US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's social media fallout upsets 'manosphere' creators and channels. Photo / AFP
US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's social media fallout upsets 'manosphere' creators and channels. Photo / AFP
About 90 minutes into Joe Rogan’s interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, a producer interrupted the conversation with some news.
United States President Donald Trump and Elon Musk “seem to be in a little bit of a spat”, the producer said, displaying on a screen a new inflammatory post fromMusk.
The relationship between the billionaire owner of social platform X and the President had, until recently, been widely described as a “bromance”.
In the post, Musk suggested, without evidence, that Trump was withholding “the Epstein files” because the President had a personal connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case. By Sunday, Musk appeared to have deleted the post.
By this point in Patel’s interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience”, the FBI director had already spent about 20 minutes discussing Epstein, promising to release video surveillance from the disgraced financier’s jail cell. Epstein hanged himself there while awaiting trial.
Patel swiftly distanced himself from the skirmish: “I’m not participating in any of that conversation between Elon and Trump,” he said. “I know my lane, and that ain’t it.”
Rogan seemed to choose a side quickly. He called Musk’s post “crazy” and suggested the billionaire’s phone be taken away.
Musk suggested Trump was withholding 'the Epstein files', but later deleted the post. Photo / AFP
Several other Maga-friendly podcasters took a similar stance, expressing gratitude to Musk for his support so far of the Republican agenda but urging him to fall in line.
Their continued embrace of Trump underscores just how central a role the President plays in the so-called ‘manosphere’, an unruly world of online content targeting male audiences.
The Administration has also continued to treat these shows as a critical messaging tool – extending their relationship far beyond the election, when the Trump campaign famously used ‘manosphere’ creators and channels to reach politically disengaged men.
On the same day as Patel’s interview, Vice-President JD Vance sat across from mullet-haired comedian Theo Von, host of the podcast “This Past Weekend”, ready to discuss the merits of what the President calls the “big, beautiful bill”.
Von’s show is arguably the second-most popular in the ‘manosphere’, with nearly four million subscribers on YouTube.
Rogan, who has the largest audience by far of any podcast in the US, has just shy of 20 million. Both men attended the President’s inauguration in January.
The Vice-President’s interview was similarly derailed by Musk’s post. “The missile is in the cannon,” Von said during the episode, using two expletives, before reading the post aloud.
Vance had not seen the post until then, he said, but he defended Trump as not having done “anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein”.
He admitted the President had grown frustrated in recent days with Musk’s criticism of the budget bill and said Musk was making a “huge mistake”.
“If he and the President are in some blood feud, most importantly, it’s going to be bad for the country,” he continued. “I don’t think it’s going to be good for Elon either.”
Elon Musk calls Trump's budget bill 'pork-filled'.
The Vice-President then briefly pivoted to the trial of Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul widely known as Diddy, and rumours surrounding the case he had heard regarding “baby oil but that had drugs in it”.
The exchange was the kind of distracted tangent, laced with unverified information, characteristic of ‘manosphere’ discourse.
Still, Vance was not overly critical of Musk, complimenting the world’s richest man as an “incredible entrepreneur” but an “emotional guy” who had “suffered a lot” by getting into politics. He said he hoped Musk would come back into the fold.
In an episode released at the weekend, conservative commentator Charlie Kirk said he believed Musk and Trump would reconcile at the President’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, “over two scoops of ice cream and steak”, before Christmas, and posted a Bible verse on X about the virtues of “peacemakers”.
Clay Travis, founder of sports media company OutKick and host of “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show”, echoed similar sentiments on his show.
“I hope that Trump and Elon, on some level, can make up,” Travis said. He called Musk “the greatest capitalist who has ever lived in the history of capitalism”.
On what was called an “emergency episode” by Patrick Bet-David, host of the “PBD Podcast”, he urged Musk to “accept” that Trump is the “alpha amongst alphas”.
Any disagreements should be voiced in private, he argued emphatically, in order to protect the “image of the alpha”, he said.
