June 5th, 2025 may go down an an historic day in history. This was the day the day when Donald Trump and Elon Musk began their internecine feud to determine the essence of reactionary politics in the United States. On one side, the MAGA multitudes arrayed behind their infallible dear leader bound together with their dreams of an ideologically and ethnically pure United States standing securely on “traditional American values.” On the other side, the vast fortunes, resources and innovative prowess of US techlords and their ambitious schemes for a futuristic American cyber-utopia. While these two camps found common political ground on their dislike of the tedious nature of US democracy and the country’s rapidly changing demographics, their respective leaders discovered quite abruptly that they had irreconcilable visions for the US state. MAGA complained endlessly while out of a power of a nefarious “deep state” that prevented Trump from “making American great again,” but once they took the reigns of this deep state, they found they liked the perks of controlling an entity with such awesome power. The “big beautiful bill” that passed the house would massively grow many aspects of the “deep state” that the MAGA bloc liked and would be important for their larger “deep state” projects, including massive boosts in military spending and mass deportation. Meanwhile, the techlords have an arguably more radical program of completely dissolving the current US federal state to be replaced by an entity more subservient to the whims of private technology companies who would use artificial intelligence and other high-tech tools to deliver government services more effectively and efficiently–including withholding a large portion of these services to those they deem unworthy.

How this specifics of this feud play out are difficult to tell at this point–some are already predicting a reconciliation or truce as the possibility of losing the House of Representatives in the midterm elections threaten to damage both agendas. In the end, however, the “victor” may be less important than the existence of the conflict itself. For both Trump and Musk, their success has been largely due to their respective abilities to understand and harbor the power of the spectacle. For Trump–a man who came of age as a celebrity in the spaces of New York print tabloid newspapers and matured as a star of the reality show The Apprentice, Trump took the insights of surviving and thriving in this cutthroat world and applied them to politics in a way that allowed him to win the US presidency twice and become the most impactful political personality of the 21st century in the US. For his part, Musk came of age wrapped in the subversive hacker culture of the late 90s and early 2000s, learning to read and understand the memes and insider jokes of early internet chatrooms and the grotesquerie of 4chan. His membership in the “Paypal mafia” placed him among a small elite of techlords who saw the information technologies of Silicon Valley, including social media and metadata processing, as a means to advance the next phase of human evolution that would result in things like functional cybernetics and human colonization of outer space. Musk’s intertest in influencing the world through social media became most apparent upon his acquisition of Twitter (which he re-labeled “X”) in later 2023.

That both individuals on some levels recognize their power is connected to their ability to manage the spectacle can be seen in recent statements and actions made by both men. During the infamous press gaggle in the White House Oval Office when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February of 2025, Trump, after aggressively demeaning his guest for not properly kowtowing to him in his request for continued aid in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, mentioned the optics of the clash between him, his cabinet and Zelenskyy, “is going to make great television.” In saying this, Trump revealed the raison d’etre of the entire press gaggle in the first place–to feed the spectacle. To take the business of politics, much of which takes place in private away from cameras, and to expose it to the “hypnotic effect” that live television gives any event. Trump’s reason for doing this has less to do with any policy goal or objective and more about pinning the zeitgeist of the moment on him, making it seem like the world genuinely revolves around him–and the power of the spectacle is such that in that moment, one could argue that the world did in fact revolve around him. Meanwhile, Musk’s X platform has seem a huge spike in users as the feud with Trump plays out as Musk himself is using the platform to run his side of the media war. His control of X–a platform much larger and more impactful than Trump’s own “Truth Social” platform gives him advantage in terms of delivering his messages and memes in a more efficient and flexible manner. Two days after the fallout, with Musk seeming to move away from direct antagonizing of Trump, Musk tweeted “most entertaining outcome is most likely” in a veiled reference to how he thought the whole kerfuffle might resolve itself. In this short post, Musk seems to recognize the spectacle is determining the terms of the conflict.

To use the language of military strategy, Trump’s capability is more Clausewtizian in that he uses traditional media platforms like broadcast to maximize his control of the state and to use the power of the state to grind down his adversaries by attacking them head on. Musk, by contrast, does not have (or no longer has) any control over the state and the ability to use the impact of the state to craft narratives and stories that the media will, to greater or lesser effect, deliver to the larger audience. Instead, his approach is more Maoist–he uses the flexibility and unpredictability of social media to deliver targeted attacks against his adversary, before disappearing and attacking again in a completely different place. To be sure, this more “guerilla” style of spontaneous messaging through social media is something that Trump himself has used in the past and still relies heavily on. But it is clear that Trump has perhaps a greater need to have the camera on him and to be on tv. In his experience, this is the most impactful form of making messaging war and it has yet to fail him. With his new feud with Musk, he likely sees no reason to change strategy now.

Yet the problem for both is that while they may think they are the ones managing the spectacle, in truth, the spectacle is the ultimate arbiter of power. Both must make decisions in terms of how they play out in their respective media and that while both men may have shown certain abilities when it comes to managing the spectacle, the spectacle in the end cannot be completely managed. It is a kind of digital leviathan that can very easily consume those who try to control it. One of the biggest bombshells in the current feud is Musk’s post on X that Donald Trump’s name is in the much ballyhooed Epstein files. While it has been long known that Trump was a close associated of the notorious financier and sex trafficker, for many Trump supporters, the Epstein files were a holy grail of secret government documents that would reveal the true depravity of Trump’s enemies in the Democratic Party. “Releasing” the Epstein files was seen as one of the signature moments for the new Trump presidency, and initially it looked like Trump would deliver the goods when shortly after taking office he arranged to have these Epstein files released. Yet when the big moment came, and the documents were examined, they turned out to be case files that were already in the public and didn’t add any new names or information to what was already known or who had associated with Epstein. Members of the Trump Administration, having used the spectacle to generate all sorts of terrible rumors about Epstein and his associates, now had to explain why the files they released were nothing “spectacular”. With Musk now saying that the reason why the files have been so underwhelming is because Trump’s name is in them, essentially turns the power of the spectacle against Trump, who must now find a way to deflect the demands for the full files and explain why his name appears in them. Indeed, the full nature of this conundrum can be seen recently, when Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, two of the biggest promoters of the Epstein files bombshell allegations, (including evidence that Epstein was murdered rather than killing himself as the federal government claims), had to sheepishly explain that, in fact, there was no sinister cover-up–that Epstein really did kill himself and that there was nothing more to it than this. When they were out of power they were able to use the spectacle to undermine the power of the Biden Administration (and the “deep state” more broadly) by making wild accusations that aroused the interests and passions of spectators and supporters of Trump. Now that they are in power (Patel as head of the FBI and Bongino his deputy), the spectacle works against their ability to actually govern and run their respective organization. Yet the spectacular genie they helped release from the bottle isn’t interested in their new responsibilities–it wants more fodder for its sensationalism and the dynamics of the society of the spectacle are such that new agents will begin to fill its maw. The Trump/Musk feud will likely shake out in a similar way, with both individuals being harmed by the forces they themselves unleashed and set upon their enemies without any thought that such forces might blowback on them.

Thus, the only guaranteed victor in the current feud is not Trump, or Musk, but the spectacle itself.