Elon Musk loses $52 billion in one day as Trump feud boils over
Minute by minute, post by post, Elon Musk's very public, extremely online feud with US President Donald Trump sliced into his vaunted status as the world's richest person.
The final damage at day's end: $US34 billion ($52 billion) erased from his personal net worth, the second-largest loss ever in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the 500 wealthiest people on the planet. The only bigger one: his own wipeout in November 2021.
The tit-for-tat was surreal, and also, in some ways, potentially inevitable for a US president who has used the Oval Office to dress down world leaders and a chief executive who has a history of launching himself from one crusade to another. The trigger was Musk's sudden push, just days after he departed from Washington, to muster enough support to 'kill' Trump's signature 'Big, Beautiful Bill'.
Musk, who is still the world's richest person with a vast $US334.5 billion fortune, has endured any number of routs before. But the stakes are higher than ever in contending with Trump, as the president laid bare when he proposed ending Musk's government contracts, in a potential blow to Tesla and SpaceX revenue.
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In true Musk fashion, the billionaire responded on X with five words uttered by Clint Eastwood's character in Sudden Impact: 'Go ahead, make my day.' He followed up by alleging, without evidence, that Trump's name appears in the files related to the late New York financier Jeffrey Epstein, and then said SpaceX would begin to decommission its Dragon spacecraft — a critical link to space for the US, which depends on Musk's company to ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.
The war of words is a sharp departure from the months following Trump's election win, when Musk's net worth reached an all-time high approaching $US500 billion. His companies' valuations surged, buoyed by expectations that they would benefit from the billionaire's relationship with Trump and his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk officially left Washington last week.
The escalating spat raises questions about the path forward for Tesla, which once appealed to climate-conscious drivers but has since become synonymous with Trump's MAGA priorities, alienating traditional, left-leaning consumers. The electric carmaker's shares fell 14 per cent on Thursday to $US284.70.
Musk, for his part, polled his X followers on Thursday about whether it is 'time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80 per cent in the middle'.
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