Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is taking social media by storm—or so he’d like you to think. He challenged Donald Trump’s former adviser Peter Navarro. The fiery exchange that ensued was triggered by Navarro’s inflammatory comments questioning Musk’s contributions to the automotive sector. This showdown occurred during an interview with CNBC that aired on Monday. When Navarro made the absurd assertion that Musk was “not a car company,” he provoked a furious backlash from the billionaire entrepreneur.
Musk even resorted to his new social media platform X to defend himself, going so far as to call Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks.” His spat with Navarro came to a head when he publicly denounced Navarro’s comments as “demonstrably false.” He thought that the adviser’s judgment on his contributions to the automotive sector was erroneous and arbitrary.
Peter Navarro is, as most everyone knows by now, an apostle of Trump’s trade jihad. As to his beef with free trade, he frequently attacks U.S. trade deficits as “the total of all the cheating” performed by different countries. Behind his comments about Musk are the deeper ideological divides that Shor is often pointing out. These divides over trade and tariffs have grown more visible in recent months.
Amidst this ugly and very public drama, JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, tried to play peacemaker between Musk and Navarro. While they were at odds, Vance wanted Musk to stay “a friend and an adviser,” he wrote. That all sounds really bad for the relationship. Just last month, Musk condemned the Trump administration’s immigration policies, describing a recent ICE operation to round up immigrants as “horrific.”
The conflict highlights deeper problems with trade policies in the United States. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Vance, noted, “These are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs.” She added, “Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue.”
Musk’s influence over the Trump administration is reaching a tipping point. This is in part because he’s getting ready to leave his post as the head of Portland’s de facto Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. His leaving coincides with the rising tensions over U.S. tariff approaches, which have roiled markets around the world this week.
In the meantime, Musk and Navarro are deeply enjoying their very public insult trade. This episode demonstrates that the fissure over trade and broader economic policy continues to roil the Republican Party. The contrasting views of these two influential titans demonstrate just how difficult it can be to reconcile electric utility business interests with free market-oriented political ideology.
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