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      Why Trump’s Tesla Showcase Mattered to Elon Musk

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      A lot has changed since former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. snubbed Elon Musk at an event in 2021.It wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk couldn’t even get an invitation to the White House.The year was 2021, and President Joe Biden was announcing tighter pollution rules and promoting his electric vehicle policies.Behind him on the lawn were gleaming examples — a Ford F-150 Lightning, a Chevrolet Bolt EV, a Jeep Wrangler — as well as the chief executives of the companies that made them. But the nation’s biggest electric vehicle producer was nowhere to be seen.“Seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Musk tweeted before the event.The Biden White House explained the snub by noting that the automakers that had been invited were the nation’s three largest employers of the United Automobile Workers, a powerful union, and it suggested that the administration would find other ways to partner with Tesla. (Union animus toward electric vehicles later became a problem for Biden.) But today, the moment is seen as a turning point in a feud between Musk and Biden that some Democrats say they have come to regret deeply.“They left Elon out,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who is working to get his party to embrace electric vehicles, “and now he hates ’em.”It was hard not to think about that episode yesterday when Musk and Trump lined up Teslas, including Cybertrucks, on the White House driveway and proceeded to rattle off their benefits like denizens of a suburban showroom.“I love the product,” Trump said.“Try it,” Musk said. “You’ll like it!”Musk now has the White House attention and promotion that he wanted several years ago — and with it, a pile of potential benefits for some of his companies — but it’s come at a price. He donated some $300 million largely through his own super PAC to help Trump get elected. My colleagues Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman reported yesterday that he’s signaled a willingness to put another $100 million into groups controlled by Trump’s political operation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Musk’s Tweet-Fueled Bubble May Be About to Burst

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      Elon Musk’s business empire may be starting to wobble.Over the past six weeks, the value of Tesla’s shares has plunged about 40 percent, wiping out virtually all they had gained after the 2024 election. This reversal reveals Mr. Musk’s soft underbelly: His fortune depends heavily on the inflated expectations of his rabid following. As those expectations deflate so will his power, demonstrating that financial markets are an underappreciated guardrail against both Mr. Musk’s and President Trump’s agendas.It is tempting to compare Mr. Musk to the true business titans of the past quarter century such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But those individuals created genuinely huge businesses that eclipse anything Mr. Musk has built by any possible metric. While Mr. Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to launch an ever-growing list of disparate initiatives and provided immunity from critics who question his operational decision-making, his corporate governance, his obscene pay packages, and now his migration into the political sphere.The high-wire act goes something like this: Dream up a business so ambitious that any setback is trivial and every accomplishment heroic. Identify yourself as the manic genius behind this ambitious business in order to personally capitalize on outsize returns from excited investors. Enlist social media to cement your iconic status, keeping your believers so enthusiastic that their fervor beats back any skeptics who dare to bet against your ventures, even as you pitch more and more fantastical ideas. At this point you hit the flywheel: Other investors, searching for outsize returns, flock to the shares of your other companies, pushing their valuations ever higher, thus fortifying your wealth and burnishing your reputation as a business mastermind.If you’re lucky, this happens when investors are dreaming of alternatives to the poor returns available when interest rates are ridiculously low; magical thinking about the power of technology suppresses any worry about the risks of problems down the line; and retail markets are turning stock trading into something more akin to online gambling.Understanding this cult requires one to rethink what one knows about finance. Financial purists like to think of financial markets as neutral arbiters that merely record the value-creating activities of entrepreneurs. Financial pragmatists understand that prices need not always reflect value, as behavioral finance has demonstrated. But what if entrepreneurs can capitalize on these dynamics to manufacture fortunes and political power?This trick is precisely what Mr. Musk has mastered. His messianic status, which was birthed in the explosion of social media, created a powerful cycle of outsize returns on ventures that lead to investors providing him with more and cheaper capital to diversify his empire that, in turn, attracts yet more investors fearful of missing out. Skyrocketing Tesla shares have made fans and investors so devoted that all he has to do is mention a new ambition to goad them into buying even more. And the larger the stated ambition, the more wealth and power they hand him. So why not try for Mars? The final step in this process is to consolidate power in the political sphere to ensure that the outsize ambitions can be nourished forever. If Mr. Musk had played it well, his empire may have been impregnable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rage Against Elon Musk Turns Tesla Into a Target

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      Tesla charging stations were set ablaze near Boston on Monday. Shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon after midnight on Thursday. Arrests were made at a nonviolent protest at a Tesla dealership in Lower Manhattan on Saturday.The electric car company Tesla increasingly found itself in police blotters across the country this week, more than seven weeks after President Trump’s second inauguration swept Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, into the administration as a senior adviser to the president.Mr. Musk, 53, is drawing increasing backlash for his sweeping cuts to federal agencies, a result of the newly formed cost-cutting initiative Mr. Musk has labeled the Department of Government Efficiency.During a demonstration on Saturday at a gleaming Tesla showroom in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, protesters joined in chants of “Nobody voted for Elon Musk” and “Oligarchs out, democracy in.” One held a sign saying, “Send Musk to Mars Now!!” (Mr. Musk also owns SpaceX.)Shots were fired at the Tesla dealership in Tigard, Ore., this week.Tigard Police DepartmentSeveral hundred protesters remained there for two hours, organizers said, blocking entrances and shutting down the dealership.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s First Cabinet Meeting Was a Display of Deference to Elon Musk

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      President Trump’s first cabinet meeting was a display of deference to Elon Musk.A couple of hours before President Trump convened his cabinet for the first time, he used his social media platform to declare that the group was “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.”As the meeting began, it seemed to be the members’ job to prove it.The secretaries sat largely in silence behind their paper name cards, the sort of thing you need when, powerful though you may be, you are not a household name. And they listened politely as the richest man in the world loomed over them, scolding them about the size of the deficit, sheepishly admitting to temporarily canceling an effort to prevent ebola and insisting they were all crucial to his mission.“I’d like to thank everyone for your support,” Elon Musk said.In fact, Musk has not had the support of every cabinet secretary — at least not when he tried to order their employees to account for their time over email or resign. When a reporter asked about the obvious tension, Trump kicked the question to the secretaries themselves.“Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” Trump asked. “If you are, we’ll throw him out of here. Is anybody unhappy?”Nobody was unhappy. Nervous laughter rippled around the table as Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, grinned and led a slow clap, which Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, eventually joined before scratching her nose.Next to her, Kelly Loeffler, the small business administrator, applauded and attended to an itch on her ear. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered up a single clap and gazed over at Musk, a fixed smile on his face. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, shifted in his seat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Officials Are Fired at Traffic Safety Agency Investigating Musk’s Company

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      The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has raised questions about crashes involving Tesla’s self-driving technology.The federal agency responsible for traffic safety, which has been investigating whether self-driving technology in Tesla vehicles played a role in the death of a pedestrian, will fire a “modest” number of employees, an agency spokesman said late Friday.The agency did not say whether any of the fired employees were involved in investigations of Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, is leading the Department of Government Efficiency established by President Trump.The efficiency department has been forcing layoffs at numerous government agencies as part of an effort to reshape the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Musk has retained control of Tesla while spending much of his time in Washington.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has three active investigations of Tesla, according to agency documents, including one examining whether the company’s autonomous driving software is prone to failure when visibility is poor.The layoffs at the traffic safety agency, which has less than 1,000 employees, were reported earlier by The Washington Post. Even after the layoffs, the agency continues to employ more people than at the beginning of the Biden administration, the agency said in a statement.“The last administration grew NHTSA by a whopping 30 percent,” the agency said in a statement.“We have retained positions critical to the mission of saving lives, preventing injuries, and reducing economic costs due to road traffic crashes,” the agency said. “We will continue to enforce the law on all manufacturers of motor vehicles and equipment.”Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.One of the traffic safety agency’s investigations into Tesla is based on four accidents involving technology that the carmaker calls supervised full self-driving.James Stukenberg for The New York TimesOne of the investigations into Tesla is based on four accidents involving technology that the carmaker calls supervised full self-driving, which can steer, brake and navigate Tesla cars in some situations. In one of the crashes, a Tesla struck and killed a pedestrian, according to agency documents. In another of the accidents, a person was injured.Tesla’s self-driving technology relies on cameras to survey a car’s surroundings, in contrast with competitors like Waymo, a unit of the same company as Google, that also uses lasers and radar to recognize objects.The traffic safety agency has been looking into whether Tesla’s technology failed when visibility was poor because of glare from the sun, fog or dust.Mr. Musk has often argued that Tesla self-driving technology is safer than human drivers.The technology is also crucial to Tesla’s future and share price. As Tesla sales have flagged, falling 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles rose 25 percent, Mr. Musk has shifted the company’s focus to autonomous driving technology and plans for a self-driving taxi.The technology will help make Tesla the most valuable company in the world by far, Mr. Musk told investors last month. More

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      Comparing Elon Musk and Jack Welch as Influential Cost-Cutters

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      Elon Musk’s hyperfocus on the bottom line has made him influential in Washington and Silicon Valley. How does that compare with the last famous cost-cutter, Jack Welch?Elon Musk is perhaps the most influential corporate cost-cutter since Jack Welch led General Electric.Eric Lee/The New York TimesA tale of the cost-cutting tapeThere’s no disputing that Elon Musk is one of the leading businessmen of our era. He has a net worth of around $400 billion these days and leads prominent businesses including Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink and xAI. And he has become known for moving fast, cutting costs and pushing the workers who remain beyond what they thought possible.In many ways, that recalls a previous titan of industry, Jack Welch, who 25 years ago was considered the greatest businessman of his generation. It raises an intriguing question: Is Musk as influential a business leader as the former General Electric chief? Are the two men even comparable?By some lights, the two aren’t remotely the same. Welch was no entrepreneur but instead was the ultimate corporate chameleon, the son of a train conductor who started his career in G.E.’s plastics division and spent his whole career at the conglomerate.Musk, on the other hand, hailed from a prominent South African family, before emigrating to Canada and then to the United States as a serial entrepreneur.And while the two were both politically conservative, Welch was more of a country-club Republican, partial to golf and no fan — at least earlier on — of Donald Trump. While a savvy political operator, Welch was unlikely to have decamped to Mar-a-Lago to personally and intensely cozy up to the president-elect, as Musk did. (In 2016, Welch withdrew his support for Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, writing on social media, “Unfortunately, wrong messenger…Party must change nominee now.”)But the two shared a common business philosophy: Cut as much fat as possible.Welch believed G.E. had become too bureaucratic and bloated. He slashed billions of dollars in costs, and prided himself on weeding out employees who just weren’t making it. He became an apostle of the Six Sigma approach, inspiring other C.E.O.s. Corporate profits — and G.E.’s stock price — exploded under his watch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Is Focused on DOGE. What About Tesla?

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      Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s main advisers, has not outlined a plan to reverse falling sales at the electric car company of which he is chief executive.Elon Musk’s role as President Trump’s cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appears to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. Mr. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Mr. Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Mr. Trump’s home in Florida — far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling start-up to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla’s success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Mr. Musk the world’s richest person.But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could have serious ramifications for his company and the auto industry, which employs millions of people worldwide.Even before he joined the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk’s running multiple companies had led investors and corporate governance experts to wonder whether he was spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Mr. Musk controls and runs SpaceX, whose rockets carry astronauts and satellites for NASA and others; X, the social media site; and xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence. And he wants to colonize Mars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nikola, Electric Truck Maker, Files for Bankruptcy

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      The company, which once enjoyed a surging stock price, struggled to turn its plans for electric and hydrogen trucks into a viable business.Nikola, an electric vehicle start-up that had once hoped to become the Tesla of heavy trucks, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday.Founded in 2015, Nikola promised to develop long-haul semi trucks powered by hydrogen and electricity, and listed itself on the stock exchange in 2020 before it had sold a single vehicle. Its share price surged briefly as individual investors and some Wall Street firms clamored to bet on companies that they thought could replicate Tesla’s success and its soaring stock price.Investors’ short-lived enthusiasm for Nikola made its founder, Trevor Milton, and other early investors wealthy. But before long, significant doubts emerged about Mr. Milton’s claims about the company’s technology and orders from customers. He was soon ousted, and later convicted on fraud charges.In recent quarters, Nikola had begun delivering small numbers of electric trucks but far too few to make money. Late last year, the company said it had $200 million in cash and $270 million in long-term debt. Its stock plunged in early February on reports that the company was nearing a bankruptcy filing.The company said in a release it had about $47 million in cash on hand, and intended to continue “limited” service and support for trucks out on the road. The bankruptcy filing listed liabilities of between $1 billion and $10 billion, and put the number of creditors it owes at between 1,000 and 5,000.Nikola is one of several fledgling electric vehicle companies that have struggled to turn their ideas into actual cars and trucks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More