That photo summed it up, didn’t it? A burning Musk truck in front of the Orange One’s hotel. Thus were gobsmacked Americans introduced, on the first day of the year, to the new era.
The Las Vegas suicide bomber and the New Orleans crowd-smasher chose the same day to personify the big transit of the moment: the opposition between Mars (masculinity) and Pluto (breakdown). Two wrong-headed warriors went out with a terrible, whimpering bang.
Both Jabbar and Livelsberger wanted to be remembered as heroes. They wanted to stand for something, and they did: The nightmarish phenomenon of troubled men — whether MAGA or ISIS — getting sucked in by online propaganda and bad action movies.
As Mars is prone to do—(as well as frustrated men are prone to do when they are ignored)—again, especially when goaded by opposition to Pluto—violence is the easiest route between point A (the urge) and point B (the revelation or solution).—Frederick Woodruff
With that stunted, thumping name over the doors of the hotel on the left, and that creepy robot truck flaming on the right, the photo indelibly links the two tragic perps to the two other evil twins in the news.
First Buddy
In Elon Reeve Musk, surely Trump has chosen the weirdest consiglieri in recent memory. The dude was weird even before he dragged his frat boy
entitlement and self-serving eccentricities to Mar-a-Lago. He was already legendary for sperm scattering, penis rocketing, onstage jumping-jacks .. and the one feature that puts the brightest twinkle in Trump’s squinty little eyes: the grotesque wealth.
Not that there’s anything new about allowing billionaires a seat at the table. It’s the rule, not the exception, in politics. But the over-the-topness of this particular plutocrat is worth a closer look.
[T]here has never been a political donor, adviser, and celebrity all rolled into one, with the gravitational pull of a $300 billion fortune. — Whizy Kim
Age of gilt and grift
This new regime is where predatory capitalism meets aggrieved toxic masculinity. Muskito Man, like the insect, is a parasite, per the Marxist definition. No less a bloodsucker is Trump, who reaps votes and admiration from those who equate masculine prowess with wealth.
Or rather, with a fantasy of wealth. Trump’s gilt chandeliers represent what people without wealth think wealth looks like.
The Trump aesthetic developed in the 1980s, another retrogressive decade. Back then, the figure of the yuppie arose as a reaction to the egalitarian impulses of the 1970s. Trump was a striving young outlier at the time, responding to the siren call “Greed is good” from the movie “Wall Street.” The line strikes us today as almost innocent in its crassness.
Gordon Gekko was a fictional villain, but he clearly hit a chord with audiences. His balls-out materialism became the model for a post-hippie vision of success. Yet people were mixed about whether this was to be celebrated or despised.
Here in the mid-202s, attitudes have changed. Cut-throat materialism is devoid of ambivalence. The current approach to greed and grift is unashamed and unapologetic.
If you believe Jared Kushner’s private equity firm would have been given all that overseas investment money to play with absent his daddy-in-law’s political juice, I have a gold-plated Trump Bible to sell you, once owned by Jesus himself. — Michelle Cottle
Today’s tech titans are a different breed of mogul from the tycoons of the Gilded Age. The railroad and steel barons, terrified the masses would rise up in revolution, ducked the press and sequestered
themselves away in smoke-filled rooms.
By contrast, the new plutocrats make themselves as public as possible, broadcasting their whims over social media. Their tyranny is not over industry but over the airwaves, via monopolies that the Carnegies and Rockefellers could only dream of. Far from cultivating a culture of exclusivity, the new billionaires pretend to speak for the vox populi, wielding their outsized power
… in the full glare of public regard, and with a kind of presumed democratic legitimacy to it. — Whizy Kim
Such is the paradox of sado-populism, Timothy Snyder’s term for a system that elevates leaders whose policies hurt the very voters who put them in office.
Mythic
Astrologically, Musk’s ascendancy represents something way beyond himself: the starting gun of a 20-year cycle, that of Pluto in Aquarius. In a perversion of this heroic sign, the advanced technology of our age has allowed a morally-stunted sociopath an international megaphone.
Around the Solstice, with Pluto freshly ingressed and opposed to Mars, our politically unschooled tech-bro pumped out fifty tweets on his very own social 
media platform — the most expensive vanity purchase in history. He denounced the bipartisan Congressional spending bill, told the British they should let Uncle Sam liberate their country, and went to bat for the far right in Germany. Confidently unfettered, the man responded to the LA wildfires by blaming not climate change, but DEI.
But let us not blame the transits. Plutocratic ignoramuses are not Pluto’s fault. And if society decides to lionize a robotic human whose brain got hyper-developed at the expense of his heart, that’s not the fault of Aquarius.
But this is the expression of the transit that the group mind has come up with right now, and it has certainly gotten our attention. As we begin the new tenure of this once-in-250-year transit, the twisted figure of Musk is already mythic.
Trumpenmusk
There are tight correspondences between the horoscopes of our buffoon-in-chief and his BFF, an “ADD-riddled, ketamine-junky man-toddler” (cf Frederick Woodruff, who analyzes their synastry here). Astrologically, their unsavory twinship is locked in.
First of all, there’s the Gemini connection (the twins): Trump has Sun & Uranus there, Musk has Saturn. At its best, Gemini is a master communicator, which Trump has made into his superpower.
The price of eggs will not, as was previously pledged, be coming down. As with all Trump campaign promises, if you read the fine print, it says “sucker” between two tiny, stunted middle fingers. – Shower Cap blog
Recent example: Deflecting questions about his promises to fix inflation, The Donald dragged the most outlandish red herring across the media’s path he could think
of: annexing Greenland.
But Saturn in Gemini, which Musk has, is less artful. It isn’t slick. At worst, Saturn in Gemini suffers from an intellectual inferiority complex, as in: Will people think I’m a lightweight?
Ironically, this hard-ass planet creates prodigies for the same reason. Insecurity prods the native to become a specialist in all things Geminian (information, multi-tasking), so, at best, they can end up scaling intellectual heights. Maybe become the king of social media.
But the fear remains: that the world sees only a dilettante.
[H]ow seriously should we take Elon Musk? When he says “The AfD policies are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office!” Was that literal? Serious or deliberately trolling? Sincere but underinformed?– Ben Wallis-Wells
Musk’s Sun conjoins Trump’s Mercury, feeding the Orange One’s dream of being with the smart guys. Trump has always wanted to be seen as an idea man. Remember how he used to brag, with tortured ambivalence, about having gone to an Ivy League school, by way of proving how “smart” he was — all the 
while insisting that he was completely different from those over-educated elitists?
Then there is the fact that Musk’s Venus is only a degree away from Trump’s Uranus. At best, Uranus is the scientific revolutionary. It’s easy to see how Trump envisions Musk as a Uranian genius: an exciting, youthful disruptor, as Trump himself would love to be. Now he gets to bask in Musk’s intellectual cred.
He clearly also loves the buzzy gadfly aspect (Venus in Gemini) Musk brings to the partnership, via the constant gossiping and sniping on “X”.
Everybody wants to be my friend. – The President-elect at a press conference Solstice week, after Jeff Bezos & Musk dined with him at Mar-a-Lago
Elonald
After having pumped 270 million dollars into the presidential campaign, brother Elon can be forgiven for believing he bought the presidency fair and square. But as he cranks up the radical-crazy, there is trouble brewing, both in his bromance with Trump and in his relationship with the public.
[Musk’s hard-right turn expresses] the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love. — Paul Krugman
Many of us have been watching, schadenfreude-style, the fissures that have been forming within the GOP about the best-buddyship, hoping that they augur a snippet of karmic rebalancing.
The first of these arose right after the Solstice, when the Musk Man sparked MAGA backlash after defending visas for foreign tech workers (only for certain
ones, of course — paralleling Trump’s exceptions for trophy wives and immigrants not from “shithole” countries). Steve Bannon, Trump’s last great consiglieri, slapped back on Musk, thundering that Americans deserve reparations for having to coexist with immigrants on H-1B visas.
Even rabid Trumpist Peter Thiel is now ambivalent about Musk, calling him (not entirely without admiration) an autistic policy-wonk.
Enter the DOGE
It will be interesting to see what happens with Musk’s appointment as a budget-cutting czar. The DOGE identity, in addition to saddling Musk with a ridiculous moniker, is so ill-defined as to give Donnie plenty of wiggle room when he inevitably changes his mind about it.
Does Musk want “a sustained role in politics for himself, a libertarian turn for the country, or just to be proved right? — Benjamin Wallis-Wells
It’s already clear that the Orange One is not entirely comfortable with any of the official niches that have been floated, so far, for the guy in the Mar-a-Lago guest house.
Trump is a one-ring circus…. I’m not sure that Musk has figured that out yet. — Maggie Haberman
Egos meeting head on
It’s more than likely that Elonald (Jimmy Fallon’s couple name for Musk & Trump) will fall prey to the reddest red flag in astrology: one guy’s Mars (ego) 
opposite the other guy’s Mars.
One way or other, these dudes are destined to be opponents. Trump’s Mars is on the Ascendant of his chart, where it is as un-self-reflective as a child’s. Musk’s Mars sits on Trump’s Descendant (“open enemies”). An opposition like this can be energizing and/or aggravating and agitating: a love-hate dynamic. The two Marses, equally tenacious (fixed Leo and Aquarius), are in a face-off, pitting two shaky masculinities against each other.
I look forward to a political bar fight when Mars transits over their respective Mars degrees in May-June ’25.
