The New Yorker:

Musk looks like the latest victim of a common Trump-era dynamic: the impossibility of sharing the President’s spotlight.

By Jon Allsop

In January, Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist, spoke on his podcast with Chris Hayes, the MSNBC anchor, about attention, a topic on which Hayes had just written a book. Klein called Donald Trump a “master” at wielding and using attention, including the negative kind, to his political benefit, and noted that he had a “disciple” in Elon Musk, who was then on the cusp of becoming Trump’s hatchet man in government. Together, the pair were the most “attentionally rich” people on earth, Klein said, and for Musk these riches might have become more important than his finances—a big claim, given that Musk is the world’s richest person. Musk had used some of that money, in 2022, to acquire Twitter (now called X) at what many analysts mocked as a ripoff price, only to leverage the platform’s ability to corral attention into immense political power. At the time of Hayes and Klein’s conversation, he was unavoidable. A few days later, Trump was inaugurated, and Musk quickly stole the President’s thunder, performing what appeared to be a Nazi salute at a rally. He said that it wasn’t; his many critics, not to mention gleeful white supremacists, said that it was. The trollish ambiguity may have been the point. Either way, people talked about it—a lot.

Things now seem very different. Last week, an analysis by Politicofound that Trump had stopped mentioning Musk in his posts on Truth Social, and that Musk had all but disappeared from Presidential fund-raising blasts, White House media materials, and Republican lawmakers’ newsletters, too. The news cycle has mostly moved on from Musk’s chaotic doge work to other stories, such as tariffs and immigration. He has even been less ubiquitous in his online fief: the Times found that Musk has been posting on X much less often than in the early days of the Administration, when he never seemed to stop, and the Washington Post’s recent assessmentof his feed found that he is posting much less about politics. Last week, he said that he plans to curb his spending on political campaigns. (“I don’t currently see a reason,” he said.) Politico wrote that he has “started to fade away”; the Times noted that he is moving into “the background of American politics.” The Atlantic dedicated a story to his “decline and fall.” On Wednesday night, Musk suggested in a post on X that he’s leaving government altogether.

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