A senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent first term in office, Bannon was widely viewed as one of the most powerful people in the president-elect’s orbit before his sharp fall from grace in 2017. In recent months, Musk has similarly assumed the role of top Trump ally, while the president-elect has harshly criticized Bannon as someone who “doesn’t represent my base” and has “lost his mind.”

Still, Bannon, who generally remains a Trump zealot, attempted to reassert his dominance over the incoming administration during a recent interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, pledging to “have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day.”

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” Bannon said. “I made it my personal thing to take this guy down.”

He continued to suggest Musk was racist, citing his South African roots.

“He should go back to South Africa,” Bannon said. “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on Earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Although the two men have both gained coveted access to Trump’s inner circle, they are opposites in many ways. Musk tends toward a pragmatic outlook with a libertarian streak, while Bannon is known as a hard-line right-wing ideologue.

The two have both known the president-elect for years, but Bannon’s power has waned even as Musk’s “star,” as Trump put it, has risen.

“Where’s my Steve? Where’s my Steve?” the president-elect reportedly said of Bannon years ago, illustrating his reliance on the man who served as the mastermind behind his 2016 campaign and first presidential victory. All that evaporated when Bannon lost his job in the White House and spent a short stint in prison last year after being found in contempt of Congress.

Meanwhile, Musk has become one of the most powerful players in Trumpworld, sometimes being described as the president-elect’s “first buddy.”

Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, made the description during an interview with the New York Post earlier this month, saying, “Who wouldn’t want one of the brightest minds of our time in the circle of people doing the right thing for this country?”

The bromance has unfolded since Trump first tapped Musk to serve on an economic advisory board in December 2016. Their relationship developed after Musk notably fought against Trump’s 2017 ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries traveling to the United States, a policy that Bannon engineered.

The travel ban is just one of the harsh disagreements Bannon and Musk have had in the past. Bannon’s attack on Musk in 2023 over the tech mogul’s factories in China exemplified their combative worldviews.

The two have not always clashed, however. In mid-December 2024, Bannon called Musk “brilliant,” praising him for his leadership role in the Department of Government Efficiency after Trump tapped him to spearhead the task force to cut bureaucratic waste. He has also lauded the work Musk did to campaign for Trump during the 2024 presidential election.

However, their feud erupted again in late December, largely over disagreements on H-1B visas.

Musk has backed the visas, saying they are necessary to supplement alarming deficiencies within the U.S. workforce and have helped power massive U.S. companies, including his own businesses — SpaceX and Tesla. He and other top Trump allies, including Vivek Ramaswamy, have argued that the visas are necessary because the country’s cultural “mediocrity” has led to a systemic decline in U.S. workers choosing to pursue highly skilled careers.

“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk said on Dec. 27. “Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot comprehend.”

While Bannon has criticized the policy over concerns that it could undermine U.S. citizens and bring down their wages, Trump has embraced Musk’s argument that the visas fill critical skills gaps in the American workforce.

As far back as November 2015, Trump pushed back on Bannon’s support for forcing foreign students attending U.S. schools to return to their home countries.

“We have to be careful of that, Steve,” Trump said during a podcast appearance with Bannon. “You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country. I think you agree with that — do you agree with that?”

Bannon was hesitant.

“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think … a country is more than an economy,” he said. “We’re a civic society.”

During a March 2016 interview with Stephen Miller, a fellow immigration hawk and top adviser to Trump, Bannon again expressed deep skepticism about H-1B visas, saying that “engineering schools full of people from South Asia and East Asia” were stealing jobs from U.S. students.

It was those concerns that Bannon posited opposite Musk during a podcast interview in late December. Ripping the tech mogul over his support for H-1B visas, Bannon warned that he should “sit in the back and study” or “we’re going to rip your face off.”

During his latest interview with the Italian newspaper last week, Bannon suggested that Musk’s positions were based on sinister motives.

Musk’s “sole objective is to become a trillionaire,” Bannon said. “He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then, through wealth, power — that’s what he’s focused on.”