Is Elon Musk's multi-billion dollar empire crumbling?
's renewed heckling of President
Donald Trump
's big tax breaks and spending cuts bill, which passed the Senate on Tuesday, threatens to put billions of dollars of his government contracts in jeopardy if Trump retaliates. The rupture of their tenuous peace has resulted in a wobbling of the stock price of a market-moving company and led the president to muse about deporting Musk to his native South Africa.
Elon Musk to be Deported?
In a Frankenstein-style twist, as Musk volleyed fresh critiques about the cost of Trump's signature legislation, Trump mused on Tuesday about turning Musk's Department of Government Efficiency back on its creator. "DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon," Trump told reporters as he left the White House for a tour of a new immigration detention center in Florida, AP reported.
Trump also suggested in an early morning social media post that if Musk lost his government contracts, he "would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa." Asked by a reporter later if he would deport Musk, Trump paused and said, "I don't know. We'll have to take a look."
President Trump has said Musk is actually irritated by the legislation's dramatic rollback of the Biden-era green energy tax breaks for electric vehicles and related technologies. Musk has denied this, but the rollback could hurt Tesla's finances.
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'Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,' Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social media network.
Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002, according to a biography of him by Walter Isaacson. It's unclear if Trump would take the extraordinary step of having the government explore the rare process of removing his citizenship, known as denaturalization, as per AP report.
Worrying Times for Elon Musk
The irony is that Musk's social media spat with Trump threatens his businesses from both sides. People won't buy his cars because of the memories of his friendship with Trump, and now that and his other businesses could get hurt because that friendship has soured.
Musk's rocket and satellite company, SpaceX, is also in Trump's crosshairs. 'No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE,' Trump said in his post. 'BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!'
SpaceX has received billions of federal dollars to help to send astronauts into space and other work for NASA, including a contract to send a team from the space agency to the moon next year.
But the most immediate fallout of their feud was the tumbling stock in Tesla down 5 per cent in early afternoon trading Tuesday.
Tesla stock's performance can have an outsize impact on the stock market index funds in which millions of Americans 401(k)s have invested their retirement savings. The electric vehicle maker is one of the Magnificent Seven, the group of companies that includes Apple and Google parent Alphabet and that account for about a third of the value of the S&P 500, as per AP report.
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A1. CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk.
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