Ben Reacts: Trump vs Elon: What The Hell Is Going On?
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What the hell is going on? That is the question on everybody's mind. Obviously, Elon Musk and President Trump are now going at it like cats and dogs. And there's been a lot of speculation for a long time that this marriage would never quite last. You're talking about the world's richest man versus the world's most powerful man. You're talking about two men who combined made President Trump president. Obviously, most of that is President Trump, but Elon's weight was...

was not insignificant in the last election cycle. You're talking about a coalition between tech and sort of blue-collar workers. There are a lot of issues at play. But I want to break down what exactly is going on along three lines. There is the political, there is the business, and then there is the personal. So...

Let's start with the political. So Elon's term in office came to an end. There is a statute on the books that says that you're basically not allowed to work inside the White House for longer than 130 days without some sort of waiver or without some sort of clearance. And Elon ran out that time.

As I said on the air, I thought that what he did during that time was quite incredible. He put his companies on hold. He took a major stock hit. He took a major brand hit in order to come into the government and try to root out waste, fraud, and abuse through the Department of Governmental Efficiency. And Elon came in believing that he would be capable of doing all of that because if you don't have a lot of time in the government, you always believed

as President Trump believed in his first term, that basically politics runs just like a business should run. Meaning you can come in, you can fix the problems, and then you can move on to the next problem to fix that. You can come in, cut everybody. Elon was doing the kind of thing that Steve Jobs used to do. Steve Jobs, of course, famously, used to go into the elevators at Apple, and if he saw an employee, he'd ask them what they did. If they couldn't explain, he would fire them. Elon actually tried to do that exact same thing with the federal employment base. It doesn't work that way. So Elon was running up against

the hard walls of what politics actually looks like. Regulations, bureaucracy, the balance of power with Congress. And within those confines, Elon was doing some pretty astonishing things. I mean, I know people who were working for Doge and with Doge, and what Doge was doing was pretty amazing. Well, in the end, Elon had to leave because his term ran out.

And he was unsatisfied with what Doge was able to accomplish, and he was also unsatisfied with the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Why? Well, because he had spent the last six months attempting to cut waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level. He might have been able to cut $100, $150 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse, but the trillions that he thought he was going to be able to cut in the end have to come from Congress. And so he's looking at the Big Beautiful Bill, and he's saying, why does this increase the deficit? My whole raison d'etre is to shrink the size of government and to

shrink the size of our national debt because it is going to be a gigantic burden on the American taxpayer, on our future, on future growth, on tech, on all of these things. And so here we are blowing up the national debt. So that is Elon's perspective politically.

And then there's President Trump's perspective, which is he's the most powerful man in the world, but also he has the constraints of an extraordinarily narrow House majority, an extraordinarily narrow Senate majority. And coming into office, it wasn't as though he ran on these kind of widespread cuts. Elon may have wanted to do them, and maybe President Trump wants to do a few of them, but President Trump had never wanted to restructure Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the things that actually would have to be cut in order to facilitate true debt reduction. And so President Trump comes in and he says, look,

I've got my tax cuts. Those tax cuts are expiring. If the tax cuts are allowed to expire, you're going to get a massive tax increase, and then you're going to get a recession on the back of that. I'm the president of the United States. I need the tax cuts. I need more money in border security. I'm willing to make concessions along spending lines in order to do that. However that gets hammered out is how it gets hammered out. And then he handed it off to Speaker Johnson and to Senator Thune to try and put together the requisite majorities. And what they came up with was a bill that basically preserves the current tax rates

and also makes some moderate cuts to future growth in spending. But the way that the media have treated this is as though a new debt dike has suddenly been opened, that suddenly the dam on debt has been broken. And that actually is not true. The reality is that the debt trajectory looks very much like what the debt trajectory would have looked like if we had just assumed that the tax rates remain the same. Again, so much of this is about budget scoring and

dynamic scoring and do you treat the tax cuts as though they were going to go away or do you recognize that they were likely to remain in place anyway? So that is a very interesting fight, the sort of ideological fight between what we want and what we get, what's possible and what we would love to see happen, what the American people say they want and what the American people actually want. All that's really interesting. And it got telescoped down into the battle between Elon Musk and President Trump over the big, beautiful bill because that's the political side.

And as I've said before, I have sympathies on both sides. I am a longtime cutter. I'm somebody who has openly said we ought to restructure Social Security and restructure Medicare and restructure Medicaid. I've said all of those things. But I also understand the American public does not agree with me on a lot of those things. And so you have to work through the system. So I have sympathy for Elon Musk's positions more than the positions of President Trump. I've criticized President Trump and the Republican Party in the past for not wanting to actually do anything about those massive debt creators'

At the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for President Trump, who actually has to work within the realm of the pragmatic in order to achieve what he can. So that's in the political realm. Then you get to the business realm. So in the business realm, the biggest problem we have with the American government, it is so large that that means that politicians can use it to help their friends and harm their enemies. And that's kind of what you are seeing play out right here. So President Trump comes into office

He won Michigan. Michigan obviously has a very large support base of auto workers who voted for President Trump, blue-collar workers, factory workers who really supported President Trump. President Trump has reconfigured enormous amounts of our trade policy in order to help specifically these kinds of people. That's what the steel tariffs are all about. That's what many of the car tariffs are about and all the rest. If you're wondering why he's tariffing Canada, that would be one reason, is to supposedly try to reshore some of the manufacturing into the United States in specifically that industry.

So as the big beautiful bill worked its way forward, the electric vehicle mandates and subsidies that were part of the Biden era law went away. And Elon Musk looked at that and he said, okay, hold up a second. You want to tell me that the EV mandates and regulations changed

and subsidies that all that goes away, which really hurts Tesla, right? Because listen, I own Tesla. I love Tesla. Tesla is the best car company on planet earth. It is an amazing, amazing company. I could not be a bigger fan of Tesla. Literally my two-year-old son's first word was Tesla. I'm not even kidding. Okay. With that said, Elon is looking at this and he is saying, okay, so you're getting rid of subsidies to, you know, my company and companies like my company, but you're blowing out the subsidies for a wide variety of other interest groups. What the hell?

what the hell and elon said as much today he said listen i'd be willing to take it on the chin as far as the electric vehicle mandates and subsidies if we were actually cutting spending but we're not cutting spending so i'm getting the worst of both worlds we expand the spending except in the area that would actually help my company

So what the ever-loving hell. And President Trump, on the other hand, also a businessman, is saying, well, hold up a second. We really should not have these sorts of subsidies for people who are already largely wealthy and who don't necessarily want to buy a green car. And I do have to support these workers. And so the battle that's happening here is kind of a normal battle that happens when business and politics meet.

a normal battle between certain people who want certain benefits and other people who want other benefits. And the only solution to that, ironically, is to agree with Elon on cutting size in the scope of government. A smaller government would not be actually capable of handing out favors to friends and punishing enemies. President Trump has now responded to Elon going after him

by suggesting that he is going to remove federal contracts for SpaceX. And Elon's like, fine, I'm just going to dismantle my rockets then. Fine, you don't want it, you don't get it. I'll work with somebody else. Again, none of that is particularly good for the United States because SpaceX is in fact an amazing company. Tesla is in fact an amazing company. And the American space program has been basically hollowed out for decades. Which brings us to the third aspect of this. And that, of course, is the personal. So when it comes to the personal,

I know both these men. I know President Trump. I know Elon Musk. Obviously, you don't get to be this powerful on either the business side or in the political realm without being unbelievably talented, incredibly smart, and also having a big ego. And so both of these men do not like being insulted. Both of these men do not like being treated with personal insult. And so you're seeing that play out right now. I think that Elon felt insulted when he left Trump.

There'd been a lot of friction inside the building, apparently, between him and a bunch of people, including the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. He felt like he didn't receive the proper levels of support for all the sacrifice that he was putting in. He leaves. There's a man who he had wanted to be the head of NASA. And of course, Elon's input when it comes to NASA should be taken fairly seriously because, of course, Elon is the person who is most knowledgeable about space companies on planet Earth. He had recommended a man named Jared Isaacson

who is himself a billionaire, an entrepreneur, to head up the NASA program. And the belief in Elon's camp and from Isaacman is that he basically was defenestrated. Isaacman was taken out of the running for the NASA administrator, specifically as a piece of sort of in-the-building revenge against Elon.

Which, if that's true, is unbelievably petty and stupid. There's really no reason for that at all. Like, none. And so Elon felt really insulted, and so the suggestion is that he was insulted. Between that and the EV stuff, he basically decided to go after President Trump. President Trump, of course, will not take a punch sitting down. I mean, President Trump always punches back. Always, always, always. And so President Trump immediately started punching back against Elon Musk and suggesting the Trump's Arrangement Syndrome. And now you have two very big egos.

who do not take insult lightly, going directly at each other. And so Elon then comes back at Trump and suggests that the reason that the Trump administration has not released the so-called Epstein files is because Trump is in the Epstein files. And of course, that has to be taken with a little bit of credibility, given the fact that Doge actually had presumably access to the Epstein files. We believe that that's the case. Is he saying that speculatively? Is he saying that because he has knowledge? Totally unclear. Again, there's no evidence whatsoever.

any evidence that I've seen, none, that President Trump was actually engaged with minors on Epstein Island or anything like that. But it's gotten very, very personal between President Trump and Elon Musk. It doesn't look like it's going to calm down anytime soon because, again, you're talking about two incredibly powerful men, two incredibly rich men,

with large egos who believe that they are in the right. And so this is likely to continue for some time. And again, that's my preliminary take. I just wanted to break that all down for you in terms of the timeline and now where things stand. Of course, that is all a preview for tomorrow's show, so make sure you tune in then.

This is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Watch Parenting, available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son. Our 13-year-old throws tantrums. Our son turned to some substance abuse. Go to dailywireplus.com today.