Elon Musk and Donald Trump: 2 disrupters face a reckoning

WASHINGTON (AP) — Elon Musk and Donald Trump share bestride-the-colossus egos, an incessant desire to be the center of attention and a platform to showcase their eccentricities and erraticism.

Both the Tesla CEO and the former president have used that platform, Twitter, as a sword and a shield — a soapbox to rouse the passions (and tap the pocketbooks) of tens of millions of followers and repulse the other side.

Trump weaponized Twitter before he was banned after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Musk was a persistent Twitter poster, taunting stock market regulators and railing against his version of conformity in numerous tweets. Then he decided to buy the platform.

Now both face a reckoning this week brought on at least in part by their use of Twitter to advance their agendas and feed their outsize id.

Trump is confronted with a select congressional committee's unanimous recommendation to the Justice Department on Monday that he be criminally prosecuted for his part in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by supporters stirred to action that day by his public remarks, on and off social media.

Right behind that could come the release Tuesday of Trump tax returns, now in the hands of another House panel, that he has spent years fighting to keep private.

After firing about half the Twitter workforce and sowing chaos with impulsive and ever-changing policies, Musk essentially asked users whether he should fire himself. In an unscientific poll he set up, a majority of the 17.5 million respondents said he should step down as Twitter chief. No word yet whether he will honor the result as promised.

The tribulations of these two June babies, born 25 years and continents apart, may be unlike anything thrown at them before.

“The biggest thing they have in common is...