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The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.
Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.
Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital, and it's sales, at least in Europe, were fueled by virtue signalling. Now imagine the look on the face of the exact type of person, that wants to be seen as saving the planet, suddenly being seen as a Nazi instead. Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly, so I consider Elon to be a dead man walking, if he loses political backing. The drama being about the budget, I wonder if he wasn't hoping for some bailout to be included there, which didn't materialize.
Anyway, if being cut loose is a foregone conclusion, he might figure that he might as well drag everyone else down with him.
That's an interesting play, since a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets, so maybe he'll manage to stir the pot this way. But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
Not anymore, surprisingly. Musk owns about an eighth of Tesla, for about $125B of market cap (if he could sell it all without tanking the stock, which he can't, but that applies to all his equities), but he's got over 40% of SpaceX, which at its latest valuation gives him more like $135B capital there.
Nah, but they've been flat for 2 years after skyrocketing for the previous 2, which is nearly as bad a change for anyone holding stock at a P/E justified by future growth.
That's true, but it's not the budget that'll explode (except for the military, by like 25%?), it's just the deficit, via tax cuts. And nearly all Trump's base (like most other Republicans and probably most Democrats, to be fair) are fine taking lower taxes now at the cost of larger but more complicated fiscal and monetary problems at some uncertain future date.
Was it actually sold to anyone at that price? Even stonk market valuations are often nothing more than memes, but at least they have an advantage of being an actual market price.
-13% worldwide sounds like declining, especially with the rest of the EV market growing. -50% in Europe does indeed sound like "tanking".
$1.25B of it, to "SpaceX, as well as investors" - it was partially a stock buyback.
Yeah, that's all fair. I was looking at total revenue trailing 12 months, but was misled by both the "total" (declining auto revenue is partly offset by rising energy production+storage revenue) and "12 months" (the last released quarter specifically looks awful; I guess people weren't expecting Trump to win and really focus the anti-Elon hate?) parts of that.
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