TOM LEONARD: Amid all the talk about President Musk, is Donald Trump already tiring of his First Buddy?

Bounding on to the stage and jumping in the air with arms outstretched, Elon Musk looked like a man who’d just won the lottery.

Donald Trump had asked him to join him on stage for the first time at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last October – the town where, just a few months earlier, the ex-president had narrowly survived an assassin’s bullet.

‘He is a truly incredible guy – and I don’t say that that often,’ Trump declared of the tycoon who’d sunk no less than £211million into his second presidential campaign.

‘As you can see I’m not just Maga [Make America Great Again], I’m dark Maga,’ Musk told the cheering crowd as he pointed to his Trump cap – not the usual red, but black.

It was clearly a joke but, since then, his critics might say that never a truer word was spoken in jest as Musk has behaved even more pugnaciously and wildly than Trump himself.

The mercurial Musk has picked fights with politicians around the globe – from Republicans in Washington over government spending to European administrations, notably Keir Starmer over the grooming gang scandal in northern England and also Germany over immigration and crime.

Less than two weeks before Trump is sworn in, Musk has effectively hijacked his presidency, soaking up the world’s attention with his endless outbursts on X, his social media platform on which he has 211million followers.

But has the ebullient tech tycoon, who tweets through the night while running a raft of global businesses, already over-played his hand – risking killing his ‘bromance’ with the president-elect before the second term has even started? That intriguing possibility has now been raised by Trump biographer and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Dubbed the ‘Trump Whisperer’ for her deep connections in the court of The Donald, Haberman claims to have been told that Trump is already tiring of the company of the world’s richest man.

Only two years ago, Musk said he wished Trump would ‘hang up his hat and sail into the sunset’. But Haberman says she is not surprised that Musk has ensconced himself in the heart of Trump’s inner circle, as he ‘has an enormous amount of money that he put to use helping Trump’ and ‘Trump equates wealth with intelligence’.

However, speaking to the podcast series On With Kara Swisher, Haberman added: ‘How long it lasts, I think, is the open question. A long-time Trump friend said something to me recently about how Trump is a “one-ring circus”. I’m not sure that Musk has figured that out yet. And Trump does complain a bit to people about how Musk is around a lot.’

Musk is ‘around a lot’ primarily because, since the election in November, he has rented a ‘cottage’– which usually costs at least £1,600 a night – on the grounds of Trump’s main home, his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. Consequently, he is only a couple of hundred feet from the mansion in which Trump is forming his next administration.

Musk has been able to drop in to meetings and dinners with the president-elect, such as one he recently held with Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, and join his telephone calls.

Haberman said that by moving into the Mar-a-Lago compound, Musk had ‘parked himself in Trump’s face’.

She added that taunts by Democrats about ‘President Musk’ and Trump’s First Lady being named ‘Elonia’ are increasingly riling the 78-year-old. ‘It definitely bothers him. The “President Musk” line was always going to be a way to get him,’ she said. 

‘Trump’s not a wind-up toy, but there certainly are very specific things that can zotz [infuriate] him.’

She also observed that Musk seems to have been ‘more willing to irritate Trump than a lot of others have been – and less concerned about what it might mean’.

Trump insiders have said much the same to news website Mediaite, claiming the president-elect was tiring of Musk’s ‘omnipresence’ and the attention he was drawing.

‘100 per cent, Trump is annoyed,’ said a source who worked on the 2024 election campaign. ‘There’s a Chinese saying: “Two tigers cannot live on one mountaintop”.’

Another insider was quoted as saying: ‘Someone that is around that much and having influence would be a bother... I mean, the guy came in, gave a boatload of money and wants to take over.’

It’s worth noting that Musk has made a fair few enemies in the Trump camp with his reportedly aggressive behaviour towards them, so there may be a strong element of wishful thinking that he’s on his way out.

For the moment, there’s no public sign of a rift. Trump has asked Musk to co-lead (with fellow conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy) a new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, or Doge, although sceptics point out that only Congress can create new federal agencies and that this department is unlikely to get off the ground.

That might give Trump the perfect excuse to avoid his ‘First Buddy’ – as the tycoon calls himself – although Musk could always ask for something else.

After all, while opponents complain he’s never been elected to public office (and so shouldn’t be given a big post now), nor had Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner when the ambitious young property developer was put in charge of leading US efforts to bring peace to the Middle East during his first term.

Pundits predict that Musk will want to stay as physically close to Trump as possible – which, from January 20, means an office on the White House campus. And if not that, at least have one of the treasured ‘access all areas’ security passes that Trump used to give out to favoured cronies during his first term and which would allow Musk to wander around the White House at will.

Haberman doesn’t believe Musk will get the office or the pass – he has too many enemies and Trump insiders don’t want him, of all people, ‘running around this way’, she says.

But at the same time, she acknowledges Trump is traditionally slow to dispense with people who have been useful to him and rarely exiles anyone entirely.

Indeed, some argue that Trump cannot afford to antagonise Musk. That’s not only because of his vast wealth – and willingness to plough it into politics – or his ownership of the social media platform that remains the most powerful communication channel in the US.

America has become increasingly reliant – some say too reliant – on Musk businesses. The 53-year-old, estimated to be worth £340billion, controls the Starlink satellite network which plays a crucial defence role and on which Ukraine’s military depends for internet coverage.

Nasa needs Musk’s SpaceX rockets to get US equipment and astronauts into space. Having accepted his shilling and let him into the gang, Trump may find Musk – who knows how to bear a grudge just as much as he does – difficult to shrug off. There will certainly be many in Whitehall and other European governments who sincerely hope that Trump does rein him in – and soon.

Some Washington experts say this is bound to happen. While it may be fine to drop in on the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago, once he’s Leader of the Free World, this becomes a lot harder. 

Insiders claim that if and when Musk does officially become part of the next Trump administration, he will have to abide by the usual constraints on presidential officials.

However, Musk is not great at restraint while Trump is not great at following the rules. And neither man, alike in more ways than just their huge egotism, likes sharing the stage.

As Americans head into one of the most unpredictable presidencies in living memory, they can at least reassure themselves of one certainty. Born in South Africa to non-US parents, Musk is barred under the Constitution from running for the presidency himself.