By Heiko Roloff
New Zoff round of multi-billionaires Donald Trump (76) and Elon Musk (51). After the ex-president had disparaged the Tesla founder at a campaign event in Alaska as a “bullshit artist” (en.: nonsense), he now fired back.
“I don’t hate the man,” Musk began his tweet quite forgivingly. “But it’s time for Trump to take off his hat and sail into the sunset,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
Called: Trump should calm down and say goodbye to the idea of becoming president again. Rather, according to Musk, he should withdraw from politics.
Musk also had one piece of advice for Trump’s political opponents: Democrats “should stop their attacks — don’t push it to the point that Trump’s only way of surviving is to retake the presidency.”
The relationship between the two billionaires was not always so hostile.
︎ Musk was one of the first businessmen that Trump received after his election victory in November 2016. At that time, before the new president was sworn in, the Tesla boss was a guest in New York’s Trump Tower and two weeks later in the White House. And in 2018 he visited the seat of government again.
But recently it broke.
︎ After Musk announced in April that he would buy Twitter and lift Trump’s Twitter ban after the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the cool refused. And when Musk suddenly backed out of his purchase offer last week, Trump said of him: “Another slob.” And further: “I predicted that he would not buy Twitter. I checked the contract. Not a good contract.”
In fact, Musk hasn’t had a good run for weeks: The shares of his electric car manufacturer Tesla have collapsed after production problems. The cryptocurrencies he has long praised have imploded. There is a crisis at his space travel company SpaceX, where employees mocked his Twitter habits. And according to the business magazine “Fortune”, his fortune has shrunk from 340 billion euros (November 2021) to 210 billion.
But: Musk, who is still by far the richest person in the world, continues to be optimistic and self-confident on the outside – and cheerfully wedges against Trump.
On Monday he tweeted about his possible new presidency: “He would be 82 years old at the end of his term. It’s too old to be Commander-in-Chief of anything – let alone the United States of America.”
Musk then took Trump and Biden to heart together and declared Republican Florida Governor Rick DeSantis (43) his favorite for the next race for the White House: “If he runs against Biden in 2024, DeSantis will easily win – he doesn’t even have to campaign for it.”