In 2017, Kellyanne Conway, then a senior counselor to President Donald Trump, was reprimanded by her own party when she told Fox News viewers to go out and “buy Ivanka’s stuff.” The comment, a response to Nordstrom dropping Ivanka Trump’s products from their stores, was treated as a gross ethics violation by a White House official. Fast forward to Trump’s second term, and the first family is profiting off of the presidency in increasingly novel and flagrant ways, while the administration is doing all it can to boost the bottom line of Trump’s most important financial backer: Elon Musk.
Musk’s tenure as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is already a massive ethical quagmire given that the billionaire has not separated himself from his multiple companies and federal contracts. As the nationwide backlash to DOGE’s ransacking of agencies and public services intensifies, Musk’s companies are paying the price — literally. Tesla’s stock price has tumbled in recent weeks, leading Trump and other high-level officials to make a public show of pumping up Musk’s flagship company.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, for example, appeared on Fox News Wednesday night and urged viewers to purchase Tesla’s struggling stock. “I think if you want to learn something on this show tonight: buy Tesla,” he said.
“It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again,” Lutnik added. “When people understand the things he’s building, the robots he’s building, the technology he’s building, people are going to be dreaming of today … and thinking ‘gosh, I should have bought Elon Musk’s stock.”
Tesla’s stock continued to tumble despite Lutnik’s appearance on Fox News. It may continue to do so considering the company is now recalling 46,000 Cybertrucks built between November 2023 and February 27 of this year — nearly every Cybertruck in the United States — to fix an exterior panel in danger of detaching.
The recall filed with the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday is not the first time Tesla has had to issue a Cybertruck recall.
Earlier this month, as Tesla’s stock valuation began its southern journey, Musk began feverishly promoting fan content on his social media. Within days, Trump hosted an improvised Tesla dealership on the South Lawn of the White House where he made a show of purchasing a Model S. Ahead of the staged purchase, Trump had accused “radical left lunatics” of “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla.
On Wednesday afternoon, Fox News bashed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for joking during a recent event that these days he boosts his mood by looking at Tesla’s declining stock valuation. “Tim Walz has put the Tesla stock on his phone. He says he looks at it and takes glee when he drops,” former Trump Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told viewers. “You are taking glee in a company dropping […] There are 80,000 people employed by Tesla and you take glee in that?” McEnany continued.
In the past few weeks, Musk has been responsible for tens of thousands of job losses throughout the federal government, the gutting of life saving aid programs both domestically and abroad, and the solidification of plutocracy as the governing law of the land. But god forbid Musk’s own companies experience the consequences of his actions.
Trump, Lutnik, and the rest of the Trump administration wants to make sure the world’s richest man doesn’t suffer financial consequences as a result of his destruction of the government. Their efforts may not be legal, and they certainly aren’t ethical, but these things are of little concern to the new Trump administration. Musk is openly attempting to pilfer federal contracts for his companies, mutilating regulatory bodies that oversee his work, and is himself straddling a dubious legal line by ransacking government agencies without having been elected and without the approval of Congress.
As boycotts and protests against Musk’s companies escalate in size, scale, and aggression, real questions arise as to if and how Tesla can separate itself from the government antics of its CEO. Its tumbling stock price seems to indicate it may not be possible.
