Elon Musk and Donald Trump are no longer friends. Tension between the two exploded into public view in the middle of last week, with each leveling sharp barbs at the other. Four days into the public feud between the world’s most powerful person and the world’s richest person, though, I declare Musk the loser. An unstoppable force has lost its battle with an immovable object.
From my colleagues Hugo Lowell and Andrew Roth: On Thursday, Elon Musk called for Donald Trump’s impeachment and mocked his connections to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the US president threatened to cancel federal contracts and tax subsidies for Musk’s companies, in an extraordinary social media feud that erupted between the former allies. The direct shots at Trump were the latest twist in the public showdown over a Republican spending bill that Musk had criticized.
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk said in a post on X. He added: “Such ingratitude.”
The fallout was immediate. Shares in Tesla, already struggling, slid 15%, knocking about $150bn from its total market value. Consequences for Trump and the Republican party may be farther-flung: midterm elections for positions in the US Congress are not scheduled until the latter half of next year.
When Trump and Musk got together, US liberals forecast that the relationship would end in a public, acrimonious disaster. I did not think so. Musk was an extremely powerful and unusually close ally to Trump. Trump’s campaign needed the huge infusion of cash that Musk could provide. The Republican party did as well, and still does.
But Trump himself remarked last week that many of his closest advisers seem to leave in dramatic and venomous fashion, victims of what he called “Trump derangement syndrome”. Musk followed the same pattern. One prominent example: Steve Bannon, once Trump’s chief strategist, was fired from the White House but now makes his living podcasting about Trump’s moves. Bannon spent the latter half of last week calling for Musk’s deportation. Trump did not seem to recognize himself as the common denominator in the fiery departures. Like Bannon, though, Musk is already back to backing the president. By Sunday night, he had already pivoted to tweeting about the riots in Los Angeles, retweeting Vice-President JD Vance with supportive US flag emojis and attacking California’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
The spat between Musk and Trump highlighted how dependent the US has become on one man’s companies for its space capabilities. In the midst of his meltdown, Musk threatened to decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which is the only ship that currently provides the US access to the International Space Station. What would the country do without him? In a pinch, perhaps another billionaire’s rockets may have to do, even if they’re carrying Katy Perry.
The spaceship aspect of the spat threw Musk’s relative weakness into relief. Musk said he would decommission the Dragon spacecraft, then rescinded the ultimatum of his own accord in response to requests on X that he play nice. Trump, by contrast, growled online. He has not taken the ominous message back, though he has not acted on it, either. Trump is no stranger to retribution. It is a major theme of his second administration. Musk, by contrast, throws his punches at people with less power and less money. When he faces foes of similar stature, he folds. Recall his gleeful jabs at Mark Zuckerberg about staging a cage fight between the two in 2023. Zuckerberg has made a fascination with mixed martial arts a facet of his public persona, showing off a toned physique in the process, and seemed likely to trounce Musk, but the X CEO seemed to believe his rival too staid to respond to his goading. He was wrong; Zuckerberg responded by taking up the gauntlet and even suggested a venue. Musk backed out. Repeat in 2025: Trump says he could save money by cancelling Musk’s government contracts; Musk says, “make my day” but then walked back his own bluff.
Will this calamitous end to his alliance with Trump harm Musk in the long run? To date, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk has lost approximately $90bn of his fortune, an unthinkable amount of money. He remains the wealthiest person in the world by nearly $100bn.
Perhaps the loser is democracy itself rather than Musk. On Friday, he polled his followers on whether he should create a new political party geared towards the center. He wants to call it “The America Party”. He has the money to make it happen. Musk has not exhibited centrist political leanings in the past two years, and he has shown himself to be a repulsive rather than a magnetic presence at political rallies, as evidenced by a major loss in a Wisconsin supreme court election earlier this year in which he played a domineering role.
Read more about how the Trump-Musk feud reveals the danger of handing the keys of power to one person here.
Read more about the ways Trump and Musk could still hurt each other here.
Read more about the financial impact of the feud on Tesla here.
AI is not as good at making movies as executives say it is
Last Thursday, I attended a showcase of eight short films produced with the generative artificial intelligence tool Runway. In a conversation before the screenings, Runway’s co-founder and chief design officer, Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz, said that two-hour films generated entirely by AI are “just around the corner”. An executive for Lionsgate described to New York magazine in a story published the day before how the film studio had gone all in on AI, though more in the invisible process of production than the final footage shown in theaters. Lionsgate has inked a deal with Runway to use some of its archives to train the tech company’s AI.
The quality of the films I watched undercuts the way these two executives are talking about AI. Six of the eight short films evoked no emotion. They lacked character and depth, full of placeholder-quality platitudes. Though AI can produce any image you can imagine, the films lacked creativity. The smooth, synthetic texture of many AI-generated images renders them as uninteresting and unstylish as a first thought. If a director can’t be bothered to resurface their images to make them a bit more unique than your average Midjourney output, why watch? One film was an anime revenge story, set off by basic signifiers of Japan, such as falling cherry blossoms, so simplistic as to be boring within five minutes. I laughed out loud at another film that claimed to document the intermittent emergence of cicadas but which consisted mostly of shots of lens flares. I felt like I was watching a showcase of middling student films. The theses of the majority of the films were muddled. The cinematography of nearly all of them was vague and offered no differentiated point of view. Runway claimed to have received 6,000 submissions for the competition, up from 300 in 2022, and I shudder to think of the Clockwork Orange-style eye-peelers that the judges of the competition must have subjected themselves to so as to be able to view all the entries.
I said that these shorts had the quality of student films – perhaps that is because the means of production are in the early stages of development, and film-makers are still studying them. Runway has introduced new features for its own tools since closing submissions to it film festival in April. Google has likewise debuted a video generation tool, Veo 3, whose output is more sophisticated than what I saw last week.
Two films rose above the rest into the realm of the intriguing. A video essay titled Total Pixel Space proved to be thought-provoking. The meditation on the nature of images rendered via computer, both of real events and of things that never happened, highlighted how few of the total possible number of images we see in our lifetimes. It offered a rare piece of insight amid the crowd, so stuffed with unearned wisdom.
“Total pixel space represents both the ultimate determinism and the ultimate freedom, every possibility existing simultaneously waiting for consciousness to give it meaning through the act of choice,” read the film’s narration. I found the point salient in relation to the consideration of generated images, which already exist within the parameters of a computer monitor’s pixels but which cannot exist in our physical world, a contrast of circumscribed possibility and fantasy. And, with our limited mortal lives, the film asks us: what will you choose to view with your time and your choice? What will you choose to give meaning to?
Total Pixel Space took home the contest’s grand prize. Though successful, the film offers a specific rebuttal of Matamala-Ortiz. If we were to extrapolate from the film festival’s output what path AI films will follow, will we see two-hour video essays? It is extremely rare for that type of film to carry interest for two hours.
Another, Editorial, established a character and her inner life, a basic requirement for a live-action film but a seemingly insurmountable bar for AI-made movies. It seems AI still has difficulty generating the same face repeatedly, though with different expressions. Despite its limitations, I would still recommend the short. It deploys a similar kaleidoscopic effect to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Generative AI can render a hundred backgrounds behind a character to create a dazzling montage suggestive of interdimensional travel. The effect seems like one that would make a five-second sequence exceed a film’s entire budget, but with AI, it becomes financially feasible. Editorial uses it to succinct, punchy effect. Perhaps that is the ultimate purpose of AI, an augmentor more than a standalone producer. The Lionsgate VP made a similar point, describing how AI tools could make a $10m movie seem like one with a $100m budget. “We’re going to blow stuff up so it looks bigger and more cinematic,” he told New York magazine.
This week’s AI news
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The Guardian has launched a new feature in its app, developed in conjunction with University of Cambridge computer scientists, that is geared not towards delivering you information but rather towards receiving it.
Secure Messaging allows you, a potential source on a news story, to send messages to the staff of the Guardian via our app. To use the feature, click the three bars at the bottom right of the Guardian app, scroll down to “More from the Guardian”, where you should see “Secure Messaging”. Click and set up your inbox there by memorizing a passphrase, which is a series of randomly generated words used as a specific key to unlock the vault where your messages will be stored. Then, you will be able to type messages and send them to Guardian reporters. It works in the same way as sending a text or email with a few important differences. If you were to text a reporter, it is possible that an employer or a country’s cybersecurity force would be able to tell via an analysis of your internet traffic. With Secure Messaging, sending a message to the Guardian will appear no different from regular app traffic to prying eyes. Your activity on your device will seem to the outside as if you were simply browsing the news.
Read more about Secure Messaging here.
