Is Elon Musk a mere vessel for President Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda, or is he secretly the one pulling the strings?
According to veteran tech journalist and Musk whisperer Kara Swisher, who used to be friends with the world’s richest man, it’s the latter.
“They’re using Trump as a vehicle,” Swisher said of Musk and the other tech billionaires working to curry favor with the current administration. “I think ultimately Elon has the power because he has the money, he has the influence, the relationships.”
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The topic came up during Thursday’s episode of Swisher’s podcast On, as she and journalists Ryan Mac, Anne Applebaum, and Owen Higgins discussed how Musk and tech leaders like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen seem to be embracing what Higgins calls “techno-authoritarianism.”
Trump is 78 years old and “at the end of it,” Swisher said.
“They [only] need him for so long, I think,” she added. “And so, in that way, I think Elon’s much more powerful. Trump is the president, but I don’t know if that’s as good a job as it used to be.”
Musk and his DOGE minions have spent the last week accessing the federal payments system, attempting to purge the civil service, and dismantling government agencies without congressional approval. Government portals and official websites with critical health and safety information—which were paid for by taxpayers—have also gone dark.
The DOGE team says it is operating under the president’s authority after Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office redesignating the U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service, with DOGE standing for “Department of Government Efficiency.”
But Applebaum—a historian who specializes in communist takeovers in Central and Eastern Europe—said the group’s activity “breaks so many lines of illegality that it looks much more like a hostile takeover by an outside power.”
“I’m fine with the word ‘oligarch,’” she said of Musk. “I think it applies really well. And oligarch is somebody who has both political and economic power. And that’s clearly what certainly Musk now has.”
Trump doesn’t even seem to know everything DOGE is doing, including the government websites going dark, Mac said. When reporters asked him about it, Trump said it sounded like a good idea, suggesting it wasn’t his call, Mac argued.
But so far Trump and Musk “get along pretty well” and have a “mutual kind of dependence,” he added, saying Trump gets a lot of value from having Musk around because his “First Buddy” draws so much attention to himself. That in turn “takes a lot of heat” off the president, Mac said.
In that sense Musk is Trump’s “junkyard dog,” Swisher agreed. But when it comes to which is the “stronger character,” she thought the answer was unquestionably Musk.
