ex Grimes revealed he neglects their children’s health, all the while securing minimal child support through Texas courts. Having fathered at least 14 children (that we know of), Musk champions birth-rates yet shirks the responsibilities of fatherhood.
Many are saying that it’s not just his paternal instincts that are in question — his grip on his alleged vices seems similarly tenuous, with it being one of the possible explanations for his linguistic deterioration. So I sat through Musk speaking so you don’t have to. A mere decade ago, back in the mid-2010s, Elon Musk was giving tours of SpaceX and Tesla factories where on average, though a bit awkward, he spoke clearly and intelligently. He explained metal expansion, assembly processes and rocket simulations with technical confidence. According to the Flesch-Kincaid scale, a tool used to measure how hard a text is to understand, his tours scored at a college graduate level, with an average reading ease of just 19.9, meaning it was complex but coherent.
Now jump to 2025. In an interview with Larry Kudlow, Musk rambles through claims about dead people receiving loans, government waste and “transgender animal surgeries.” The same scale now puts his speech at an 8th-grade level, with a reading ease of 64.2. That’s a steep drop in clarity. Instead of sounding like a visionary engineer, Musk now talks like a confused man ranting at a town hall. The numbers don’t lie, his ability to communicate has sharply declined, and you can hear it in every stumbling, mumbling sentence.
If Elon Musk’s public decline is audible in his stumbling speech, it’s visible in his sleep, or lack thereof. The man who once boasted of thriving on six hours a night, Musk’s sleep habits have devolved into something more chaotic, mirroring his erratic influence. Analyses of his tweeting patterns from 2014 to 2024 reveal a man who now catches shut-eye in sporadic bursts, often between 3 a.m. and 10 a.m., with gaps shrinking since he took over the platform in 2022. The billionaire now seems trapped in a sleepless spiral, fueled by a relentless need to stay online and in control.
This isn’t the disciplined approach of a high achiever; it’s the red-eyed restlessness of a man stretched far too thin. Now, as he juggles Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and his new role as a political playmaker, those blank spaces on his tweet chart, moments of rest, have all but vanished. What’s left is a posting frenzy that suggests insomnia has become his default state, a feedback loop of rage and exhaustion driving his late-night sporadic tirades.
This sleep-starved Musk isn’t just a personal quirk, it’s a warning sign for America. A man who can’t switch off now wields unprecedented sway over government policy, his jittery fingerprints all over executive orders and far-right endorsements. The richest man in the world, once a symbol of relentless productivity to his fans, now embodies a different kind of relentlessness: one that sacrifices coherence for chaos, rest for reaction.
The now tenuous alliance between the president and a tech oligarch whose main qualifications are the wealth he brings, online clout with incels, and an alleged fondness for horse tranquilizers. This is not the natural progression of the American right, it is a complete mutation. Trump at least had the veneer of continuity with past Republican figures. Musk has no such lineage.
