Trump vs. Musk, Trump trade takes tumble: Market Takeaways

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US stocks (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) closed Thursday's session lower amid President Trump's phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the president's social media spats with Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk.

Yahoo Finance senior markets reporter Josh Schafer comes on Asking for a Trend to highlight the trading day's biggest themes, including the stock reaction from Tesla and other companies tied to the Trump Trade.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.

00:00 Speaker A

Escalating tensions between President Trump and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, sending shares of the EV maker lower. The downward move in Tesla shares weighing on the S&P 500 in today's trade. Yahoo Finance's Josh Shafer joins us now with the trading day takeaways. Josh.

00:12 Josh Shafer

Hey, Josh. You got it. So, this dispute between President Trump and Elon Musk really heating up today. Of course, Elon Musk had been coming after the president over the last several days regarding his tax bill. Well, today you had Trump responding. One of the key moves was Trump's response on Truth Social saying that he would pull government subsidies to Elon's companies such as Tesla. Here's our chart here. Stock down over 14% today. Trump also adding in separate posts saying that quote, "Elon went crazy," essentially saying that he pushed Elon out of the government. Elon didn't necessarily choose to leave. But what I want to take a look at for our chart here, Josh, Tesla is now essentially back where it was on November 6th, 2025. November 6th, 2025, of course, was the day after the election, right? Tesla shares had just jumped. They were $288 a share. Well, today, Tesla shares just closed at $284 a share. And one of the interesting things when you look at a chart like this and you see stock at a similar price is, okay, well, what's the pitch now, right? At 288 back in November, it was Musk is teaming up with Trump. There's all this optimism built into the stock. It sent the stock roaring, right? And even Musk coming back has sent the stock roaring. Now you're back at that same level. And you basically went from Musk probably being buddy-buddy with Trump to Musk clearly being an adversary of Trump. And I'm just curious what Wall Street makes of this sort of change in investment thesis over the next 24 hours and we start to digest this. Tesla shares down about 2% after hours now. Musk continuing to tweet. He just put out on X that Trump's tariffs might cause a recession. So, just it doesn't feel like this is ending. And I'm curious when Musk is such a big part of this story, what investors are going to say about this over the next.

03:22 Speaker A

Yeah. I mean you can see that move, by the way, off. Look at that April low. You're still up about 20% from that and, I mean, people have different theories about why that was. That move like maybe it was Musk coming back to work full-time at Tesla and his other companies, or maybe it was the robotaxi launch, or the bet that a more affordable vehicle was on the way. But a strong move there. It is interesting to hear from the bulls, by the way. Dan Ives of Wedbush just popped out another note. He told his clients still bullish, right, so bullish on Tesla, still bullish on that autonomous future, but did note, I think how Dan put it was this could put a fly in the ointment of Trump's regulatory framework, and that's kind of the worry.

04:43 Josh Shafer

Just overall, since Trump has taken office, you saw this for a little bit with Amazon, you saw this with Apple when Trump started mentioning them, the president mentioning your company's name on a consistent basis has not been friendly to stocks in the near term, right? So, I think if you're a Tesla investor, simply rooting for whenever this moves on and you can start talking about something like the robotaxi event and get back to the fundamentals. And get back from the president mentioning Tesla all the time. But the interesting part that we were watching in the market today, Josh, it wasn't just Tesla moving. So you saw a lot of these Trump trades. Tesla was one of the key Trump trades, right? It was one of those trades that always seemed to go up and sort of the hype after Trump got into office. Take a look at Palantir today. Palantir fell 7%. So this was a report from Semaphore. This is came out right here, right? That was your big drop. They said that some House Republicans do not like the government contracts that the government is signing with Palantir worried about some privacy issues with all that data being collected. And then you just look across the market at other Trump trades. So, Trump spouted, or in this spout with Trump, or in this spout with Musk, look at what happened to DJT stock today, right? Again, right around that 1:00 p.m. time that we were following this, even Bitcoin, which has been a Musk and a Trump trade, again, similar timeframe, that stock goes down. And a final one I want to show you. This is an interesting one. So this is Destiny Tech 100. This is an ETF you can buy that gives you access to private market companies. What do you think Destiny Tech 100 owns that would make it go down 12%, Josh? It's largest holding is SpaceX. So now, Musk coming out today, of course, saying that they're going to decommission that ship and Trump saying that they might pause some of those contracts, right? There's sort of submifiness there on what exactly is going on with the government and SpaceX, but for now, it seems like there's trouble with Musk and SpaceX as well.

08:25 Speaker A

Yeah. Openly brawling with the President of the United States. There you go.