WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 24: White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attends a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on March 24, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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On any number of Donald Trump’s policies, from mass deportations of undocumented immigrants to challenging federal judges who rule against his executive orders, Elon Musk has the president’s back. Over the last few months, as the world’s richest man has worked to gut the federal bureaucracy as head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, he has defended the president’s agenda at every turn on X to his 218 million followers.
But when it comes to Donald Trump’s most significant policy to date – the broad-based tariffs program unveiled earlier this week, which applies a baseline 10% levy on every country plus additional tariffs for countries with larger trade deficits with the U.S. – Musk has almost nothing to say.
At the Wednesday evening Rose Garden event where Trump announced the new tariffs to press and members of his administration, including cabinet members like Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Musk was nowhere to be found. While Trump was behind the podium and holding aloft his huge cardboard sheet outline the ‘reciprocal’ tariffs his administration is imposing against various countries, Musk was retweeting a guy with 780 followers talking about how his buddy with a boat has good internet on the boat thanks to Starlink, the satellite internet service provider controlled by Musk’s company SpaceX.
Financial market chaos ensued the next 36 hours, with investors panicking over the growing likelihood of a U.S. recession, wiping out $2.4 trillion in stock market value from the S&P 500 during yesterday’s trading session – the biggest one-day decline since March 2020 – yet the loquacious Musk had nothing to say about the most pressing story of the day. He was too busy retweeting the Department of The Interior boosting a national park in California, reposting a video that purports to show prominent Democratic politicians doing the Nazi salute, mocking U.S. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, and retweeting posts boosting Starlink and SpaceX. From the beginning of this week until now, Musk has authored just one tweet referencing Trump’s tariffs—and it was a retweet of another account.
It’s possible that Musk, who is becoming increasingly unpopular with Americans (60% view him unfavorably according to a new poll), simply wants to avoid attaching himself to an unpopular plank of Trump’s policy agenda; after all, global Tesla sales were already declining, due largely to consumer backlash to Musk’s role in the Trump’s administration. It’s also possible that Trump, conscious of Musk’s broader unpopularity, doesn’t want the tycoon associated with his policy (which could help explain Musk’s exclusion from the Rose Garden event) or, which has been reported, that Musk is on his way out from DOGE. Above all, what seems certain is that Musk, a pioneering businessman who built his global empire with the help of free trade policies, understands that the tariffs are self-defeating and that the ensuing economic chaos will negatively affect his own companies and their bottom lines.
The tycoon has already acknowledged as much in the case of Tesla. The electric automaker is better positioned than its domestic rivals to cope with the tariffs, since its gigafactories in Austin and California produce all of the Teslas sold to American consumers. Tesla however still relies on global supply chains for the raw materials that go into its vehicles. “Important to note that Tesla is NOT unscathed here,” Musk tweeted last week, referring to Trump’s auto tariffs. “The tariff impact on Tesla is still significant.” The new tariffs are “a debacle of epic proportions for the whole auto industry including Tesla,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research for Wedbush Securities, said to Forbes via email. “Economic Armageddon.”
Tesla’s stock has fallen 14% over the last two days (as of Friday afternoon), since Trump announced the tariffs on Wednesday evening. Musk’s fortune is down over $40 billion since its peak of over $400 billion in late December. (It would be even higher if Musk hadn’t added $33 billion to his net worth by merging X with xAI last week).
Musk’s second largest business, SpaceX, the rocketmaker that enjoys huge U.S. government contracts and runs the satellite internet company Starlink, is also likely to get burned by Trump’s tariffs, because it sources satellite components and network gear from abroad. Taiwanese firm Wistron NeWeb Corporation, a major SpaceX supplier, began producing routers and other network gear for Starlink at a factory in Vietnam last year, while other SpaceX suppliers – including Taiwanese manufacturers Universal Microwave Technology, Shenmao Technology, and Chin-Poon Industrial – have also begun moving some of their operations in Vietnam and Thailand, following a request from SpaceX over concerns of geopolitical risk, according to a Reuters report last November.
Vietnam and Thailand are among the hardest hit countries by Trump’s tariffs, with each facing 46% and 36% levies, respectively. Even the SpaceX suppliers that kept their operations in Taiwan will be heavily taxed—U.S. imports from Taiwan now face a 32% tariff. The tariffs on Vietnam, in particular, may disrupt a critical investment that SpaceX has been planning. Government officials in Vietnam said last September that SpaceX was planning to make a $1.5 billion investment in the country, though the purpose and progress of that investment is not clear.
SpaceX, which is among the most valuable privately held U.S. companies, is seeing its valuation dip. According to Notice, a secondary market data provider, SpaceX’s shares have fallen 12% this week and over 23% year to date, pushing its valuation to around $290 billion. Investors valued SpaceX at above $350 billion at the beginning of this year.
