Elon Musk is known for many things. Subtlety is not one of them.
When Musk shared a grainy two-minute video at 4:59 a.m. Monday to his 218 million followers, his post contained no words, and yet the message was clear. It showed the free-market intellectual Milton Friedman, in a 1980 clip well known to economists, waxing poetic about free trade as he sketched out the international origins of the parts that form a pencil.
Musk was expressing his discomfort with President Trump’s imposition of draconian new tariffs. And yet one has to wonder what Musk hopes to accomplish.
This is not a president known to brook much public criticism, after all. Try to imagine Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, subtweeting her boss.
And Musk repeatedly went out of his way to disagree with Trump over the weekend, suggesting he believes he is not subject to the same rules that govern others in the president’s inner circle.
Speaking by video on Saturday to an Italian far-right political conference, he said he hoped the United States and the European Union would “move to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone.”
And that came after Musk twice took shots on X at the administration trade hawk Peter Navarro: First, he ridiculed Navarro’s Harvard Ph.D. in economics as “a bad thing, not a good thing,” suggesting it meant Navarro’s ego exceeded his intelligence.
Then, in case anyone had not caught his drift, Musk arguably added a line to Navarro’s future obituary, saying he “ain’t built” anything, using an expletive for emphasis. (He later deleted the second insult.)
I’ve been covering the notoriously impulsive Musk for a while now. I don’t see a cogent strategy at work in making public his frustrations with his boss.
This is not the first time Musk has been at odds with Trump since joining his team, and publicly so.
During the transition, Musk endorsed Rick Scott of Florida to be the Senate majority leader, getting ahead of Trump, who did not support Scott. Then Musk endorsed Howard Lutnick for Treasury secretary, which Trump ignored in choosing Scott Bessent.
Most prominently, Musk vocally defended the H-1B visa program against the more anti-immigrant, MAGA wing of the Republican Party, saying he would go to “war” to defend the program, which is beloved by the tech industry. Trump eventually sided with Musk.
In the early days of the Trump administration, Musk also dissed a Trump artificial-intelligence manufacturing plan. Trump gave him a pass for that one.
So does Musk have some secret plan here to get Trump to walk away from the ledge?
Trump has espoused tariffs and protectionism for decades. Musk’s online acting-out suggests he believes Trump’s stance may be negotiable assuming enough pressure is applied.
I have no doubt that Musk genuinely believes what he says about tariffs and trade. But it seems highly doubtful that a Milton Friedman video about a pencil will be able to change what Trump believes.
MEANWHILE on X
He protests the protesters too much
Musk is using his X account as a megaphone. My colleague Kate Conger looks at how he is responding on the site to protests against his government cost-cutting efforts.
On Monday, Musk suggested in a series of posts that protesters had been paid to demonstrate against him, or had little idea about why they were protesting.
In one, he responded to a headline from his favorite right-wing satirical website that said the protesters were demanding government waste, writing “Seriously,” and adding a face-palm emoji. In another, he wrote that people protesting against him were full of “bitterness.”
He also shared posts from other X users claiming that the protests were staged, and asked, “Who are the key individuals funding this?”
The idea that someone is funding the opposition to him and his work has fascinated Musk in recent weeks. When protests cropped up at Tesla dealerships last month, he accused George Soros and other Democratic donors of funding them.
These responses are characteristic of Musk, who often interprets disagreement with him as an attack. They also violate one of the internet’s cardinal rules: Don’t feed the trolls. Where other billionaires might ignore the criticism, Musk can’t seem to stop himself from responding to it — and bringing it more attention.
— Kate Conger
BY THE NUMBERS
$31 Billion
That’s about how much Musk has lost in net worth since Trump’s tariff announcement, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Perhaps this will help make your 401(k) losses go down a bit easier.
you shouldn’t miss
How Trump helped Musk save Twitter, financially
When Musk bought Twitter for about $44 billion in 2022, he was said to have wildly overpaid for the beleaguered company. Musk agreed with the criticism, so much so that he tried to get out of the deal entirely.
But a funny thing happened. The company, now called X, has rebounded somewhat. And, as Kate Conger explains, that’s in large part because of Trump’s election, which she says had a “halo effect” on the company. The company still has problems, but Kate reports that Trump’s return to power has brought some advertisers back to the platform and made it newly relevant.
Musk often has a way of somehow forging his own luck. It’s not as if he saw this coming; Trump wasn’t even an official candidate for president when Musk bought Twitter in 2022.
It does raise a fun hypothetical though, one that I’ve thought about from time to time over the last few months: What would have happened to X, and to Musk, had Kamala Harris won in November?
Read Kate’s piece here.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com