May 31, 2024 - 7:30pm

Four-year-old X Æ A-12 Musk has a new playmate, and it’s Barron Trump, son of the former President, the Wall Street Journal reports. The touching detail embroiders speculation (it’s an “exclusive”) that Elon Musk is being considered for a presidential advisory role, should Trump regain the White House. The Journal reports that Trump and Musk are already close enough to talk “several times a month”, so the prospect is not so far-fetched.

For the Journal, it’s too good not to be true. Both are not only global celebrities — Musk this month regained the title of being the richest man in the world — but also gigantic, self-mythologising characters. For both men too, a central strand of their personal brand is challenging a corrupt establishment. Trump vowed to “drain the swamp” of Washington DC, while Musk made enemies as a neophyte bidding for defence contracts. His first biographer, Ashlee Vance, recalls receiving mysterious anonymous packages detailing scurrilous personal allegations about Musk — invariably postmarked from a location near a major US defence contractor. In Trump’s case, the defamatory gossip was catalogued and published in the now notorious “dossier”.

Both are at ease on social media and are experts at using provocation: Trump’s latest diversion is to suggest that Biden is so reliant on an exotic cocktail of pharmaceutical stimulants for his public appearances (he’s “jacked up!”), the former president will demand a drug test before the presidential debates. Musk routinely produces such entertainment for Twitter, the social media platform he liked so much, he had to buy it. The impulsiveness and exaggerations have earned him penalties before, but one may finally earn Musk a criminal fraud charge: he has allegedly been exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla’s autonomous driving technology for many years.

Both men oppose expansive foreign military adventures as bad for business. Both have a fondness for the period of American greatness that was built on post-War manufacturing and military hegemony. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is an explicit throwback to a better period from which the nation has regressed, economically and spiritually. Meanwhile, Musk’s business empire makes the things you might find as models in a teenager’s bedroom in the 1950s: rockets, very fast cars, spacecraft, and a gigantic digging machine.

Not surprisingly, these two men define themselves by the quality of their enemies. They have gleefully attacked woke causes, and Musk has recently endorsed the proposition that mass immigration is a deliberate political strategy by the Democrats to bolster its core demographic base (“That was always the plan”, Musk agreed in February).

These have not so far appeared to dent Musk’s businesses: Californians hate Trump, but keep buying Teslas.

Another reason the two men might maintain a cooler, more informal advisory relationship is their points of disagreement. They’re likely to diverge on China, where Musk needs to do business, on energy policy, with Trump seeking a revival of hydrocarbon production, and on free trade. Musk opposed Biden’s punitive tariffs on cheap Chinese electric vehicles and the components that comprise them, such as solar cells and batteries, even though these imports pose a mortal threat to America’s car industry, including Tesla itself.

But businessmen as busy as Musk, a micro-manager who owns several companies and formally acts as the CEO of two of them, don’t take full time cabinet jobs as they once did. In the mythical Golden Age, presidents tapped business titans for cabinet positions. This declined with globalisation and the rise of the managerial class into politics, where a lawyer, diplomat or political placeman was seen as better equipped for those formal multilateral negotiations.

In addition, accepting a formal nomination requires putting business interests at arm’s length, with blind trusts a favourite vehicle. This is unthinkable for a manager as involved as Musk. What would Twitter/X do without him?