There is something darkly amusing about the way tech's biggest rivalries collapse the moment actual power becomes available. In February 2025, when court documents were published showing text exchanges dated February 3, 2025, between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk as part of Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, the unsealed messages revealed not the vitriolic exchanges of competitors but something closer to professional coordination. The men who once promised to fight each other in a cage were now, it seemed, fighting on the same side.
On February 3, 2025, around the time Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast to complain that corporate America had become "emasculated," Zuckerberg texted Musk about his aggressive government-slashing efforts through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), saying "Looks like DOGE is making progress." The message itself was innocuous enough. What mattered was what Zuckerberg offered next. He wrote that his teams were "on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team" and asked "Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help."
The timing was particularly revealing. This came just weeks after Zuckerberg announced Meta's pivot away from content moderation in favour of "free expression." Here was Meta's CEO offering to weaponise content moderation precisely when Meta was publicly renouncing it. The irony, one suspects, was not lost on anyone reading the actual fine print of Meta's policy shift.
What happened next was equally telling. Musk responded with a heart emoji and followed up by asking Zuckerberg if he was "open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others." Without missing a beat, the conversation pivoted from government efficiency to the acquisition of artificial intelligence assets. According to previously released documents, Zuckerberg never actually signed on to join Musk's bid. But the offer itself was the point. Two of the world's most powerful technology executives were signalling alignment on both government and business.
The narrative arch here matters. While the relationship was once thorny enough that Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cagefight, things seem to have warmed up by the early days of the second Trump administration. What shifted? Access. DOGE was officially established by an executive order on January 20, 2025, after being first suggested to Donald Trump by Elon Musk in 2024. Suddenly, one of these men had the ear of the president and the machinery of government at his disposal. The other, watching carefully, recognised an opportunity to appear supportive, cooperative, and aligned with the new order.
The documents themselves became public only because they were published as part of Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. Litigation has a way of dragging private conversations into the light, which is perhaps why Musk's lawyers argued that his exchanges with the Meta CEO ought to be excluded from the lawsuit, claiming such "personal relationships and communications" were "tangential and prejudicial." The irony of that objection is sharp: one of the most powerful men in America arguing that his texts demonstrating his influence should be inadmissible because they might make him look powerful.
Here's why this moment matters beyond tech gossip: it illustrates a recurring feature of how institutional power consolidates. When government becomes something to be captured rather than negotiated with, rivals become allies. Moral positions become tactical. Content moderation policies can be abandoned in favour of "free expression" while simultaneously offering to deploy that same infrastructure as a favour to someone in power. The machinery doesn't change. Only the appearance of principle does.
By November 2025, DOGE had been quietly disbanded with eight months left in its charter, with OPM Director Scott Kupor telling Reuters that DOGE "doesn't exist," adding that most of the office's functions have been absorbed by OPM. What once seemed like a transformative force simply dissolved, leaving behind questions about what was actually accomplished and what the coordinated efforts of February had achieved.
The texts reveal something more important than either man's ambitions. They show what happens when power concentrates and oversight evaporates. Two figures who had built empires on competing visions of content, speech, and digital life were suddenly coordinating on government efficiency. The cage match never happened. Instead, they found something better. They found a government willing to listen.