Cathie Wood says the Musk-Trump feud reveals how much Musk's companies rely on the government
Ark Invest's Cathie Wood has weighed in on the public feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Wood said the feud reveals how much Musk's companies rely on the US government.
Trump said Saturday he had no desire to fix his relationship with the Tesla CEO.
The public feud between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has shown investors just how much control the US government has over Musk's companies, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood says.
"I think the way this is evolving is Elon, Tesla, and investors are beginning to understand more and more just how much the government has control here," Wood said in a video posted to the company's YouTube channel on Friday.
Many of Musk's companies have key links to the government and have received billions of dollars in federal loans, contracts, tax credits, and subsidies over the years.
"Elon is involved in companies that are depending on the government," Wood said, pointing to Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink as examples.
SpaceX's COO, Gwynne Shotwell, said last year that the company has $22 billion worth of federal contracts. Neuralink, Musk's brain chip company, is subject to FDA regulation, and a less friendly regulatory environment could impact Tesla's robotaxi rollout plans. Tesla stock fell more than 14% on Thursday after Musk and Trump became locked in a series of increasingly bitter clashes.
The feud appeared to begin, at least publicly, on Tuesday, after Musk criticized Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill." He called it a "disgusting abomination" and said it would increase the national budget deficit.
Tensions rose fast between the once-close allies on Thursday. Trump threatened to cut Musk's government contracts and Musk said SpaceX would immediately begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft — which returned stranded NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station in March.
Musk later retracted that threat, which Wood said was a sign he was "beginning to walk this back."
Wood said the rift with Trump could, in part, be Musk's attempt to further decouple himself from the Trump administration. Musk announced in April that he would be stepping back from his government work.
"One of the hypotheses out there is that what has happened was partly — not entirely — orchestrated," Wood said. "Clearly, there has been some brand damage to Tesla, which he readily admits, and I think he's trying to disengage from the government and being associated with one party or the other."
Moving forward, Wood said neither Trump nor Musk needed to get "bogged down" with a fight and that she believed both would eventually heed that reasoning.
She also appeared to be confident that Musk could make the situation work for him. She said Musk "works really well under pressure" and that "he creates a lot of that chaos and pressure himself."
Trump, however, signaled Saturday that he had no desire to fix his relationship with the SpaceX CEO anytime soon.
"I have no intention of speaking to him," Trump told NBC News.
"I think it's a very bad thing, because he's very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the President," he added.
Vice President JD Vance struck a somewhat friendlier tone when asked about the possibility of reconciliation during a Thursday interview with podcaster Theo Von.
Vance said that while he thought it was a "huge mistake" for Musk to "go after the president," he hoped Musk "figures it out" and "comes back into the fold."
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The last time this happened was 1965, according to Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive policy institute. President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized National Guard troops to protect civil rights demonstrators in Alabama that year. Protesters who set out from Selma were protected by over 3,000 National Guard troops, according to the National Archives. The protest march – the third attempt after previous marches were met with violence from state troopers – was led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of protesters walked to the State Capitol in Montgomery, where they delivered a voting rights petition to the governor. Goitein described Trump's deployment as 'extremely rare' in an interview with CNN's Jim Sciutto. She noted Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act – a move Trump hasn't taken yet. 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The administration's diminishing of the standards for deploying and federalizing the National Guard under Title 10 is concerning, Kayyem added. 'This is part of an overall reaching by the Trump White House to utilize federal military resources in civilian society, without an insurrection, without a major flood, without a major crisis, and in defiance of political leadership.' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Trump called in the National Guard soldiers to 'address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester' and 'violent mobs attacked ICE Officers and Federal Law Enforcement Agents.' Even in the face of violence, disruptions and civil unrest, Kayyem said deploying the National Guard under Title 10 without the governor's cooperation, especially when local law enforcement is already handling safety concerns, is unnecessary. 'A car on fire, some unrest, people arrested – those are things that we have seen in our society for a long time. They're not unique, and that is why we have law enforcement,' Kayyem said. 'If they don't know how to deal with it, they then ask for state resources, and if the state resources are overwhelmed, then the state generally turns to the federal government.' In nearby Compton, a vehicle was set on fire where protesters began to gather Saturday, video from CNN affiliate KABC showed. On Friday, video showed several projectiles being thrown at officers equipped with body armor and protective shields outside a Los Angeles federal detention center. Elsewhere in Los Angeles County, a crowd of protesters in Paramount became 'increasingly agitated, throwing objects and exhibiting violent behavior toward federal agents and deputy sheriffs,' the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department said in an advisory Saturday night. In response, the department requested extra resources countywide and deployed additional deputies. 'LA authorities are able to access law enforcement assistance at a moment's notice. We are in close coordination with the city and county, and there is currently no unmet need,' Newsom said in a post on X Saturday night. 'Trump is sending 2,000 National Guard troops into LA County — not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis,' Newsom said in another post Sunday. Officials from the Trump administration described protesters as 'lawless rioters.' The Los Angeles Police Department, meanwhile, said Saturday's demonstrations within the city 'remained peaceful' and 'events concluded without incident.' When asked about the LA County Sheriff's Department describing protesters as exhibiting violent behavior, congresswoman Barragán said the violence was not coming from anti-immigration protesters. '(The sheriff) told me the situation in Paramount was under control, the people that were peacefully (protesting) have left. The situation was now across the street into the Compton area, and (these were) the unruly folks — that Saturday night crowd. The people that were there to actually protest immigration were gone,' Barragán said. 'We agree that if you're being violent, you should be arrested, you should be prosecuted,' she added. Because Trump's deployment of the National Guard has occurred in defiance of the governor's request, Kayyem predicts there is a higher likelihood the move will incite conflict. 'Our federalized troops are trained to do something, and that something is the use of force. They are not trained to de-escalate a political situation, civil unrest,' she said. US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the National Guard soldiers are in Los Angeles to maintain peace amid ongoing tensions between immigration enforcement authorities and demonstrators this weekend – but the rules of engagement remain unclear. Although Noem said the soldiers are there to 'provide security for operations and to make sure that we have peaceful protests,' she did not provide specifics about their activities on the ground. Kayyem said if the troops also lack clarity of mission, problems can arise. 'Without a definitive mission statement and without rules of engagement … there will be mistakes, and those mistakes will not only potentially harm civilians, they will also potentially harm other law enforcement,' Kayyem said. 'This is dangerous for the troops … and it's dangerous for a population that, even if you view them as hostile, do not deserve to be put in harm's way because of that hostility.' US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized if the unrest continues. 'We need an administration that's not going to get to DEFCON 1 (the highest level of US military alerts) every time they see something on TV they don't like,' Kayyem said. 'Active Marines? That's just unheard of in the kind of situation we've seen.' Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard against Newsom's wishes comes on the heel of escalating tensions between the two leaders, with the president consistently targeting Democratic-led California in his efforts to use funding as leverage to enact his agenda. The administration is preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding for California, according to multiple sources. Last month, Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from California over a transgender athlete's participation in a sporting event. The administration also recently cut $126.4 million in flood prevention funding projects, and even before his inauguration Trump repeatedly went after the state's handling of devastating wildfires earlier this year. The president and Newsom have also publicly feuded for years. 'I see these actions as kind of intentionally inflammatory from the White House, because they want this escalation,' CNN political analyst Astead Herndon said. 'They want this fight with Gavin Newsom, and they want to be able to use the levers of federal power in that fight.' 'It shows a feature of this administration, which is to use the levers of federal power against its enemies as a means of exerting its own ideological prism,' Herndon added. Human rights advocacy organization Amnesty International criticized the 'dangerous' deployment of National Guard troops, which the executive director says is 'to target and punish those who speak out in defense of human rights.' 'This is not about protecting communities,' the organization's executive director, Paul O'Brien, said in a statement. 'This is about crushing dissent and instilling fear.' CNN's Brad Lendon, Karina Tsui, Antoinette Radford, Zoe Sottile and Danya Gainor contributed to this report.
