The spectacular rupture between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk last week had observers from Palo Alto to Pennsylvania Avenue asking the same question: Is the GOP’s Silicon Valley honeymoon already over?
Musk’s messy divorce made for compelling headlines, but behind the noise, the tech-GOP fusion continued its relentless advance through Washington undeterred. The billionaire’s theatrical exit, analysts say, barely registered among the venture capitalists and freshman defense contractors who have already learned that real power moves in channels quieter than social media.
“I feel like there’s a sort of assumption that Musk is somehow representative of all of Silicon Valley and all of the relationships with the government there, which I just don’t think is really accurate,” said Max Bodach, executive vice president at the Foundation for American Innovation, in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The feud erupted over Trump’s signature legislative play — the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a massive spending package that federal bean counters say will add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. By rescuing soon-expiring tax cuts and expanding immigration enforcement, Trump aims to lock down his domestic legacy in a single sweeping measure. But for Musk, those ballooning deficit numbers represented everything wrong with Washington — and yet another big-government betrayal of his libertarian sensibilities.
The Quarrel
It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt https://t.co/dHCj3pprJO
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 3, 2025
Last Tuesday, Musk fired the opening salvo, branding Trump’s prized legislation a “disgusting abomination” that would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit.” For the next 48 hours, the mogul’s X feed became a political ground zero — post after post beseeching Republicans to “KILL the BILL,” each tweet more escalatory than the last.
By Thursday, what began as a policy spat had curdled into something uglier. Musk claimed ownership of Trump’s presidency — “without me, Trump would have lost the election” — and later promoted impeachment talk openly.
Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025
Trump retaliated with typical force, publicly threatening to gut Musk’s government contracts — tens of billions in longtime SpaceX and Tesla deals suddenly reduced to bargaining chips. Musk went lower still, insinuating Trump had dark ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring.
Musk, for his part, has deleted many of his more venomous tweets over the past week. He even explicitly retracted “some” of his posts in a 3 a.m. tweet Wednesday morning, admitting he “went too far.”
I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2025
But Silicon Valley Doesn’t Seem To Notice
But zoom out from the internet psychodrama, analysts say, and something else comes into focus: the circuitry binding tech to power kept humming along with mechanical indifference, unfazed by just one burnt bridge.
Even as Musk raged against the Republican machine, the machine kept feeding his contemporaries. House Republicans advanced a 10-year preemption of state-level AI laws in their reconciliation package — exactly the type of regulatory immunity Big Tech lobbyists have salivated over for months. The same week Tesla stock was bleeding out on the trading floor, defense contractor Anduril scored another $2.5 billion in fresh capital, its valuation swelling to $30 billion. Meanwhile, crypto super PACs kept stacking chips, their $116 million war chest waiting patiently for deployment in next year’s midterms, according to Axios.
For Nathan Leamer, a former FCC advisor, the Musk-Trump bloodbath was just another data point in a much larger pattern of cooperation between the Beltway and the Bay — and one blowup wasn’t about to stop the inertia.
“Elon Musk is a personality within the greater Silicon Valley ecosystem, but he is his own guy — and even the way he operates in DC and politics is really its own thing,” Leamer told the DCNF. “Peter Thiel, [Marc] Andreessen, David Sacks … they’re building infrastructure to change culture and debate. Elon is about Elon. He is his best and worst lobbyist. He is his infrastructure.”
The difference reflects two distinct theories of influence, Leamer explained — Musk’s shock-and-awe campaign versus the patient accumulation of institutional mass. One model burned bright and died fast; the other spent years on careful constructions built to withstand any one man’s spat with the president.
Friends In High Places
Take Peter Thiel, whose personal network is a constellation of friends in high places — Vice President JD Vance steering a corner of the executive, David Sacks building out a policy infrastructure for crypto and AI, Pentagon CTO Michael Kratsios spearheading defense innovation. Bodach says this network represents a personal and political philosophy different from Musk’s — one more focused on influence through established and quieter channels.
The White House reiterated its confidence in Sacks in a statement to the DCNF. Vance’s office declined to comment.
But Bodach says the philosophical divide runs deeper than tactics. He said Musk is still a creature of the libertarian “2010s Tea Party” era — bureaucracy as enemy, deficit as apocalypse, capitalism as righteousness — while the Thiel network had learned to speak in the “more sophisticated” registers of civilizational decay and redemption through state power.
“Elon sounds profoundly uncomfortable whenever he’s trying to talk about, like, the nation-qua-nation — you know, the idea that the market serves people and not the other way around,” Bodach observed.
Marc Andreessen represents another ideological strain entirely. Where Musk raged against deficits, Andreessen fed on pure growth, consequences be damned. The Netscape founder’s venture firm has methodically deployed over $70 million across election cycles since 2022, backing tech-friendly politicians regardless of party, according to The Defiant.
“We believe everything good is downstream of growth,” Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto” reads. “We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.”
Bodach said the crypto industry’s approach revealed an even savvier institutional approach. They had watched city councils bloody Uber in its nascent years, seen regulators kill promising startups in their cribs, and they decided on a different approach.
“He was like, you know, trying to figure out something — how do we make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to Airbnb?” Bodach explained, describing regulatory strategist Chris Lehane’s crypto industry’s political operation after successfully navigating local regulations for the home-sharing giant. The result: crypto-affiliated groups spent $119 million in 2024 elections and won an astounding 33 of 35 races they targeted, including taking down left-wing firebrand Katie Porter, according to an investigation in the New Yorker.
In The Same Boat
But defense technology, Bodach said, carved out the most permanent presence in powerful Republican circles. Anduril founder Palmer Luckey scattered production facilities across the reddest districts on the map: Alabama engineering, Mississippi production, “hyperscale manufacturing” in Pickaway County, Ohio. Each facility meant jobs and tax revenue — Republican congressmen could finally wear tech policy as a kitchen-table win rather than some wonkish abstraction.
“You know, Elon did a lot of work just to, you know … poured a ton of his own money into proving that business model could even work,” Bodach said, referring to how SpaceX pioneered the commercial space model that companies like Anduril now replicate in defense.
But the stronger structural glue, Leamer and Bodach agreed, was the problem of China — this fear of a civilizational conflict that keeps Washington and Silicon Valley locked in binary orbit, generating a bipartisan consensus that American technology leadership must be maintained at all costs.
“If you manage your expectations and you think, hey, there’s an opportunity for them to think about establishing a U.S. framework for AI and competing against other nations, then their interests are still aligned,” Leamer explained.
The Work Continues
Musk’s outburst aside, Trump’s broader deregulatory agenda hasn’t slowed down — an executive order shredding 10 regulations for every new one written, the EPA declaring “the greatest day of deregulation” in American history. These gears turn with or without the richest man in the world’s endorsement, Leamer said, and Silicon Valley kept stacking wins while Musk fell out of the White House’s good graces.
Still, the Musk episode reveals real vulnerabilities for the tech-GOP alliance. Washington Post polling shows his unfavorable rating hit 57% nationwide after the Trump fight, while his $20 million spending on Wisconsin’s losing Supreme Court candidate demonstrated how a billionaire’s extremely public involvement can sometimes backfire.
“I don’t think anyone’s really figured out exactly what is going to happen there,” Bodach admitted about Silicon Valley’s broader political evolution, noting that 75% of tech workers’ political donations still flow to Democrats despite the much-hyped rightward shift.
But that’s precisely why the Trump-Musk breakup won’t kill the broader alliance, the analysts argue. Many tech leaders spread their eggs across countless baskets, building multiple channels of influence that can weather personal fallouts and public scandals. What emerges, they said, is a cooperative relationship of a more institutional breed — one that could prove sturdier than Musk’s relationship with the president.
The DCNF reached out to X, Thiel’s Founders Fund, Anduril and Michael Kratsios for comment but did not hear back by publication.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)
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