Now the big beautiful friendship is over, those wondering what happens next have this message Musk posted on 07 June 2025, during their earlier falling out: ‘Most entertaining outcome is most likely.’
Here is the explanation of why Musk might believe this and the real reason for the bust-up.
Musk’s unhappiness with the Big Beautiful Bill proposal didn’t trigger the rift
Most reporting focuses on Musk’s criticisms of Trump’s economic policy, specifically his Big Beautiful Bill for the Federal Budget..
However, follow the timeline and you see Musk attempting to replace Trump after the President put his lifetime ambition of colonising Mars in jeopardy.
On 30 May 2025, Musk left his special government advisor role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), receiving a Golden Key to the White House and warm words from Trump as a parting gift.
Although Musk had been criticising Congress for passing spending commitments that undermined his cost-cutting as head of DOGE, he was still on good terms with Trump.
Trump withdrew Isaacman’s NASA nomination
On 31 May, Trump announced, ‘After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA.’
Jared Isaacman was Musk’s choice. He has flown in Musk’s SpaceX rockets on two private missions (Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn). He spoke of redirecting NASA’s focus from the Artemis moon mission, to putting humans on Mars.
Musk has received billions of dollars in federal funding to develop his Starship rocket for Artemis, but says the moon is a distraction and he will use Starship to go straight to Mars.
As soon as Musk left the White House, the director of the presidential personnel office, Sergio Gor, reportedly encouraged Trump to drop Isaacman, citing his past donations to democratic politicians. (Musk has since attacked Gor on X, accusing him of being guilty of the serious crime of making false declarations on his immigration forms.)
On 03 June, three days after Isaacman’s demise, Musk announced, ‘I just can’t stand it anymore’ and attacked Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill as an ‘abomination’.
On 5 June, Musk reposted a Trump tweet lauding Isaacman for the NASA job, introduced with his plaintive comment: ‘This is what he said about Jared.’
The tit for tat started
Just 25 minutes later, Musk dropped his ‘very big bomb’ claiming that Trump was in the Epstein files, implicating the President in the crimes of a sex-trafficker and paedophile.
Trump allegedly attributed Musk’s behaviour to Musk being ‘a big time drug addict’ (which Musk denies), and said on his Truth Social platform that he might cut Musk’s government contracts. Musk immediately responded that he was grounding the Dragon spacecraft used to supply the International Space Station.
Musk escalated further, reposting a call for Trump to be impeached and replaced by JD Vance, who Musk had already called: ‘The best VP ever and our future President.’ (Musk reportedly lobbied Trump to appoint JD Vance as his running mate; Vance was a protege of Musk’s former PayPal colleague Peter Thiel.)
The world’s richest man was attempting to topple the world’s most powerful man.
Musk tried to influence Republicans’ support for Trump
Musk warned Republican politicians unsure who to support: ‘some food for thought as they ponder this question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years…’
Musk’s attempt at replacing Trump gained no traction. He released no killer blow of evidence from the Epstein files and he retracted his threat to decommission Dragon.
On 11 June, Musk posted: ‘I regret some of my posts about @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.’
Now, it seems Musk is having another go at taking Trump down.
On 01 July, the Senate voted on Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. The President’s authority was on the line. Musk posted in the build-up, that any Republican who voted for the Bill, ‘will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth’.
If the Bill passed, Musk said he would set up the America Party the next day, stating: ‘Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the people actually have a VOICE.’
The Bill passed, with Vance – Musk’s designated future President – casting the decisive vote.
Musk wants to cut spending rather than drop the tax cuts for the richest
Does Musk truly want to save America from debt, and be a voice for the 80% of Americans on the middle ground of politics, as he claims?
Musk posts the deficit must be reduced, but he focuses on cutting federal spending, rather than reconsidering the tax breaks he benefited from under Trump, with any shortfall met by economic growth.
Musk says the Bill will increase the debt ceiling by $5 trillion and attacks the spending commitments as ‘pork’.
However, Musk’s own AI bot Grok, says allowing the tax cuts that favoured the richest, from Trump’s first term, to lapse would bring in an extra $4.6 trillion, not far off balancing the budget.
While wanting to keep his tax cut, Musk posted on 23 May, that he would like 1% of global resources directed to making humanity multiplanetary.
On 2 July, Trump said he will investigate whether Musk should be deported. It has been alleged by the Washington Post, that Musk was on a student visa when he dropped out of a graduate course at Stanford University, and so allegedly in breach of restrictions on working when he set up his Zip2 software company, potentially putting him at risk of denaturalisation.
Which brings us back to Musk’s post on 07 June: ‘Most entertaining outcome is most likely.’
Musk posts this assertion often, describing it as his variant on Occam’s razor, which is a scientific principle that when choosing between scientific theories, first go for the simplest.
Why is entertainment value a guiding principle for Musk?
Musk wants to spread humanity over other planets
Back in 2014, Musk gave an interview to Brigid Hains, published in Aeon magazine. Even then, Musk was speaking of taking a million people to Mars. He explains his Mars ambition by saying: ‘If an advanced civilisation existed at any place in this galaxy, at any point in the past 13.8 billion years, why isn’t it everywhere?’
Musk speculates something killed these extraterrestrials off before they became spacefaring – he wants to ensure humanity becomes multiplanetary before it is too late. (The lack of evidence of extraterrestrials was first raised by the physicist Enrico Fermi and is known as The Fermi Paradox; the possible obstacles that stopped life spreading, the Great Filters.)
There is another telling comment from Musk in this 2014 article: ‘The absence of any noticeable life may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation. Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mould in a petri dish.’
Musk suggested in 2016, at the Recodes Code Conference, that as intelligent beings would create many simulations, as humans have created video games and computer models, the chance we are living in actual base reality is one in billions.
Musk could perhaps be forgiven if he half believes he’s living in a simulation, playing a video game that he might unplug from when he completes his mission.
He’s the richest man on the planet.
He thinks he’s on the verge of colonising another world and saving humanity from extinction.
Musk tells us what his money has bought and can still buy
He claims he bought the Presidency for Donald Trump and swung Congress to the Republicans, that his Starlink company owns 80% of the active satellites orbiting the world, and that his social media platform X is the most downloaded app in 140 countries, making it ‘the top source for news on Earth’.
He is even developing the Neuralink brain-computer interface to make the blind see, the lame walk and, who knows, to enable consciousness to be transferred to achieve immortality.
If you believed you are the central character in a simulation, the most entertaining outcome would indeed be most likely.
And if it is a game or a lab experiment where the surroundings are just part of the test, where other people might be nothing more than Non-Player Characters, then it might seem justifiable to guarantee funds are available for space travel by, let’s say, feeding USAID into the wood chipper, as Musk did when heading DOGE; even though, according to the Lancet, “Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts – combined with the potential dismantling of the agency – could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years.”
Mars is Musk’s ultimate goal
If life is a simulation, as Musk’s theorises, it might even seem good game play to give impetus to a whole-world effort to build a backup civilisation on Mars by using money and the power of X to install politicians who will kill net zero and boost greenhouse gas emissions, thereby accelerating climate breakdown: Trump, Reform UK, AfD (see my article: Humans on Mars, and forget about net zero?).
Whether Musk really believes he is living in a simulation or not, there should be Hearings in Parliament and the US Congress into his Mars plan, how he is pursuing it and its impact on Earth.
Finally, if you are intrigued by the simulation possibility, another Musk post jumps out.
On 27 January 2025, he shared an extract from a science fiction book published in 1953 called “Project Mars: A Technical Tale” by Wernher Von Braun, the father of the Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon, and earlier the developer of Hitler’s V2 flying bombs, built with slave labour.
This book describes a trip to Mars, where the astronauts found an existing Martian civilisation led by someone going by the name of… The Elon.
“How can this be real?” asked Musk.
Even his own name seems to be telling Musk his destiny is Mars.
