Record crash of the Tesla-A shares: The increasing confrontation between Donald Trump (78) and tech billionaire Elon Musk (53) on Thursday had the Tesla papers sag as much as never before in one day. The title of the electric car manufacturer fell by more than 14 percent to just under $ 285. The company thus lost around 153 billion euros of its IPO within a day – negative record. The loss of value has been 29.5 percent since the beginning of the year.
After Musk had expressed unusually open and aggressive criticism of the President’s planned tax cutting laws, Trump verbally struck back on Thursday. The US President threatened Musk to withdraw government orders and subsidies. Now the dispute escalates publicly and is the determining topic in the United States. The discussion also overshadowed the visit of Chancellor Friedrich Merz (69) in the white house.
Escalation after resignation as a consultant
Musk is not only the chief and major shareholder of Tesla, but also head of the SpaceX space company. He recently resigned from his post as a consultant Trump. This is precisely as Tesla investors that had hoped for a phase of political calm, Musk started a new word war, “this time with exactly the man he supported so vehemently – President Trump,” commented stock analyst Matt Britzman from the asset manager Hargreaves Lansdown. “An investment in Tesla is not for the faint of heart,” said his conclusion. Because the company has to struggle with enough internal problems such as disappointing sales figures and a damaged brand image.
The Tech billionaire had asked Congress members of the Republican Party in the dispute over Trump’s tax law (“Big Beautiful Bill”). He also advised them to join him and not to the US President. “Trump still has three and a half years as President – and there will be more than 40 years,” he wrote as a “food for thought” for the parliamentarians on his platform X.
Musk had put a mood against the tax and expenditure law promoted by Trump for days, which would burden the US state with more than $ 2.3 trillion dollars. Meanwhile, Trump suggested that Musk was led by business interests. Trump said Musk had no problem with the law – until he found out that this includes a reduction in billions of billions of subsidies for electric vehicles.
Trump gave up any reluctance to Musk on Thursday. The Tesla boss “went crazy”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will still have it,” Trump said to journalists in the White House.
Mutual threats
Trump openly threatened financial consequences for Musk companies. “The easiest way to save billions and billions of dollars in our household is to terminate Elon’s government subsidies and contracts,” wrote the president. He had always been surprised that his predecessor Joe Biden (82) didn’t do that.
Musk struck back over X a little later: “Without me, Trump would have lost the choice,” he said. In the election campaign, he donated more than $ 250 million for Trump’s campaign. Musk added: “Such an ungrateful.”
In response to the threat that his companies would be withdrawn from government orders, he threatened: He will start immediately by decommissioning the SpaceX Dragon Ferry Ferry. The vehicle is on behalf of NASA.
And Musk also threatened Trump personally. He claimed Trump’s name found himself in documents for the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had come to death in a New York prison in 2019. “That is the real reason why they were not published,” he wrote. The world’s richest man did not provide evidence of this; In his time, however, he had an apparently comprehensive insight into documents as the head of the Doge Commission for the US government. He is also aware of Trump’s financial participations in his company network. Musk threatened to be undisguised: “It is time to throw the really big bomb.”