In February 2023 California governor Gavin Newsom and Elon Musk stood side by side at a press conference celebrating Tesla’s new AI innovation lab in Palo Alto.
They traded jokes about a $100,000 deposit Newsom had made on a Tesla Roadster, the first electric car the company produced.
“That was a lot of money in 2007,” Musk, now the richest man in the world, said.
“It’s still a lot of money,” Newsom replied. “Trust me, brother, you haven’t looked at my salary.”
That was the high-water mark of their relationship, and it’s been all downhill, and increasingly fast, ever since.
On Wednesday, Newsom appeared on “The Axios Show” and called Musk — CEO of Tesla, founder of Space X, brain implant company Neuralink and owner of social media company X — “this generation’s Thomas Edison.”
Then, in the same breath, he called him “one of the great disappointments” of this era, adding, “It breaks my heart.”
The occasion was ostensibly a conversation about electric vehicles, but it was also something more personal, a public eulogy for one of the stranger political friendships in recent California history.
On one side: Newsom, 58, the fourth-generation California politician who has been governor since 2019, married to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and the father of four children ranging in age from nine to sixteen. He’s widely regarded as the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, leading early surveys against a field that includes Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.
On the other side: Musk, 54, the South Africa-born engineer who is by a considerable margin the richest man in recorded history. Forbes pegs his net worth at $839 billion, more than three times that of the second-wealthiest person on the planet.
His stated ambition, however, isn’t merely accumulating wealth but relocating humanity to Mars.
Edward Niedermeyer, author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors,” has been watching this relationship longer than most, and he’s not sentimental about it. The history of California’s relationship with Tesla, he says, is a story of a state bending over backward for a company that took everything on offer and kept its hands clean of nothing.
“Tesla has been one of the largest manufacturers in California for some time, so Newsom has long had strong incentives to play nice with Musk,” Niedermeyer said. “Any time you have that many jobs in a single state, the governor usually tends to be quite friendly.”
Tesla also functioned as something more than an employer. It was, he notes, “a kind of flagship company for California, in the sense that it both enhances the state’s high-tech image and diversifies it into new industrial dimensions.”
The state’s generosity had limits that weren’t always enforced. Tesla’s Fremont factory still carries rampant Clean Air Act violations, Niedermeyer said, despite Lila Bringhurst Elementary sitting within a mile of that plant.
State regulators, he says, have repeatedly given Tesla “sweetheart deals where they just have to hire an expert to help them remain in compliance.”
The arrangement worked because each man needed the other. California needed Musk as living proof that environmental regulation and world-changing technology could coexist. Musk needed California’s policy environment, its engineering talent, its consumer market, and its symbolic prestige. For years, it bordered on mutual flattery.
The cordial phase has a paper trail. In March 2020, Musk announced Tesla would provide 1,000 ventilators to California during the first COVID wave. When Newsom announced manufacturing reopening rules two months later, Musk responded on X with an enthusiastic “Yeah!”
That same year, despite Musk openly feuding with Alameda County officials over shutdown rules at the Tesla Fremont plant, he was careful to direct his ire at local officials rather than Newsom himself. The governor returned the favor, praising Musk as a great innovator and job creator even as other Democrats were taking shots.
The 2023 Palo Alto lovefest was the relationship’s last uncomplicated moment. Newsom beamed and told CNBC that California had given Tesla $3.2 billion in subsidies over two decades, calling it money well spent.
What Newsom didn’t say, or couldn’t, was that the headquarters being celebrated was Tesla’s second. The original had relocated to Austin, Texas, two years earlier, after Musk threatened to leave during the COVID shutdown fight and then actually did, first moving his own residence, and then his companies.
By Niedermeyer’s account, the cracks had already been widening for some time before that event. “This roughly coincided with Musk’s [2022] purchase of Twitter and his increasing turn toward right-wing politics,” he said, “which was also reflected in a turn away from California. By 2024, Tesla was reducing its headcount in the state, and Musk was actively badmouthing it.”
The ideological break hardened through 2024. Until that point, Musk had been something of a conventional political donor. He contributed $11,800 to Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, and his giving history across two decades was roughly split between the parties — California Democrats up and down the ballot alongside contributions to Republican organizations. He’d voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
In May 2022, he announced publicly that the Democratic Party had become the “party of division and hate.” Then, in July 2024, came the full rupture: Musk publicly endorsed Donald Trump, and ultimately directed at least $277 million to Trump and Republican candidates, making him the largest single donor of the entire 2024 cycle.
Within days of that endorsement, he announced he was also moving the headquarters of X and SpaceX from California to Texas, citing a new California law barring schools from notifying parents about a student’s gender identity without the student’s consent.
He called the law “the final straw,” and announced he had been personally transformed by the experience of having a transgender child, Vivian Wilson, whose mother is his first wife, Justine Wlison. Musk wrote on X he had “lost my son.”
Newsom had signed that law. In fact, he’d signed a great many pro-transgender bills and was proud of it. By December 2025, the gloves were fully off. Newsom’s press office posted a pointed message on X about Musk’s estrangement from Vivian, writing “We’re sorry your daughter hates you, Elon,”
Musk responded by writing on X, “I assume you’re referring to my son, Xavier, who has a tragic mental illness caused by the evil woke mind virus you push on vulnerable children.”
“My daughters are Azure, Exa (she goes by Y) and Arcadia, and they do indeed love me very much,” he assured.
Newsom’s move into personal attacks and social media taunts is seen by some as him fighting back against Republicans with the same tactics Trump and Musk use. Others see it as Newsom copying others’ tactics to look tough and draw attention to himself.
Ashlee Vance, who spent more than fifty hours with Musk while reporting his 2015 biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” thinks Newsom’s social media digs are misguided, saying: “Newsom should spend less time trying to get attention on social media and more time fixing things in his state.”
Niedermeyer, for his part, isn’t buying the idea that the relationship was ever what it appeared to be from the outside. “The reality is that Gavin Newsom is very pro-business and would likely be happy to continue supporting Tesla, if Musk weren’t so hell-bent on aligning himself with the right wing,” he said.
Niedermeyer thinks Newsom would have preferred what many California Democrats quietly maintained even at the height of the feud: public criticism paired with private accommodation.
What Niedermeyer finds strangest is what Newsom hasn’t done. “Tesla alone has given Newsom all kinds of ammunition to attack Musk with,” he said. “They’ve polluted the state’s air, ground and water, they’ve had one of the worst worker safety records, and all after receiving billions in state subsidies.”
The pretense, at this point, is thoroughly ruined. California still has Tesla’s factories. It still has tens of thousands of Tesla workers. It is still, by a wide margin, Tesla’s largest American market.
What it no longer has is the fiction that any of that creates goodwill between these two men, or that it ever really did.
Newsom paid $100,000 for one of the first Tesla Roadsters ever built, because he believed it stood for something. A California company solving a California problem, with money and engineers from the state, building something the rest of the world would eventually have to copy.
What the feud reveals, underneath all the posturing, is that Newsom and Musk were never really allies. They were each other’s best prop. California needed a billionaire who made clean energy look cool. Musk needed a government that would pay him to do it. Now China has 70 percent of the global EV market.
Newsom built the cathedral and Musk walked out. Now they’re arguing in the parking lot over who gets to keep the car.
