Musk swipes at Navarro amid tariff turmoil: ‘He ain’t built shit’
The tech CEO has lost billions as markets tanked, and has been mostly silent on the president’s tariffs.
Elon Musk took an apparent swing at senior White House aide Peter Navarro — one of the chief cheerleaders of President Donald Trump’s tariff plans — amid market turmoil that has hammered Musk’s holdings.
Musk, a close adviser to the president, has been unusually quiet as the rollout of Trump’s sweeping tariffs have caused the markets to tumble and global trading partners to retaliate.
The Tesla CEO lost billions in the wake of Trump’s Tuesday tariff announcement. His car company relies on imported parts from China, which Trump slammed with a 34 percent tariff.
In response, China hit the U.S. with a reciprocal 34 percent tariff on all U.S. goods Friday. Tesla shares, like much of the rest of the market, have fallen since Trump announced the tariffs.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, Musk took to his social media platform X to launch an apparent attack at the president’s senior trade counselor, taking jabs at Navarro under a video in which he explained the Trump administration’s logic in levying tariffs during a CNN appearance.
“A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing. Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem,” Musk wrote in one post. (Navarro earned a PhD in economics from Harvard in the 1980s.)
The Department of Government Efficiency head replied to another user’s comment on the video lauding Navarro’s explanation, writing of the economist: “He ain’t built shit.”
Musk also responded to another user posting a quote attributed to well-known conservative economist and commentator Thomas Sowell as saying “in every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it.”
“Yup,” Musk wrote under the post, seemingly referring to Navarro.
Sowell has sharply criticized Trump’s tariffs, warning that they could set off a global trade war and possibly trigger another Great Depression.
But despite his brief attack on Navarro, Musk continued boosting other Trump administration policies on his social media platform later into Saturday morning, promoting his own work with DOGE and reposting content applauding Trump’s border policies.
The Trump adviser’s apparent spell of anti-tariff commentary came amid reports, first revealed by POLITICO, that the president has told his inner circle that Musk will soon step down from his post.
Neither the White House nor DOGE immediately responded to requests for comment.
(Source:Politico)
