Tesla shares sink as Musk and Trump ridicule each other

NBC News

2 days ago

Tesla's shares have fallen 16% since CEO Elon Musk began bashing President Donald Trump's massive spending bill last week, and the stock remains about 33% lower since Inauguration Day.
The slide since May 27 follows Musk's departure from the Trump administration and as the the two men's relationship publicly unravels.
Elon Musk, the world's richest person and until recently Trump's cost-cutter-in-chief, said he was leaving his post as the head of his Department of Government Efficiency project to refocus on his businesses. Those companies — Tesla, satellite company SpaceX, social media platform X, and brain tech startup Neuralink — have faced growing criticism as Musk oversaw deep cuts to the federal workforce. Tesla sales across the world have fallen sharply this year.
Trump and Musk were still trading insults Thursday afternoon online, with the president threatening on his Truth Social platform to "terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts."
Tesla stock closed more than 14% lower Thursday. The automaker is Musk's only publicly traded company — and one that the president tried to boost as recently as March, drawing sharp criticism on ethical grounds for turning the White House driveway into a car showroom just as the company's stock was plunging.
The Trump-Musk rift has dented Tesla's stock anew after the multibillionaire executive slammed the GOP spending bill as "a disgusting abomination' in a post on X last week.
"Bankrupting America is NOT ok!" he wrote in another post, part of an ongoing barrage of public ridicule.
Musk began speaking out after an electric-vehicle tax credit that would help incentivize Tesla purchases was not included in the bill, which is estimated to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. Musk has lobbied congressional Republicans for that tax credit, NBC News reported Wednesday.
"I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn't decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," Musk told CBS Sunday Morning on June 1.
As Trump spoke about the former DOGE chief in the Oval Office Thursday alongside German chancellor Friedrich Merz, Musk began firing off dozens of posts on X.
"Whatever," he wrote. "Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill. In the entire history of civilization, there has never been legislation that both big and beautiful. Everyone knows this!"
Trump pushed back further on Musk's criticism.
'Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people. He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it,' he said during the meeting with Merz. 'All of a sudden he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate because that's billions and billions of dollars, and it really is unfair.'
As Trump continued speaking, the Tesla CEO posted another comment: "False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!"
Tech analyst Dan Ives said the EV tax credit isn't the main factor behind Tesla's stock slide. 'The reason Tesla stock's off the way it is — and I think overdone — is because of the view that this means that Trump is not going to play nice when it comes to regulatory' issues, he told CNBC Thursday. The feud between the two men is 'not what you want to see as a Tesla shareholder,' Ives added.
"Where is this guy today??," Musk added Thursday in yet another post, resharing a compilation of Trump's past tweets including one in which Trump had previously called the federal debt "a national security risk of the highest order."
"Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate," Musk added on social media. "Such ingratitude."
Musk is the richest person on the planet, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index. His net worth of $368 billion is $125 billion more than that of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is currently ranked second. Musk spent $250 million supporting Trump's most recent campaign.
The president quipped from the White House that he thinks Musk "misses the place."
"I think he got out there and all of a sudden he wasn't in this beautiful Oval Office, and he was and he's got nice offices too, but there's something about this one," he said.
The president's own publicly traded company, Trump Media & Technology Group, has also suffered in the market. Shares of the Truth Social parent company fell more than 8% Thursday and are down over 41% so far this year.