
Investment firm Azoria postpones Tesla ETF after Musk plans political party
Musk made the announcement a day after polling his followers on the X social media platform he owns, declaring, "Today the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom."
Azoria was set to launch the Tesla ETF, which would invest in the electric vehicle company's shares and options, next week.
However, following Musk's announcement, Azoria CEO James Fishback posted on X several critical comments about the new party and repeated his support for U.S. President Donald Trump.
That culminated in a post where Fishback announced the postponement of the ETF.
"I encourage the Board to meet immediately and ask Elon to clarify his political ambitions and evaluate whether they are compatible with his full-time obligations to Tesla as CEO," Fishback said.
The announcement undermines the confidence shareholders had in Tesla's future after Musk said in May he was stepping back from his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Fishback said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters' request for comment.
The announcement from Musk comes after Trump signed his self-styled "big, beautiful" tax-cut and spending bill into law on Friday, which Musk fiercely opposed.
Azoria is also offering the Azoria 500 Meritocracy ETF that only invests in the top 500 U.S. companies that do not impose hiring targets under diversity, equity and inclusion programs, according to its website.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
S&P 500 Gains & Losses Today: Index Falls From Record Level; Tesla Stock Tumbles
The S&P 500 fell 0.8% on Monday, July 7, 2025, as President Trump sent letters about impending tariffs to trading partners including South Korea and Japan. Tesla was the weakest-performing stock in the benchmark index as CEO Elon Musk discussed the creation of a new political party. Research analysts lifted their price targets on shares of DoorDash and Uber, citing strong growth forecasts. Both stocks moved U.S. equities indexes dropped to start the new trading week. Trade policy returned to center stage two days ahead of a July 9 deadline for the negotiation of "reciprocal" tariffs. In letters addressed to world leaders and posted on social media, President Donald Trump said the U.S. will impose 25% levies on goods imported from Japan and South Korea starting Aug. 1, provided the countries are unable to reach a deal before that date. A variety of other trading partners are facing tariffs of up to 40%. The S&P 500 finished 0.8% lower, receding from the all-time closing high set on Thursday ahead of the three-day Independence Day weekend. The Nasdaq Composite also failed to build on last week's record close, losing 0.9%. The Dow also closed the session 0.9% lower. Read Investopedia's full coverage of today's trading here. Tesla (TSLA) shares tumbled 6.8%, falling the most of any S&P 500 stock, after CEO Elon Musk said he will form a new political party. Musk's announcement that he will launch the "America Party" extended the business mogul's ongoing conflict with Trump, who suggested that Musk had gone "off the rails." William Blair analysts downgraded Tesla stock to "market perform" from "outperform," citing the removal of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit under the newly passed budget bill. First Solar (FSLR) shares slipped 4.3%, giving back gains notched late last week. First Solar and other stocks in the renewable energy space surged heading into the long weekend as the final version of the budget bill omitted a proposed tax on wind and solar projects with a certain amount of foreign participation. However, the legislation maintained other provisions that present a challenge to the solar business, including the phase-out of federal tax credits for residential rooftop installations. Medical device maker Baxter International (BAX) named a new CEO. Andrew Hider, chief executive of Canadian automation solutions firm ATS Corp., has been tapped to take the reins of Baxter by the beginning of September. Baxter shares lost 4.3% in the wake of the announcement. Shares of Lululemon Athletica (LULU), maker of yoga gear and other athletic attire, sank 4.1%. Monday's decline reversed gains posted by the stock last week as Trump announced a trade deal with Vietnam, where Lululemon and some other apparel manufacturers have significant manufacturing exposure. Lululemon last week filed a lawsuit against Costco (COST) alleging that the membership warehouse retailer has infringed on trademarks by selling clothing items that are "confusingly similar" to Lululemon's designs. Shares of Tractor Supply Co. (TSCO) advanced 3.9%, securing Monday's top performance in the S&P 500. Analysts expect the provider of lawn and garden tools, animal feed and supplies, and farm maintenance products to post a year-over-year uptick in profit per share on a diluted basis in its next quarterly earnings report, due July 24, despite tariff-related uncertainties and concerns about restrained consumer spending. DoorDash (DASH) stock gained 3.4% after Deutsche Bank analysts boosted their price target on shares of the food delivery company. The Deutsche Bank team pointed to DoorDash's trajectory in the U.S. grocery market, forecasting an increase in transactions in the segment as well as sales growth to be driven by increases in gross and average order value. Wells Fargo lifted its price target on Uber Technologies (UBER) stock, helping drive shares of the ridesharing giant 3.3% higher. Analysts highlighted upbeat expectations for Uber's growth in mobility bookings and a positive view on the company's strategic initiatives to expand its market presence, including its embrace of lower-priced products and forays into less dense markets. Read the original article on Investopedia

Yahoo
17 minutes ago
- Yahoo
White House looks into rogue employee who used a DOGE account to DM anti-Musk activist
The White House is trying to get to the bottom of an incident involving a former Veterans Affairs employee who used their position to target a prominent critic of Elon Musk, according to a White House official and a second person familiar with the matter granted anonymity to speak freely. James Fishback, the anti-DEI investor who recently launched FSD PAC — a super PAC aimed at blunting Musk's political ambitions — received a direct message on X from the official DOGE Veterans Affairs account. 'James - we need to talk. Your recent behavior has crossed some serious lines. That's why we rejected your DOGE application in the first place. Let's step your game up. This is embarrassing,' read the message, reviewed by POLITICO. Fishback said he never applied to work at DOGE. Fishback advised Vivek Ramaswamy on DOGE while Ramaswamy was still involved, and conceived of the 'DOGE dividend check' plan, which President Donald Trump and Musk both embraced. The person who sent the message no longer works for the VA, the White House official said, adding that the White House is confident that everyone working in the administration is part of the same team. If that is found not to be the case, that person said, repercussions will follow. 'The president's mission is to make sure the goal of cutting waste fraud and abuse is successful and continues,' said White House spokesperson Harrison Fields. 'The American people elected him to be a better steward of taxpayer dollars, and every agency and department is working seamlessly to execute the president's campaign promise.' This is the only known example of a Musk loyalist going rogue and acting at odds with Trump's and the GOP's agenda, but the incident comes at a delicate moment as the administration is grappling with how to manage DOGE's influence now that Musk has turned into a Trump adversary. The White House's Presidential Personnel Office has made loyalty a cornerstone of its hiring strategy, scouring social media accounts and grilling applicants about their Trump bona fides. But DOGE hires, selected through a separate Musk-led process, didn't undergo the same level of scrutiny, according to a Trump official granted anonymity to describe the process. Musk announced last week that he is forming a new political party, the America Party, with plans to pour financial resources into two or three Senate races and as many as 10 House contests. 'Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people,' Musk said Friday. Trump quickly fired back. 'Saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely 'off the rails,' essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks,' he posted on Truth Social over the weekend. Trump has also threatened to turn DOGE against Musk, though it is unclear how much control he has over the network of employees who signed up to work for the tech mogul. The DOGE VA account that messaged Fishback has no public posts aside from a single reply in February, when it engaged an X user about improving veterans' health care. The message questioned whether opening new VA hospitals was the right solution but acknowledged that more could be done to serve veterans despite the VA being the nation's largest health system. The VA-linked account is one of several DOGE-branded X accounts, including @DOGE_USDA and @DOGE_SSA that have remained mostly dormant. The most active social accounts promoting DOGE activities, aside from the main handle, are tied to the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management — two agencies that remain DOGE strongholds. GSA is led by Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian, and Josh Gruenbaum serves as Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service within GSA. Charles Ezell serves as Acting Director of OPM. Both agencies, each stacked with dozens of DOGE employees, have been reoriented since the start of Trump's second term to implement DOGE's agenda. According to the New York Times' DOGE tracker, seven DOGE employees have ties to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Yahoo
17 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How Elon Musk's Third Party Gamble Could Succeed
Elon Musk is reentering national politics after a brief hiatus, vowing to disrupt the midterm elections with a new 'America Party' that will contest a narrow set of federal offices and aim to control the balance of power in Congress. It's a daring scheme if Musk commits to it, which is by no means certain. His alliance with President Trump lasted less than a year, his role at DOGE just a few months and his recent vow of abstinence from national politics only days. So what would a serious attempt at this plan look like? The usual third-party fantasy in Washington involves finding unicorn candidates who can claim the ideological center and rally temperate problem-solvers on all sides (see: Unity08, No Labels, Americans Elect, Bloomberg 2016.) This is a recipe for failure in a divided country where most Americans have chosen a side. Musk's plan can only work if he learns from the most successful political disruptors, including Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left, and identifies places where both political parties are neglecting the real preferences of voters. This means not finding a midpoint on a left-right spectrum but rather seizing issues beyond the standard D-versus-R menu. Trump built his political rise on three areas of policy where much of the electorate felt unrepresented: immigration, trade and global security. He rejected Clinton- and Bush-era consensus on all three. For Musk's new party to have a purpose, it must find similar ideological targets of opportunity. Here are three that might make sense: — Championing free trade. Trump shattered U.S. trade policy and reorganized national politics around protectionism. In a way, he was too successful. Now, there is no longer a major party that consistently backs lowering trade restrictions and defends free trade as a force for good. The Republican Party is so deferential to Trump's worldview that even former free-trade conservatives now mouth support for the most aggressive tariff policy in generations. Among Democrats, there are plenty of officials eager to trash Trump's version of protectionism — and far fewer making an affirmative case for free trade. Even the Biden administration tried to coopt rather than roll back MAGA trade policies. This protectionist consensus excludes most has found since 2015 that at least 60 percent of independent voters consistently see foreign trade as an opportunity rather than a threat; this spring, that number stood at 81 percent and even higher among Democrats. This is a fat opportunity for a political disruptor willing to defy regional voting blocs and special interests. — Radical fiscal rebalancing. Most Americans say they worry about government overspending and debt. Neither major party is credible on this issue. The Biden administration grew the size of government, failed to enact promised tax hikes on the wealthy and only proposed raising taxes in the first place to pay for more spending. Republicans, meanwhile, have put tax cuts ahead of fiscal responsibility at every opportunity for a quarter century; Trump's Big Beautiful Bill put America on track to assume trillions in new debt,obscuring that reality with a brazen congressional accounting trick. It is unclear how many Americans would vote for a take-your-medicine party that advocates fiscal austerity, even if that means asking conservatives to raise taxes and left-leaning voters to give up on resurrecting the New Deal era. Perhaps someone should find out. Musk — whose sneering, chainsaw-swinging DOGE theatrics alienated much of the public — is not the ideal figure to test this proposition. Other wild-card outsiders, running for office backed by Musk's money, might connect on this issue. — Securing American technological and scientific supremacy. Both parties say they want the United States to outcompete China and dominate this century. When it comes to scientific research and technological competition, Republicans and Democrats tend to subordinate that goal to factional and cultural politics. The Trump administration's onslaught against elite universities, its crackdown on foreign students and academics and the grant-slashing spree carried out by DOGE have upended some of America's core strategic assets in a global intellectual arms race. In his post-DOGE persona, Musk also blistered Trump's sprawling tax law for 'severely damaging industries of the future' — a reference to the legislation's attempt to throttle growing parts of the clean-energy sector where the United States is already lagging behind China. Democrats have not gone on the attack like this against incubators of innovation. But they have treated investment in technology as a vehicle for other social change, rather than as an end unto itself. Exhibit A is the Biden administration's implementation of the CHIPS Act, when a law aimed at upgrading U.S. semiconductor manufacturing became an instrument for advancing progressive workplace equity policies. And Biden kept tech tycoons like Musk himself at a distance, viewing them as malignant oligarchs despite some obvious overlapping interests. Despite his DOGE record, Musk could be a magnet for this strain of politics: one that says the United States must win the future by amassing all the intellectual and industrial might it can muster, using every available lever of policy — including the tax code, trade deals, immigration policy, energy regulation and more. High-tech research policy is not typical soapbox fare. But American leaders have a history of inspiring voters with scientific goals, separated from other cultural and interest-group politics. John F. Kennedy did not say the United States would put a man on the moon, so long as rockets were built in compliance with Davis-Bacon. Ronald Reagan did not call for scientists to help make nuclear weapons obsolete, provided that no woke postdocs were working in the lab. Is all this an agenda for Musk's America Party? Probably not. It's unclear that the party will exist in any organized form or that Musk is even capable of executing a disciplined political strategy. Still, in an age of churning disorder in U.S. politics, these ideological gaps and blind spots are opportunities for any political entrepreneur — especially one who can freely spend billions of dollars on an electoral experiment.