Musk in public spat with Trump’s top adviser over tariffs
Washington: Elon Musk lashed out at Donald Trump’s top trade adviser over the US president’s sweeping tariffs, prompting Peter Navarro to tell Musk to stay in his “lane”, in a sign of growing tensions in the White House as financial markets dive and banks start to forecast a recession.
The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder responded to a video of Navarro talking about tariffs on CNN that had been posted by a user on Musk’s social media platform X. The user praised Navarro, pointing out he had a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
President Donald Trump and his son Eric go golfing in Florida as markets tank.Credit: Getty Images
“A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing. Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem,” Musk replied in a 1.30am post.
When another user said Navarro was correct about trade regardless of his PhD, Musk replied: “He ain’t built shit.”
The exchange came on top of Musk’s remarks by video link to a conference of Italy’s far-right party in which he supported the US and European Union moving “to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone”.
Musk has previously been sceptical of tariffs and has otherwise remained silent about them on his X account, which reads as a stream of consciousness on political matters and topics of the day.
Elon Musk at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he was heavily involved in a state Supreme Court election.Credit: AP
His time at the White House, where he is officially classed as a special government employee running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is expected to end soon.
“Elon is fantastic,” Trump said aboard Air Force One last week. “I want Elon to stay as long as possible … but there’ll be a point where he’s going to have to leave, and when he does, the secretaries will take over [DOGE].”
Navarro – the most pro-tariff adviser in Trump’s economic circle and a key driver of last week’s announcement that has roiled markets and alarmed many Republicans in Congress – fired back at Musk on Sunday, US time.
“Elon, when he’s in his DOGE lane, is great,” Navarro told Fox News. “Elon sells cars, and he’s in Texas assembling cars that have big parts of that car from Mexico, China. The batteries come from Japan or China, the electronics come from Taiwan. And he’s simply protecting his own interests, as any business person would do.”
Senior trade adviser Peter Navarro at the tariff announcement ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.Credit: AP
Navarro said the administration was “more concerned about Detroit building Cadillacs with American engines, and that’s what this is all about”.
He also said Musk “doesn’t understand” the zero-tariff zone with the European Union he proposed.
During Trump’s first term, Navarro was well-known to Australian politicians and trade negotiators as the hard-line adviser who opposed giving Australia an exemption on steel and aluminium tariffs, and who later argued Australia exploited the exemption Trump granted to “flood” the American market even though steel and aluminium from Australia accounted for less than 2 per cent of US imports of those products.
At a 2019 meeting in Japan between Trump, then-prime minister Scott Morrison and a large team of advisers, Navarro was “unnecessarily sharp” in prosecuting the case that Australia was in breach of an agreement to limit aluminium shipments, according to a person in the room.
The US and Australian trade delegations meet in Japan in 2019.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Navarro went to jail last year rather than comply with a subpoena relating to the pro-Trump riots of January 6, 2021 in Washington. He also made up a fictional character, Ron Vara – an anagram of his last name – whom he quotes in several books as a source of economic wisdom.
About $US6.6 trillion was wiped from US sharemarkets on Thursday and Friday in a rout not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic. The country’s biggest investment bank, JPMorgan, gave the US a 60 per cent chance of going into recession this year, predicting its economy would contract by 0.3 per cent through 2025.
Among the Trump administration officials defending the tariff package on the Sunday morning political shows was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said Americans should take “great comfort” in the fact sharemarket infrastructure worked smoothly amid a record volume of trading on Friday.
“Americans who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I think they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press.
The weekend was also marked by protests against Trump, Musk and the administration’s agenda, with tens of thousands marching in major cities. Demonstrations were held in all 50 US states, as well as in European capitals.
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