How well does Donald Trump understand Elon Musk?

Elon Musk and Donald Trump have seemed inseparable recently. After Musk declared his support for Trump’s presidential campaign in July, he donated more than $120 million to the pro-Trump Super PAC that he founded. He vigorously championed Trump on social media and elsewhere.

Trump repaid this backing in his own characteristic way. At a rally in Pennsylvania, he said of Musk, “He’s incredible. He’s a total genius.” A few days later, he declared, “We love him. He’s a smart cookie. Little different, too. He’s a little different, but he is one smart cookie.”

As the election drew nearer, Trump went further, announcing that Musk had suggested the creation of “a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government… Elon has agreed to head the task force.”

Amid the flood of eye-catching and controversial nominations to executive positions, this has — up to a point — come to pass. Trump revealed that Musk and former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy will run a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” intended to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Despite its name, the new body will not be a department of the federal government but a body giving what Trump has referred to as “advice and guidance from outside of government.” Although Musk has claimed he can cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, it is still not clear how the entity will operate or what its powers will be. Musk will likely wish to retain direct control of his companies — Tesla, SpaceX, X Corp, xAI, Neuralink and others — rather than commit himself to managing a major Washington organization.

Musk’s influence extends further than making the government more efficient. Not long after the election, he was invited to join two official telephone calls, when Trump spoke to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Characteristically, Trump currently looks favorably on Musk, and therefore wants him at the center of everything. Musk has stayed at the president-elect’s Florida home at Mar-a-Lago and has been offering opinions on the selection of cabinet nominees and other issues surrounding the transition.

Already, however, cracks are appearing in the relationship between president-elect and advisor. Politico’s Playbook has reported that “Musk is starting to wear out his welcome with some in Trump’s orbit ... some insiders now say he’s become almost a comical distraction.” This may be the frustrated complaints of advisors and staff rather than Trump himself, but there is in any case a more fundamental challenge waiting in the wings.

While Musk did not stint or hesitate in his support for Trump, the world’s richest man is not in ideological lockstep with his new friend. He is at heart a believer in free markets, and has bonded with the radical libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, predicting that “prosperity is ahead for Argentina.” In addition, Musk supports scrapping government subsidies for renewable energy in place of a carbon tax on fossil fuel users.

Musk has also rejected Trump’s cherished policy of tariffs on imports from China, on which Tesla depends heavily as a customer and manufacturing base. Musk has enjoyed good relations with the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, meeting Premier Li Qiang on his last visit to Beijing in April and telling him “Tesla is willing to further deepen cooperation with China and achieve more win-win results.”

Unlike Trump, Musk is not a climate skeptic. When the Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in 2017, Musk tweeted “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.” Yet since President Biden rejoined the accord, Trump has promised to withdraw a second time and has labeled climate change “one of the biggest scams of all time.” He dismissed climate scientists as “lunatics who know nothing.”

Assuming Trump does not simply tire of Musk, how will these contradictions be resolved? Perhaps the immovable objects of Trump’s opinions and ego will meet Musk’s similarly relentless personality, and the partnership explodes abruptly. After all, this happened in Trump’s first term with Anthony Scaramucci, Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, John Kelly, Jim Mattis and many others.

An intriguing possibility, however, is that, if they clash over an issue in which the president has little genuine interest, Musk could prevail. Trump is not a deep thinker, relying instead on elemental instincts and prejudices. Over the summer, there were indications that his hostility toward electric vehicles was abating as his alliance with Musk — CEO of the world’s largest EV manufacturer — developed.

Predicting Trump’s behavior is a fool’s errand. What seems certain is that the current equilibrium with Musk will not long endure. It is possible that Musk’s skills — he is innovative, energetic and iconoclastic, but impulsive and inconsistent — will be harnessed for a transformative administration. A safer bet would be a bitter and messy parting of the ways. But remember: an outcome is only unprecedented until it happens.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.