The Sons of DOGE

Something about the Trump–Musk spat in early June 2025 didn’t sit right. It wasn’t just performative. It felt hollow in a way that was strangely personal, as if something deeper was breaking down—but we watched the wreckage through a meme filter.

Everyone was interpreting it at face value: ego, politics, positioning. But tuning in, I sensed something else. Not analysis. Not fact. Just a flicker of meaning beneath the noise.

I think Musk felt betrayed—not just by Trump, but by the breaking of a dream. He had rallied a whole generation of young men into a mythos: DOGE, Tesla, Mars, memes-as-language, a future to build. Whatever you thought of it, it meant something to them. It gave them purpose in a world fast losing the thread. And then, perhaps, he felt Trump—once an ally in that rebellious energy—had mocked that vision. Turned on it. Cheapened it.

Musk didn’t expect gratitude. He didn’t need favouritism. But he did expect to be respected—as a builder, a strategist, a visionary, and someone who gave Trump’s second run some badly needed intellectual credibility. He had brought in sharp, young minds under the DOGE banner to cut waste, rewrite systems, and reimagine government infrastructure. They weren’t ideologues. They were technologists—and they believed they were building something real.

And then came the “Big Beautiful Bill”—a bloated, cynical package stitched together for optics and short-term wins. For Musk and his team, it must have felt like the message was: “Thanks for your input, lads. Now shut up and watch us do it the old way.” Bureaucracy won again. Politics-as-usual swallowed the experiment.

And worse—when Musk objected, he wasn’t engaged with. He was mocked. Trump, the showman, treated the protest as a tantrum, not a challenge. And that, perhaps, was the deepest wound: to give your intelligence and vision to a cause and be ridiculed like an underling when you spoke up.

It was the cry of tech support everywhere: “You call us when it breaks, but you never listen when we tell you how to fix it.” They were brilliant, analytical, solutions-driven—and constantly patronised by the old guard who mistook swagger for competence.

So yes—this wasn’t just about policy. It was about voice. About being heard. About Musk and his cohort watching the machinery roll on, dumb and deaf, despite everything they tried to contribute. And that’s why it felt so personal, so raw, so mythic.

It wasn’t about politics. It was about the sons. The coders and crypto kids, the engineers and dreamers who threw their weight behind a symbolic father figure, because they wanted to believe in something that wasn’t dying.

If that was true—if some part of Musk knew he had sold them that dream—then Trump’s betrayal wasn’t just personal. It was mythic. It ruptured the fragile masculine architecture that held the whole story up. And the rage we saw was, at heart, grief in armour.

But grief in men like Musk didn’t show up as lament. It mutated—into sarcasm, severance, or a thousand versions of “I never cared anyway.” He unfollowed, he posted, he mocked the man who used to mirror him. It was adolescent, yes—but also ancient. A wounded king lashing out at the failed patriarch who failed him. The one who promised allegiance, and then sneered at the temple they**’d half-built** together.

The sons were watching. Some were still loyal, eyes sharp behind their avatars. Others were disillusioned, peeling away from the myth, trying not to feel foolish. They weren’t wrong to believe—only perhaps mistaken in where they placed their belief. That’s a different kind of heartbreak.

And here’s the ache: there was a dream there, once. Strange, wild, problematic perhaps—but real in its energy. A dream of building a future not managed by decaying institutions or dominated by dead-eyed bureaucracy. A dream of motion. Of doing something big, fast, stupid, brilliant. The masculine, in its raw, generative form, unrefined but alive.

What broke then wasn’t just a Twitter spat. It was the scaffolding of a particular masculine myth—the brotherhood of purpose—pulled apart by two of its own architects. They each thought they were leading it. Maybe they were, in different ways. But then they wrecked it, in public, with pettiness that felt like desecration.

And maybe that’s the point. Not everything breaks cleanly. Some things fell apart in absurdity, in memes, in half-jokes that left a bitter aftertaste. And somewhere in that collapse, the sons were watching. Waiting. Not quite sure if what they had built was still worth believing in.

Or maybe—just maybe—this was the beginning of something else. Not a collapse, but an initiation. The moment the sons saw the fathers for what they were, and stepped out from under their shadows. Something might have risen from this, quieter and truer—built not in homage to old men and their broken myths, but in the image of those who had nothing to prove and everything still to make.