The sun rises every morning. Spring turns to summer. Water is wet. Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s relationship has ended with a tweet about Jeffrey Epstein.This was inevitable. When Elon Musk attached himself to Trump during Trump’s presidential transition last fall, there was great speculation that these two massive egos would, eventually, clash and that their strategic partnership would flame out spectacularly. Many onlookers assumed that Trump would be the one to tire of Musk and that the centibillionaire would fly too close to the sun, becoming too visible in the administration or simply too annoying. During his short time in government, Musk did manage to anger some of Trump’s staff and advisers, tank his public reputation with many American voters, and jeopardize the financial health of his EV company, Tesla. Still, through all of that, Trump remained remarkably on message and supportive.Instead it was Musk who fired the first shots, specifically criticisms of the Republicans’ budget-reconciliation package (a.k.a. the One Big Beautiful Bill Act). On Tuesday, Musk called the bill a “disgusting abomination,” threatened to politically retaliate against its supporters, and argued it would increase the debt. This led to Trump calling out Musk in an Oval Office meeting today with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and suggesting that the DOGE figurehead had “Trump derangement syndrome.” The episode that followed has been playing out in reality-TV fashion, with X and Truth Social acting as confessional booths. On X, Musk argued that, “without me, Trump would have lost the election” and accused Trump of “such ingratitude.” On Truth Social, Trump posted that “Elon was ‘wearing thin’” and that, when the president asked Musk to leave, “he just went CRAZY!”It keeps going. At one point in the afternoon, as if sensing the feud had reached a critical mass of attention, Musk leveled a serious allegation against Trump, posting: “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”Musk had, it seems, kicked off an attentional spectacle without precedent. You have the world’s richest man, who is terminally online and whose brain has been addled by social media and, reportedly, other substances. He is one of the most prolific and erratic high-profile posters, so much so that he purchased his favorite social network to mold it in his image. He is squaring off against Trump, arguably the most consequential, off-the-cuff poster of all time and, one must note, the current president of the United States. If it weren’t for the other, both men would be peerless in their ability to troll, outrage, and command news cycles via their fragile, mercurial egos.The point being: If this public fight between Musk and Trump continues, we will witness a Super Bowl of schadenfreude unfold. It’s guaranteed to entertain and leave those of us who spectate feeling gross. It is, in other words, the logical endpoint of internet beefs.This spectacle is tempting to view as a cage match: Two men enter, one man leaves. (Musk, at least, is familiar.) But that mentality supposes a winner and a loser, and it’s worth asking what winning even looks like here. Surely, nobody will come out of this unscathed. Musk’s “Epstein files” comment, beyond being an allegation about Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex offender and child trafficker, also is a suggestion that Musk might have other dirt on the Trump administration. And the likely loss of Musk’s donor money deprives Trump of political leverage. Similarly, Trump has suggested he might strip Musk’s companies of their federal funding and subsidies. Tesla’s stock has fallen sharply today since Musk began rage-posting against Trump, which suggests there will be real consequences. (Meanwhile, people, including Steve Bannon, are already musing that Musk could get himself deported.)Consider, though, that in the realm of social media, Musk and Trump both know exactly what they are doing. Musk and Trump are innately attuned to attention and how to attract and wield it. It stands to reason that their interpretation of their past decade online is that public feuding has, essentially, no downside for them. Instead, their perma-arguing, norm-stomping, and general shamelessness has allowed them to become the main characters of a media and political ecosystem that demands constant fodder. Harnessing attention in this way has proved remarkably lucrative. Many credit Trump’s initial victory in 2016 to his ability to program the news cycle 140 characters at a time. Meanwhile, some analysts have suggested that Musk’s companies are, in their own right, memestocks whose fortunes have risen on the centibillionaire’s incessant ability to stay in the spotlight.Trump’s and Musk’s constant provocations and attention seeking have downstream effects, too. Their feuding creates content for others to draft off of. The press can cover it, influencers can react to it, politicians can fundraise off it, and all manner of online hustlers can find a way to get in. You can already see the attentional cottage industry hard at work in the Musk-Trump fight as lesser attention merchants try to involve themselves. The podcaster Lex Fridman offered to broker peace on his show while the rapper Ye stepped in to comment on the chaos. The onetime presidential candidate and third-party champion Andrew Yang seized on Musk’s comments to drum up enthusiasm for his pet project. Even the replies became valuable real estate—the long strings of responses to Musk's posts about Trump are littered with advertisements automatically inserted by X. (I saw one for a Trump T-shirt company.) In this way, a Trump-Musk beef is an attentional Big Bang.In 2020, the blogger Venkatesh Rao wrote a seminal post titled “The Internet of Beefs,” arguing that the structure of social media and our culture-warring has brought about “a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict.” In it, he describes the Internet of Beefs as having “a feudal structure,” with charismatic leaders (knights), and anonymous legions of normies (mooks) who’ve devoted themselves to fight on behalf of these leaders. Rao identifies Trump as an ur-example of a knight, who is able to profit off of all of the discord he’s helped sow. “For the mook, the conflict is a means to an end, however incoherent,” Rao writes. “For the knight, the conflict is the end. Growing it, and keeping it going, is something like an entrepreneurial cultural capital business model.”I reread Rao’s post as the internet worked itself into a lather over today’s fight. Many of the dynamics Rao explained were on display: sycophants lining up to defend Musk or Trump in the hope of getting noticed, various posters (myself included) excitedly or dutifully chronicling the fallout—there is seemingly opportunity everywhere, created by this attentional spectacle. The content is at once depressing and tremendous. At a glance, it looks like everyone’s winning.Of course, nobody is. Rao’s most salient point in his essay is that this state of forever beef is a consequence of a societal rot. It’s a stalling tactic of sorts, one that prevents us from deciding who we are, both individually and collectively. If that sounds overwrought, it’s worth remembering the genesis of Musk and Trump’s feud, a funding bill in Congress that would result in roughly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, while offering a similar value in tax cuts to high earners. Millions of people could lose their current coverage through Obamacare if the bill passes. These details are vaporized by the size and scale of this particular beef.The Trump-Musk feud is not so much a distraction as it is evidence of a societal tendency toward abstraction, even obfuscation. A cage match is easier to watch than a discussion about who deserves benefits and resources. It is certainly more cathartic than an ideological stalemate about the world we want to build. Maybe Trump or Musk will find a way to win or lose their spat. The rest of us, though, will probably not be so lucky, destined instead to spectate fight after fight.