How badly could Donald Trump hurt Elon Musk?

NEW YORK Barely one week after leaving the Trump administration with every semblance of amity, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is going scorched earth against the leader of the world’s richest nation. Insults and threats. Calls for impeachment. Sinister references to Jeffrey Epstein

- Io Dodds, The Independent

Even for Elon Musk, this is — to use the precise technical term—bonkers. Barely one week after leaving the Trump administration with every semblance of amity, the world’s richest person is going scorched earth against the leader of the world’s richest nation. Insults and threats. Calls for impeachment. Sinister references to Jeffrey Epstein. Somehow, Kanye West is also involved. It’s like the messiest online influencer drama you've ever seen, except the parties are two of the most powerful people on Earth.

But when it comes down to brass tacks, what exactly does Musk stand to lose in this titanic celebrity divorce? If Trump were to follow through on all his threats, and use every available weapon against Musk’s business empire, how badly could it hurt him? The short answer is: pretty badly. In fact, with some admittedly quick and dirty math, we can put a price tag on some of it. SpaceX and the $68bn black hole Elon Musk's estimated $388bn fortune — already $26.6bn smaller than it was before this frank exchange of thermonuclear warheads — depends on the success of two companies which are both intertwined with the US political system. One is Tesla, which makes electric vehicles; the other is SpaceX, which builds rockets, spacecraft, and satellites. X, formerly Twitter, can be left aside for now; having bought the social network 2022 for $44bn, Musk is still struggling to recoup his investment and has almost certainly lost money overall.