IT was a messy divorce, and the Internet was watching from the sidelines. So of course, the memes were out in full force.

As the relationship between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk unravelled publicly, bystanders flooded social media with memes comparing them to the main figures in some of the most legendary feuds, including the teenage frenemies of Mean Girls and rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

“The big beautiful bill led to the big beautiful breakup,” one person observed on X, Musk’s social media platform, referring to the disagreement over Trump’s domestic policy bill that set off the clash. An X account devoted to political jokes posted a doctored image of an iPhone emergency alert: “THE GIRLS ARE CRASHING OUTTTTT,” it announced.

It’s “like Kendrick v. Drake but with two Drakes,” another X user posted, comparing Trump and Musk to the rapper who was perceived as having lost his feud with Lamar after Lamar performed a dis track at the Super Bowl in February.

Other scenarios recast Trump and Musk as a divorced couple sharing custody of their child, Vice President JD Vance; supermarket lobsters being egged on to fight; and two monkeys engaged in a knife fight surrounded by cheering spectators clutching fistfuls of money — a scene from a 2000 episode of The Simpsons.

One person joked that Musk would be posting lyrics from breakup songs soon enough. The song of choice? Get Him Back! by Olivia Rodrigo, in which she recounts a short-lived relationship with a guy with “an ego and a temper and a wandering eye.”

Another X user said the feud had been “foretold” on New Year’s Day, when a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.

Others found humour in the fact that the breakup between two men, albeit the unravelling of a political alliance, coincided with the start of Pride Month.

“This messy Trump-Musk breakup is truly the gayest thing about pride month,” Josh Sorbe, a spokesperson for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote on X.

Liberals celebrated the mess, hoping it would inspire Musk to “become woke again” and spill some secrets. (In past years, Musk supported Democrats and celebrated Pride Month.) Others thought the feud might be drug-fuelled, citing a New York Times report from last week that Musk had been consuming ketamine and other drugs more intensely and more often than was previously known. (Musk has denied the drug use.)

What might it take to mend the breach? One X account offered a possibility in a mock headline: “BREAKING: Hamas calls for a ceasefire between President Trump and Elon Musk.”

But the question social media users were eager to grapple with was, which powerful man would emerge on top?

“Imagine being the ICE agents suiting up for your biggest mission of all time right now,” one user wrote on X, suggesting that the president could order Musk’s detention in an immigration sweep. (Musk, who was born in South Africa, is a naturalised US citizen.)

“Watching the richest man alive and the most powerful man in the world go head-to-head,” one person posted over a clip from the Netflix drama “Narcos” of Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar taking a long drag on a cigarette while gazing contentedly at green fields.

Some of the biggest names in politics and punditry chimed in. “Siri, play ‘Bad Blood,’” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, posted, referring to the Taylor Swift song believed to be about her feud with Katy Perry. Hasan Piker, the liberal Twitch and YouTube star, told Musk to “pull up” to his podcast if he really wanted to make Trump mad.

Others who have spent years complaining that Musk ruined Twitter when he bought it for US$44bil in 2022 and rebranded it X found the moment to be nothing short of blissful. By launching into the feud in full view of its users, they said, he had finally returned the platform to its heyday.

As Dan Pfeiffer, a host of the political podcast “Pod Save America,” put it, “Elon finally found a way to make Twitter fun again.” — 2025 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.