The two have also expressed different views on electric vehicles. While Musk has been a pioneer in battery-powered cars, Trump has been sceptical, saying: “I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.” He also suggested phasing out tax credits supporting EVs.

Counterintuitively, this could end up benefiting Musk. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act dangled huge subsidies for US electric car manufacturing, which mainly served to help rivals such as Ford and GM in their efforts to catch Tesla.

Musk sees EVs as inevitable. These days, he is more focused on his plans for swarms of autonomous “robotaxis”, a venture that has been potentially threatened by multiple government agency investigations into Tesla’s self-driving technology – launched while Joe Biden has been in the White House.

“We’ve got a gigantic bureaucracy, we’ve got over-regulation. We need to let the builders of America build,” Musk told the pro-Trump broadcaster Tucker Carlson earlier this week. Here, he surely has a point: SpaceX, a company that has single-handedly resurrected American space launches, needs multiple licences from fish protection agencies to launch.

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The biggest prize is likely to be space. Musk frequently communicates that his guiding force is making humanity an “interplanetary species”. Trump, who set up the Artemis Moon mission during his first term, is now due to preside over the first manned lunar landing in more than 50 years, with astronauts carried on a SpaceX Starship rocket. He has pledged that the US will “reach Mars” by the end of his second term.

Musk’s marriage to Trump feels like one of convenience rather than conviction. Musk was a huge Obama fan and claims to have voted for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden before helping launch Ron De Santis’s campaign and claiming Trump was too old to be president. Trump responded by attacking Musk’s “electric cars that don’t drive long enough” and “rocket ships to nowhere”.

That all appears to have been forgotten. The world’s richest man is now set to be one of the most influential figures in Trump’s White House. “Soon, you will be free to build,” he tweeted on Wednesday. That freedom will also apply to Musk himself.

Telegraph, London