Elon Musk’s Spat With Trump Erased $34 Billion From His Net Worth — And the Bleeding Isn’t Over

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Elon Musk is extremely powerful, but he is not invincible. Spending several hours in a social media brawl with President Donald Trump erased $34 billion from his net worth — and the full calculation of the damage is not yet complete.

He’s still the world’s richest man, but losing the equivalent of the GDP of an entire Central American country in an afternoon is not so easy to ignore.

The messy breakup of the bromance lit the political media world ablaze as Musk and Trump fired increasingly harsh social media posts back and forth, but the mostly pixelated fight is likely to lead to real-world consequences for both of them. The drama may prove to further stall the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Trump urgently wants the Senate to pass, and threats were exchanged regarding SpaceX’s role in the U.S. space program and the many other federal contracts and government subsidies that affect Musk’s various business enterprises.

In these early hours of what some pundits have deemed “World War X,” Tesla’s stock price took the brunt of the blows. By 1:30 pm ET, it had dropped nearly nine points, and the collapse continued throughout the afternoon, closing at $284.70, down 14.26% for the day, then losing a bit more in after-hours trading.

The drop pushed Tesla’s market cap below the $1 trillion benchmark. Tesla’s stock price had seen a 22% uptick in late May — despite abysmal sales numbers for the Cybertruck and weakening sales for Tesla overall — as Musk wrapped his work with DOGE and vowed to shareholders he would refocus on his companies. That gain has now been almost totally erased.

Tesla isn’t just a key part of Musk’s brand as a tech titan — it’s a core part of his wealth, and his stock was a critical part of how he financed his purchase of Twitter. According to an analysis by Bloomberg Business, the one-day hit to just his Tesla shares represented a $34 billion loss.

This was “the second-largest loss ever in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the 500 wealthiest people on the planet,” reported Bloomberg. “The only bigger one: his own wipeout in November 2021.”

The “stakes are higher than ever” in this feud with the president, the Bloomberg report noted, and represent a radical reversal from where Musk’s fortunes were just a few months ago. Shortly after Trump’s re-election win, “Musk’s net worth reached an all-time high approaching $500 billion,” and “[h]is companies’ valuations surged, buoyed by expectations that they would benefit from the billionaire’s relationship with Trump and his role as head of [DOGE].”

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to roll back or repeal federal emissions regulations that generate the billions of dollars in electric vehicle tax credits that have kept Tesla profitable. According to JP Morgan Chase’s analysts, the provisions in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” as currently drafted, will wipe out about $1.2 billion from Tesla’s bottom line.

And it’s not just Tesla at risk from presidential retribution.

SpaceX, Bloomberg reported, added $50 billion to Musk’s personal fortune when it was valued at $350 billion as part of an insider share sale last December, bolstered by the assumptions that Musk’s then-friendly relationship with Trump would mean that SpaceX’s billions of dollars of federal government contracts would continue, if not expand.

Even Musk’s companies that are not dependent on government contracts could still take a hit. The brain implant startup Neuralink, infrastructure and tunneling construction enterprise The Boring Company, his social media and AI projects under X and xAI Holdings, the Starlink internet satellites, and the solar panels manufactured by Tesla are all subject to a vast web of federal laws and regulatory agencies.

Investigative journalists and ethics watchdog organizations have already raised alarms asking if Musk’s involvement with DOGE was insulating him and his companies from investigations and regulation; it is not hard to picture how a president who feels betrayed could spin that protection around and instead start targeting Musk’s businesses in very inconvenient and expensive ways.