Elon Musk is brilliant, creative and has managed to become the richest man in the world. He’s also very independent and has an outsized ego, which made me wonder how well he would play with others in the Trump Administration. 

When you are the board president or CEO of your own companies, you can pretty much do whatever you wish. In Elon Musk’s case, he tried to have others take over the CEO positions at his companies, and he became frustrated when he had to relinquish control. In most cases, he simply fired the CEOs.

In the Trump administration, Musk doesn’t have that luxury. He is reporting to Trump, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, as the co-leaders of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. I assume that he realizes that approval for everything that he identifies must go through Trump.

This past weekend, Musk made public his support for Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, for Treasury Secretary. When Trump’s support for Lutnick seemed to be fading, Lutnick asked Musk to step in:

Musk obliged, publicly throwing his support behind Lutnick in a post on X on Saturday.

‘My view [for what it’s worth] is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas [Howard Lutnick] will actually enact change,’ Musk wrote on X.

Lutnick has said that he didn’t ask Musk to make a public statement. But Musk must have known that his X comment would put Trump in an awkward position. Subsequently (perhaps, defiantly), Trump added more people to the mix for Treasury Secretary: former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh, Apollo Global Management chief executive Marc Rowan, and Robert Lighthizer, who worked in the first Trump administration.

At this time, the decision still hasn’t been made.

There are a number of reasons why Musk's relationship with Trump might go south. First, he has been staying at Mar-a-Lago for weeks, even having dinner with Trump and Melania on a number of occasions. Musk is known to often stay with friends for long periods at their homes. But those people are clearly friends. Would Trump and Musk call each other “friend,” and would they each mean the same thing by using the word? When we have friends, we may think we can ask them for favors, and expect that they will be open to our opinions, too. I’m not sure how any of us would feel about learning about our friends’ opinions through the global press.

Second, Musk is accustomed to getting his way in his companies. He makes demands of his employees, and when he encounters resistance from them, he pushes back and simply tells them to “make it happen.”

Third, his behavior regarding Lutnick makes me wonder if he will post on X when he has made recommendations to the President-elect for DOGE and Trump turns him down. Will he feel justified in campaigning publicly for his idea, even though it’s been rejected?

It's not clear how well Musk will respond to the protocols of working as a quasi-government employee. Will he respect Trump’s expectations? Will he “play nice” with the team?

Time will tell.

Image: JD Lasica