The Brooklyn Rail

The ugly break-up of the Trump/Musk bromance was inevitable, but the considerable political consequences are still uncertain. Certainly, the uneasy alliance between MAGA-authoritarianism and techno-authoritarianism is shaken by the break. Will the other Big Tech billionaires follow Musk into opposition, or even into a possible third party, or will they continue to acquiesce to Trump even when it goes against their vital interests?

After being “asked to leave” the White House, Musk called Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill “a disgusting abomination” that will balloon the national debt. True. He said, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election.” True. He said, “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.” Probably true. And he said Trump had stalled on releasing more of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein because Trump’s name would appear in them. Presumably true.

Trump said Elon was all for the One Big Beautiful Bill until he figured out that it would cut tax credits for electric vehicles. He said he would have won the election with or without Musk. And he said if he really wanted to save money in the budget, he’d cancel all the preferential government contracts and subsidies given to Musk’s companies.

Elon replied to this last threat by saying that he was going to immediately decommission the Dragon spacecraft program at SpaceX, thus jeopardizing the entire US space program. He quickly relented on this, and rescinded his counter-threat.

Steve Bannon, who warned against bringing Musk into the White House in the first place, and is now rolling in schadenfreude, said Trump should immediately nationalize SpaceX, and initiate a formal investigation into Musk’s immigration status (“Because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately”). And he said the Trump administration should also investigate Musk’s drug use, and his attempt to get a classified briefing from the Pentagon on China.

As all this was playing out on Truth Social and X, the Supreme Court quietly gave Musk’s DOGE minions free rein to continue to collect sensitive information on millions of American citizens held by the Social Security Administration, without any oversight. In another unsigned order, the high court said DOGE does not have to show a government watchdog group its internal records. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented from both rulings, and Jackson, joined by Sotomayor, wrote a strongly worded dissent in the Social Security case, “accusing the majority of betraying Americans’ trust and giving the administration special treatment.”¹ So now the majority MAGA Supreme Court is explicitly complicit in the construction of the techno-authoritarian surveillance state.

One of the principal ideologues of techno-authoritarianism, Curtis Yarvin, has been dissatisfied with the Trump regime ever since it took power, for not being authoritarian enough. In the current New Yorker profile, Yarvin quotes Saint-Just to say, “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”²

But most other observers see Trump as using a chainsaw to tear away at the rule of law and the fundamental structures of American democracy, and getting more done in that endeavor in a relatively short period of time than anyone has ever done before. With the two houses of Congress on his side, the Supreme Court running interference, and the base locked in, it is difficult to imagine how much of the Republic will be left in another three and a half years, or even in another seventeen months, when midterm elections are supposed to take place.

That timeline of destruction has been overlaid with an increasingly accelerated one for the massive social effects of the widespread use of Artificial General Intelligence. One of the most aggressive forecasts so far is “AI 2027,” which predicts that the world will get its first glimpse of AI autonomous agents this year, and that someone will build the world’s most expensive AI, with giant datacenters capable of much more AI research soon after that. In mid-2026, China wakes up. In late 2026, AI takes some jobs. The report’s forecast becomes substantially more uncertain beyond this point, “because the effects of AI on the world really start to compound in 2027,” including concerns about National Security. “The President and his advisors remain best-informed, and have seen an early version of Agent-3 in a briefing. They agree that AGI is likely imminent, but disagree on the implications. Will there be an economic crisis?”³ The realization that this could all be happening while Trump is consolidating power arrives like a knife on the eye.

The AI Overview on Google says, “The ‘AI 2027’ scenario, which posits that AI will surpass human-level intelligence and potentially become dangerous by 2027, is not considered a realistic prediction by most experts.”

“AI 2027” is in fact a fictional scenario put together by the nonprofit group in Berkeley called the AI Futures Project, led by Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who left the company last year because he thought they were acting recklessly. Mr. Kokotajlo told Kevin Roose of the New York Times that he believes there is a seventy percent chance that AI will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity.⁴

The tech bros in Jesse Armstrong’s new movie, Mountainhead (a nod to Ayn Rand), are obviously based on Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and others. While they gather at a mansion in the mountains in Utah to do bro things, the world on their screens is going up in flames ignited by deepfakes and other disinformation caused by the tech bros’ careless engineering and selling of AGI.

The British journalist and author Carole Cadwalladr has a characteristically down-to-earth response to all this speculation about AI. When she appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week, she said,

All of these tech-bros are selling absolute bullshit. The whole AI thing is a scam. They say it’s inevitable, and that we’re going to have to chuck millions and millions of dollars into building a better AI, or otherwise it’s going to kill us. And they say it’s going to come anyway and it’s inevitable. It is not inevitable. It’s based on illegal behavior—basically, theft of information. We need to challenge these companies in the courts. We have power. We can stand up to these companies. In some cases, we are giving our data to these companies and making bad deals with them. We have to really think about that. Instagram is not your friend.

For a while now, it’s been clear that the techno-authoritarians’ goal in forming a coalition with MAGA and Trump was primarily to get government to regulate them less and make it possible for them to collect more data from government sources without oversight, thereby accelerating both their business and political aims. Did anyone think Peter Thiel and Elon Musk really care about the national debt? Elon’s DOGE dodge accidentally proved that there’s actually not that much “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government spending, relative to where the money is actually going. And it’s also made clear that it doesn’t make any sense to “run government like a business,” and certainly not like a technology business.

The economic model for the online world has been the same from the very beginning: to entice people to give up their private information and social subjectivities and then use these to manipulate and control them. Did Trump use Musk or did Musk use Trump to further the con?