Tesla Drops Over 10%, Outpacing Market Bloodbath and Erasing $12 Billion of Musk’s Wealth in Just One Day
Allison Robbert/Pool via AP
The bloodbath in the markets in the wake of President Donald Trump’s new tariffs hit Elon Musk’s Tesla especially hard Friday, knocking the price down over 10% and evaporating with it a chunk of the world’s richest man’s wealth.
In a Rose Garden press conference Wednesday afternoon, Trump declared it to be “Liberation Day” and announced a series of sweeping new tariffs, including 10% on virtually all imported goods, 25% on foreign automobiles, and a long list of what he described as “reciprocal tariffs” on dozens of countries around the world.
The markets were rattled after Trump’s plans were confirmed, with U.S. stock futures plummeting in after-hours trading, and continuing to have historically bad days on Thursday and Friday. Even a number of Republicans have spoken out to criticize the tariffs as causing unnecessary economic harm.
Shares of Tesla, Inc. were down 10.42% Friday. The company had already been reeling from crashing sales worldwide amid backlash to Musk’s increased political involvement in far-right causes, protests at Tesla showrooms, and yet another embarrassing recall last month.
Screenshot via Google Finance.
Other tech stocks had a bad day Friday but not quite as rough as Tesla. Apple was down 7.29%, NVIDIA Corp. down 7.36%, Amazon down 4.15%, Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) down 3.20%, and Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) down 5.06%.
Overall, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 5.50% Friday, the S&P 500 was down 5.97%, and the NASDAQ composite was down 5.82%.
According to multiple reports, Musk owns about 411 million shares of Tesla stock, which is 12.8% of all shares. A large portion of those shares was pledged as part of the collateral for his purchase of Twitter, which he rebranded as X, and while the exact number of collateralized shares, the loan-to-value ratio in his agreements with lenders, and the exact stock price that could trigger a margin call are not publicly known, it is potentially a significant problem for him.
Using the round number of exactly 411 million shares for simplicity’s sake, that meant that Musk’s Tesla stock was worth almost $109,852,080,000, or nearly $110 billion, when the market closed yesterday. Today’s closing price of $239.43 means that Musk’s shares were worth $98,405,730,000, or about $98 billion — a loss of about $12 billion in one day.
Since the markets closed, Tesla has dropped another 0.49% in after-hours trading, as of the time of publication, losing Musk another half of a billion dollars.
