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Shares of Tesla (TSLA)closed 14% lower on Thursday as a war of words between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump heated up. Market Domination Anchor Julie Hyman charts the stock's decline throughout the day as the tensions increased.
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Tesla shares continuing to fall, actually, in the after-hours. They're down another 2% or so after this big 14% drop over the course of the session. And it all began right around noon here. And that's when we saw the rhetoric really heating up between President Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. This has been building in recent days, right? We had yesterday Musk out on Twitter or on X complaining that the tax bill was what he called an abomination, saying that it really wasn't good because it's boosting the deficit. And then, um President Trump was asked about that today. He was meeting at the White House with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and was asked by reporters about Elon Musk. And Trump said, quote, he's upset because we took away the EV mandate. I'd rather Elon criticize me than the bill. The bill is incredible. And then Musk fired back on X, call it about 20 minutes later here, maybe around here, saying slim, beautiful bill for the win. Keep the good, remove the bad. In other words, he said there's no such thing as a big beautiful bill, that the two things don't go together because of the spending, which is at odds, he says, with, of course, the efforts that he was trying to do at Doge. Then right around 12:45, you had Musk posting on X that without him, Trump would have lost the election. So a lot of vitriol coming from Elon Musk via X towards President Trump today. Then things escalated. I guess right around 2:30. And that's when Trump was asked again about Elon Musk. He said at that point that Elon was wearing thin. And he also posted on Truth Social, his own social media platform about it. He said, the easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon's governmental subsidies and contracts. And that's when, again, you saw kind of the momentum accelerate to the downside. Now Tesla doesn't really have federal government contracts, but of course SpaceX, one of Musk's other large endeavors, does. And Musk at one point also posting on X that he would decommission one of his spacecraft that had been commissioned for the government. Right around, just a little icing on the cake, I guess, or one last little barb here. Um Musk also said that President Trump is in the Epstein files and that's why they had not been released. So a lot of back and forth today. A lot of messy lines on this chart that represent all of the back and forth that was happening. The latest, Elon Musk again posting on X and saying that due to tariffs, which he has already been outspoken about that he is not in favor of, the due to tariffs he thinks there will be a recession in the second half of the year. So again, right now, seeing that 14% drop during the regular hours, and it is not letting up in the after-hours down another two and a quarter percent.