In the past 48 hours, Elon Musk, President Trump’s right-hand man as well as DOGE leader, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, have been involved in a spat via social media that has not gone unnoticed.
The dispute began on Sunday, when posting on his social network, X, Musk effectively accused his rival of funding the protests of recent weeks against Tesla, another company that he owns.
It all started when the right-leaning Western Decline communicated on the social network: “Hoffman is a major funder of Indivisible, a group actively funding and organizing anti-Musk demonstrations at Tesla showrooms, factories, and dealerships—events that have led to widespread vandalism.”
Soon after, it was Musk himself who spoke on the subject, explaining: “Reid will have many layers between himself and the organizations attacking me, but the probability is 100% that Reid is funding them.”
Hoffman’s retort was not long in coming, addressing Musk: “”The probability many, many people don’t like you? 100%,” Hoffman wrote. “Probability that Tesla polls need to be rigged by bots to cover up the fact that people don’t like you? 100%. Probability you’d rather make s*** up about me than fix your problems? 100%.”
March saw a significant increase in protests against Tesla, with numerous vehicles and dealerships targeted in multiple states. The FBI is still investigating an incident in Kansas City in which several Cybertrucks were damaged by protesters.
Musk’s rhetoric against the protests became increasingly rancorous as they continued. In March, he explained that such demonstrations were caused by people’s anger at his attempts to reduce government spending by cracking down on fraud, as leader of DOGE.
“It turns out when you take away the money people get fraudulently, they get very upset”, Musk said, “They basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we are stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government.”
