Washington, DC – March 24: The main White House, Tesla and the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, attend a meeting of the cabinet held by American president Donald Trump at the White House on March 24, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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On A number of Donald Trump policies, mass deportations of undocumented immigrants to federal disseminate judges who govern against his decrees, Elon Musk has the back of the president. In recent months, when the richest man in the world has worked to empty the federal bureaucracy as head of the Trump government’s efficiency department, he defended the president’s agenda at each turn on X to his 218 million followers.
But with regard to Donald Trump’s most important policy to date – the wide -based prices program unveiled this week, which applies a 10% reference levy on each country as well as additional rates for countries with larger trade deficits with the United States – Musk has almost nothing to say.
During the event on Wednesday evening, where Trump announced the new prices to the press and members of his administration, including members of the cabinet such as Vice-President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Musk was not found. While Trump was behind the podium and holding in the air, his huge cardboard sheet describes the prices `Reciproche ” that his administration imposed on various countries, Musk retweeted a guy with 780 subscribers talking about the way his boyfriend with a boat has a good internet on the boat thanks to Starlink, the Satellite Internet service provider controlled by Musk Spacex.
The chaos of the financial market has followed the next 36 hours, investors panicking about the growing probability of an American recession, annihilating 2.4 billions of dollars in market value of the S&P 500 during the negotiation session of yesterday – the greatest drop of a day since March 2020 – but the Loquacier musque had nothing to say about the most pressing history of the day. He was too busy retweetering the interior department stimulating a national park in California, republishing a video that claims to show eminent democratic politicians making the Nazi salute, making fun of the American Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and retweeting the stimulating publications Starlink and SpaceX. From the start of this week until now, Musk wrote a single tweet referring to Trump’s prices – and it was a retweet from another account.
It is possible that Musk, who is becoming more and more unpopular with Americans (60% consider him unfavorably according to a new poll), simply wants to avoid attaching to an unpopular board of the Trump’s political agenda; After all, Tesla’s world sales were already down, due to consumer playing the role of Musk in the administration of Trump. It is also possible that Trump, aware of the wider unpopularity of Musk, does not want the magnate associated with his policy (which could help explain the exclusion of Musk from the Rose Garden event) or, which was reported, that Musk is coming out of Doge. Above all, what seems certain is that Musk, a pioneering businessman who has built his world empire with the help of free trade policies, understands that the prices are self-deficit and that the ensuing economic chaos will negatively affect its own companies and their results.
The magnate has already recognized as much in the case of Tesla. The electric car manufacturer is better positioned than its interior rivals to cope with the prices, because its gigafactories in Austin and California produce all the teslas sold to American consumers. Tesla, however, relies on the world supply chains for raw materials that enter its vehicles. “Important to note that Tesla is not unscathed here,” Musk tweeted last week, referring to Trump’s car rates. “The price impact on Tesla is always significant.” The new prices are “a debacle of epic proportions for the entire automotive industry, including Tesla”, Dan Ives, World Technological Research Manager for Wedbush Securities, told Forbes By e-mail. “Economic Armageddon”.
Tesla’s shares have dropped 14% in the past two days (Friday afternoon), since Trump announced the prices on Wednesday evening. Musk’s fortune has been down more than $ 40 billion since its top of more than $ 400 billion at the end of December. (It would be even higher if Musk had not added $ 33 billion to its net value by merging X with XAI last week).
The second Musk, SpaceX company, the rocket that benefits from huge contracts from the US government and manages the Satellite Internet Starlink company, is also likely to be burned by Trump prices because it gets satellite components and network equipment from abroad. The company Taiwanese Wistron Neweb Corporation, a large SpaceX supplier, began to produce routers and other network equipment for Starlink in a factory in Vietnam last year, while other SpaceX suppliers – including Taiwanese manufacturers, also started to move risks for concerns, in SpaceX, after a SpaceX request, for geopol concerns. Vietnam, in La Tonon a Reuters Report last November.
Vietnam and Thailand are among the hardest countries affected by Trump’s prices, each facing 46% and 36% of samples respectively. Even SpaceX suppliers who have kept their operations in Taiwan will be strongly taxed – Taiwan imports are now faced at a rate of 32%. Vietnam prices, in particular, can disrupt a critical investment that SpaceX has planned. Government representatives in Vietnam said last September that SpaceX planned to make an investment of $ 1.5 billion in the country, although the objective and progress of this investment are not clear.
SpaceX, which is among the most precious private American companies, see its drop in evaluation. According to an opinion, a supplier of secondary market data, SpaceX stocks fell 12% this week and more than 23% per year, bringing its valuation to around 290 billion dollars. Investors estimated SpaceX at more than $ 350 billion at the start of this year.
