Trump and Musk's Brittle, Shared Secret Gets Exposed | Opinion

What President Donald Trump and Elon Musk share more than anything else—and have built their lives on—is one keen insight into American psychology. Let's call it the Glass Onion principle.

In the movie Glass Onion (spoiler alert), a detective investigates a case involving a billionaire. He's supposedly a tech visionary, but at the end, is revealed actually to be "an idiot": a man who never came up with original ideas, hyped and took credit for the inspirations of others, and yet thinks he's smart enough to mess around with powerful forces he doesn't understand. His many blunders should have made it obvious, except for the aura of wealth and success—and therefore the assumption of underlying brilliance—that shielded him.

Sound familiar?

This is the secret that Musk and Trump understand. Americans desperately want to be rich, so we elevate those who have achieved wealth. And we so easily conflate talent and success that we get confused about which one implies the other.

So it's not just that the key for creating a self-fulfilling prophecy is to always project prosperity—an idea that's been around for ages—it's also that if you can, others will infer that you have a special genius. Even if it's blatantly hollow. Even if it's a brazen myth.

And that lets you get away with outrageous things.

The basic pattern is all around us. It's the same dynamic that fueled the rise of kitschy grifters preaching the exceptionally icky prosperity theology—the belief that material success must be a sign of divine favor. How else to explain Christian ministers showing off their Rolls Royces while demanding that their congregants buy them $65 million jets... while people nod along and name universities in their honor?

It's the same notion that drives modern celebrity culture. It used to be that success made you a celebrity; now the fact that you're a celebrity makes you a success. How else to explain that one of the world's most prolific and talented musicians, Taylor Swift, is worth $1.4 billion, while the meritless Kim Kardashian leveraged nothing more than a friendship with Paris Hilton, a sex tape, and a reality TV show into a higher net worth of $1.7 billion?

It's like one of those optical illusions where your brain fills in gaps to form a familiar picture: once people think you're rich and famous they'll assume that your underlying genius (stable or not) should probably be given a lot of room to maneuver.

The fact that Musk and Trump both saw this explains a lot about their biographies. As Substacker Shane Almgren recently laid out in riveting detail, the Musk myth has all the hallmarks of a long con. At every step, he's been able to invest some money into other people's good ideas and then cash out—literally and figuratively—with more money and a gaudier reputation, despite contributing very little. Quite the opposite: others have had to fix his bad technical ideas, subsidize him (including $465 million in 2010 from a U.S. government that he's recently decimated for being "wasteful," and tens of billions more from foreign governments, including China, with whom we're now in a trade war), or pay him to go away.

But Musk understood the Glass Onion principle. While he was being pushed out of PayPal, he conceded that they could take everything else away but insisted in a binding legal agreement that they had to call him a "founder." Ditto at Tesla, where Musk pushed out an actual founder, and then paid him off in a court settlement that again required that Musk be called the "founder." These had to be his ideas, his creations.

History may not repeat, but in the case of Trump it sure does rhyme. He took an initial $413 million (in 2018 dollars) inheritance from his father and invested it in a string of doomed enterprises. He was such a bad businessman that he went bankrupt six times. By 2021, Trump would have actually been worth more if he had never touched his dad's money and just let it ride in the stock market.

But like Musk, Trump's one clear talent is that he is a fantastic hype man for his own story. On the verge of financial ruin, he was saved by re-selling his myth via The Apprentice. And then Trump did it again two decades later, when in 2024 he was in real danger of getting wiped out by almost $500 million in legal penalties. He was pulled out of the danger zone by the meme stock-like explosion of Truth Social. This was the ultimate example of the Trump pattern: reaping a mind-boggling windfall based on the initiative of other people and the value of attaching his invented cult of personality to an otherwise flailing business (and yes, of course Trump nearly messed up the deal; and yes, of course he then turned around and backstabbed the people who made it happen).

Because, like Musk, Trump understands the secret. That's why he so zealously guards the foundation of his myth. Look no further than the fact that in 2011, Trump agreed to be the subject of a Comedy Central roast with ground rules that they could make fun of anything— his bizarre relationship his daughter, his synthetic hair, his weight—except questioning how wealthy he actually was. Because that's the wellspring of everything, the source of his popularity, the Horcrux that has preserved his political life.

And now, these two reputational Ponzi schemes have crashed into the Peter Principle.

With Musk, as with his fictional Glass Onion counterpart, the signs were building. His failures with the hyperloop, the Boring Company, and Twitter should have given ample warning. But Trump gave him license to take the same approach to the federal government that he took with Twitter—demolish with no plan, only the hint that a genius was at work. The result has been the same disaster.

And in the past week, Trump's half-baked ideas about global trade have encountered the harsh reality of economics. It turns out that bond markets don't react well when you try to explain your plan to reshape global commerce through a nonsensical formula that a sixth grader could concoct and a haphazard chart that features tariffs on penguins.

Trump and Musk are truly onions made of glass: shiny orbs of one insubstantial layer over another, with nothing in the center, liable to be shattered under the slightest pressure.

But will the failures fell the fabulists? Only if we can finally pierce their spell and snap out of the collective mass delusion they've weaved.

Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.