Lessons from Trump-Musk fallout

That brief bromance, that lasted just about the same time as the five- month gestation period of a goat, will be a timeless and classic history lesson on leadership.

Lesson 1: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

Elon Musk, the billionaire space rocket and electric vehicle guru, decided he could also fix the US government. Trump, never one to shy away from “Mtoto akililia wembe, mpe - vibes”, handed him the keys to DOGE.

The result? A startup-style assault through federal government offices that slashed billions in contracts and left civil servants gasping for air at the speed of job losses.

Leadership takeaway? Trying to introduce efficiency into a civil service system that has thrived on self-created inefficiencies will definitely create character development ulcers. Also, always let someone else be the ugly face of job cuts. For Trump, Musk was the perfect mask.

Lesson 2: Don’t bite the hand that funds you

Musk’s companies—SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink—have been feeding from the government tenders trough for years. But when he started throwing shade at Trump’s budget cuts and electric vehicle (EV) policies, the bromance soured faster than milk in a mursik gourd.

As word emerged that Trump was working on a new spending bill that would roll back the government’s support on EV policies, with a potential $1.2 billion negative impact on Tesla’s core business, Musk publicly voiced his concerns and warned that the government’s policies could undermine American leadership in clean energy.

He pressed the ego nuclear button, claiming that Trump would have lost the 2024 election without him and dropped a bombshell: Trump’s name might be in sealed government documents that related to the notorious sex trafficker Jefrrey Epstein and that was why certain files had not been released.

As the late John Michuki famously told us, when you rattle a snake, be prepared to deal with the consequences.

A $400million government contract for Tesla armored vehicles was scrapped and Trump threated to terminate Space X’s contracts with the government space agency NASA, which run in the tens of billions of dollars. In the 2024 financial year, Space X allegedly received $3.8 billion in contracts alone.

Leadership takeaway? If your hustle depends on tenders, maybe don’t insult the guy signing the LPO. Also, perhaps don’t start nuclear Twitter wars with sitting presidents.

Lesson 3: Transparency is great—until it’s not

DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” was a Muskian masterstroke: a public dashboard showing every contract cut, every dollar “saved.” It was efficient. It was transparent.

After initially promising to deliver up to $2 trillion in cuts, the verified savings by April 2025 were only $175 billion. DOGE has so far terminated over 25,000 in federal government contracts and grants which has created a public relations disaster as watchdogs started asking why so many of those cuts seemed to benefit Musk’s rivals.

Leadership takeaway? Transparency is only powerful when it’s paired with accountability. Otherwise, it’s just a very shiny mirror that reflects your self-interest image back at you. There are plenty of people waiting in the wings ready to hold that mirror for you, particularly the disgruntled ones.

And so, we end where all great political dramas do: with a bill. Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill—meant to showcase fiscal discipline—ended up gutting the very electric vehicle incentives that powered Musk’s empire. Meanwhile, DOGE was supposed to be a lean, mean, waste-cutting machine.

Instead, it became a cautionary tale of what happens when you mix Silicon Valley swagger with Washington’s deeply entrenched civil service.

In trying to make government more efficient, Musk may have made his own empire more vulnerable. And Trump, in trying to assert control, may have alienated his most powerful ally. We can only sit on the X sidelines to watch what the future portends.

The writer is a corporate governance specialist and a former banker
X: @carolmusyoka