Tesla released its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, its first since the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, took up residence in the Trump White House and immediately began trying to fire federal workers, gut regulators, and illegally withhold funding from recipients who are entitled to it. The numbers are, to use a technical term, grim: Tesla’s net income for the first three months of the year was $409 million, down precipitously from $1.4 billion over the same period in 2024. According to The New York Times, things could have been much worse: Had Tesla not been able to supplement its sales by earning $400 million in interest and close to $600 million selling emissions credits, it would have been hundreds of millions of dollars in the red.
Hours later, Musk tried to reassure investors by revealing that he planned to dedicate “significantly” less time to his work at the Department of Government Efficiency starting next month, but would still spend “a day or two per week” on the project. This is roughly analogous to announcing that, on account of your house being on fire, you intend to scale back the volume of gasoline you have been pouring the flames at some point in the weeks ahead.
Valiantly trying to spin a 71% drop in profits is presumably not the future Musk envisioned when he endorsed Trump’s candidacy, or spent more than quarter-billion dollars on his campaign, or started appearing as an honored guest at rallies, bouncing around the stage like a child allowed to eat one too many Cadbury eggs on Easter. The second Trump administration was supposed to be a presidency run by billionaires for the benefit of billionaires hoping to climb a few spots in the Forbes rankings. But like many of the CEOs who lined up behind Trump this time around, Musk is learning the hard way that voluntarily associating oneself with an aspiring autocrat who keeps flirting with causing a generational recession can be very bad for business.
Tuesday’s news is only the latest bit of evidence that Musk’s decision to lumber into right-wing politics has had real consequences for some of the companies he runs. Tesla’s stock price is down from an all-time high of $480 per share in December to around $280 as of this writing, and earlier this month, the company announced that its first-quarter deliveries were down 13%. Musk recently sold X to his artificial intelligence company, xAI, at a $33 billion valuation, which for those doing math at home is $11 billion less than he paid for the platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022. In an increasingly competitive electric vehicles market, the stigma associated with buying—or even owning—a Tesla has put the company in a precarious position. In March, Musk and Trump grew desperate enough to stage a live Tesla infomercial at the White House, a stunt that I doubt made people already turned off by his brand any likelier to buy a car from him.
Tesla’s reputational nosedive has been particularly disastrous for Musk, whose estimated net worth has plummeted from close to $500 billion in December to around $300 billion today. Although he remains the world’s wealthiest person by a considerable margin, this is an astonishing amount to lose in such a short period, especially given that it’s been driven in significant part by his terminal inability to stop posting. To give you a sense of scale, the reduction in Musk’s net worth over the past four months is roughly equal to Mark Zuckerberg’s total net worth as you read this sentence.
Musk’s influence is waning, too, both inside and outside the government. His preferred candidate’s blowout loss in Wisconsin’s high-stakes state supreme court election raises uncomfortable questions about his staying power within the Republican Party establishment. DOGE-led efforts to hollow out agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission are getting tied up in court, and even if the Trump administration ultimately prevails, it will be years before the resulting dearth of regulatory oversight makes up for a 12-figure reduction in Musk’s net worth. The infamous “five things” emails that Musk purported to require of all federal workers have apparently fallen by the wayside already; one employee told The Washington Post that they use an AI chatbot to fire off a “word salad” response each week, which is inspiring to me in the same way that Black Lives Matter protesters using leaf blowers to blow tear gas at the cops who fired it was inspiring to me.
Meanwhile, when Musk ventures into spaces that are not populated by crypto scammers, Trump acolytes, or some combination thereof, normal people relish the opportunity to share how they feel about him. Earlier this month, for instance, when Musk livestreamed himself playing video games to demonstrate the capabilities of Starlink’s in-fight WiFi service, users took to the comments to say things like “YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND YOU WILL DIE ALONE,” and “YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL INSECURE AND IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY.”
Mark Zuckerberg, another Big Tech luminary who tried to ingratiate himself to Trump, has to be second-guessing himself, too. During the transition, the Meta CEO paid multiple visits to Mar-a-Lago and quickly rebranded as the sort of manosphere enthusiast who decries the scourges of fact-checking and government censorship of social media platforms. Perhaps that’s why, when Zuckerberg called the FTC in March to try and settle a blockbuster case challenging Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, he reportedly seemed “confident” that Trump would back him up. The FTC’s Trump-appointed chair rejected his offer, though, and the support Zuckerberg expected never materialized. As it turns out, the price of getting the president to make a gigantic antitrust lawsuit go away is greater than fawning over his agenda in the occasional podcast interview.
Many of this country’s largest corporations followed Silicon Valley’s lead after the election, throwing tens of millions of dollars at Trump’s inauguration committee and engaging in a spirited competition to see who could most vociferously disavow their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in public. (Some inauguration donors, including Target, McDonald’s, and Delta, opened their wallets after not doing so for more than a decade, per CNBC.) Even as Trump runs roughshod over both civil liberties and the global economy, few have changed course, holding out hope for the long-promised capitalist utopia of a lighter regulatory burden and a number-go-up stock market. In reality, their share prices are down, their investors are getting restless, and the government is no more sympathetic to their plight than it was three months ago. Thanks to the uncertainty generated by Trump’s on-again, off-again interest in waging harebrained trade wars, a big bounceback does not seem likely anytime soon.
This is not to suggest that the administration’s anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-regulatory agenda will never redound to these companies’ benefit. But the basic bet that so many boardroom types made by trying to curry favor with Trump was that electing a Business President would make their businesses money, too. Instead, the most consistent beneficiary of Donald Trump’s second term has been Donald Trump, who is having the time of his life hawking an eponymous memecoin and TRUMP 2028 hats. Everyone else is stuck fighting for scraps.