I don’t know anyone who isn’t hugely enjoying the war between US President Donald Trump and his erstwhile political handlanger, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Barely had Musk taken leave of the government after utterly failing to cut a fraction of the spending he said he was going to, than he was at Trump’s throat.
The kicker was a tax bill from Trump called, literally, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that not only failed to cut the federal deficit — the issue Trump (and Musk) campaigned on in 2024 — but increased it and pulled the tax credits Joe Biden had made available to customers of Musk’s electric car brand, Tesla.
Musk, who we now know is often on a cocktail of recreational drugs and quick to temper, flung himself at Trump, claiming he wouldn’t have won the election without his (Musks’s) help. “Such ingratitude,” he huffed on his platform, X.
Trump, stung by the suggestion he may not have won on his own, hit back: Elon was “wearing thin”, he posted on his network, Truth Social. “I asked him to leave. I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do), and he just went CRAZY.” And later: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.”
This is how billionaires fight; it may not be elegant but it is entertaining. As a friend put it, the anatomical study of any body politic will reveal it can have only one asshole. Musk put $250m (R4.4bn) of his own money into Trump’s 2024 election campaign. At one stage in the past few days, Trump’s war on Musk wiped $150bn off Tesla’s market value. Little wonder he went deeper, posting to 60-million people: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day DJT!”
Businessmen (and women) entering politics probably isn’t a good idea
There, that’ll show him. Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide awaiting trial on charges of paedophilia and Trump, along with a host of other celebrities including King Charles’s younger brother Andrew, partied with him and very young girls for years. If Trump is in the files — and he would surely sue Musk if he weren’t — it could open him to impeachment.
This affair is important to South Africa because it should teach us an important lesson about businessmen (and women), entering politics — it probably isn’t a good idea. Citizens are not your employees. You are their employee.
Not everything the government does has to make money. Public transport, for example, should be affordable, efficient and reliable and occur within an agreed budget. Much the same should arguably apply to the provision of clean water. Citizens pay taxes so the state can provide a quality life to people who can’t always afford what the taxpayer might have.
The row resonates here as a range of pundits and political types have begun a lobby to draft Patrice Motsepe, a mining entrepreneur and one of South Africa’s richest men, to run for the leadership of the ANC at its national conference at the end of 2027.
To them, Motsepe is a figure free from all the messy internal politics of the ruling party, rich enough not to steal and he’s a real businessman. But I think it would be a terrible decision. Motsepe himself is a fairly delicate man and he would in an instant find himself dealing with a fabulously corrupt party.
He would not cope — the ANC would do to him what it has done to Ramaphosa, his brother-in-law. It would ruin his reputation and strip him of his dignity. As Songezo Zibi warned us in his 2022 book Manifesto: “We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that Ramaphosa will get anything significant fixed. Even if he were a decisive and capable leader, which he is not, he draws his political legitimacy from an inherently degenerative organisation, the ANC.”
Worse, a push from outsiders to draft Motsepe would probably strengthen the candidacy of Ramaphosa’s deputy, Paul Mashatile.
The only credible way to stop Mashatile is for Ramaphosa to allow a strong ANC figure like police minister Senzo Mchunu to show a hand and then to give him time to run. Don’t, as Thabo Mbeki did in 2007, get in the way. Jacob Zuma beat Mbeki by a whisker in Polokwane and we would have been a different and better place had he had the grace to stand aside early and help someone else win.
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