Billionaire Elon Musk made personal appeals to the Donald Trump to reverse his aggressive plan to make sweeping tariff increases, a new report has claimed.
Trump introduced some of the steepest U.S. tariffs on imports in over a century on the weekend, raising import taxes by as much as 50 per cent for some countries sparking stock market meltdown and widespread backlash.
Musk, who has become a close personal adviser to Trump, spent the weekend personally appealing to the president to wind back the tariff plan, according to sources who spoke to The Washington Post. More publicly, the South African-born tech businessman also spent the weekend tweeting about the benefits of international trade cooperation, sharing a video of economist Milton Friedman breaking down what goes into making a pencil to explain the benefits of free trade.
He also blasted White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, the architect of the tariff plans. Responding to a tweet that shared a clip of Navarro explaining the hikes, Musk wrote: “A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing.”
It is one of the key policy areas on which Musk and the U.S. President disagree. As the chief executive of electric car manufacturer Tesla, Musk has opposed tariffs for years. During Trump’s first term, Tesla filed a lawsuit in a bid to overturn the tax on Tesla imports from China. In 2020 the company’s top executives wanted to sue the Trump administration over its China tariffs, the Washington Post reports, saying Musk originally agreed but later berated staff for following through.
More recently, speaking via video link at a congress of Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salivini’s right-wing League Party, Musk said he hoped the U.S. and Europe could develop a “very close relationship”.
“I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move, ideally in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and the United States,” he said on Saturday.
But Musk’s interventions do not appear to have worked.
Global stock markets plunged in response to the tariff hikes on Monday, and Tesla stock closed down more than 2.5 per cent.
The president has so far dismissed the market turmoil, saying, “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
Musk has since made more conciliatory noises on his platform X, sharing a tweet from the official United States Trade Representative listing unfair trade practices imposed on American exporters, saying “good points”.
Since Trump’s inauguration, Musk has led the Department of Government Efficiency, promising to cut $1 trillion in federal government spending.
DOGE first took the axe to USAID, and has since fired U.S. Department of Agriculture staff working to contain the bird flu outbreak, and slashed funding to scientific research programmes.
