Has Elon Musk Gotten Anything Out of Trump?

Why is it so hard to be corrupt?

Corruption should be easy if you’re the richest man in the world. It should be even easier if you’re buddied up with the sitting US president and he’s given you a position in his White House. Growing your fortune from this position should be one of the easiest tasks there is. So why hasn't Elon Musk gotten much out of it?

Currently, the central pillar of Elon’s wealth, Tesla stock, is down to around its pre election price (at time of writing). This is part of an over 40% drop in the stock’s value since its December, 2024 height. Meanwhile, Elon has taken his job in the administration incredibly seriously and put his face on many of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies. This would be all well and good if Elon was going to push through a very pro business agenda, and in some ways he has. But for every slash to regulation that investors dislike, there are many more questionable decisions.

Part of it is Elon’s genuine political commitment to a right wing project. But there’s also the businessman side of Elon that wants to use his position to further his companies, which we saw in his continued insistence on shoving the Tesla brand into every possible aspect of his work. But why hasn’t this garnered huge returns in stock prices? I think this comes from a profound misunderstanding by Elon of what was holding his company back and what the government could do to remove those constraints.

Tesla is a company that has mostly thrived under Democratic presidents. The Obama Administration granted billions in tax credits for electric vehicles and by the time he left office in 2017, the company’s value had increased by over 1000%. Trump’s first two years actually saw stagnation for Tesla’s stock price, before a meteoric rise that occurred across 2020 during the zero interest rate period. This was continued into 2021 and held strong through most of 2022 before another drop that coincided with the Twitter purchase. Although personally shunned by Biden, the administration’s policies to bring back domestic manufacturing and invest in green energy was not hostile to Tesla and gave investors many reasons to feel confident.

Trump’s policies aren’t actually looking amazing for Tesla. I want to credit Max Chafkin (as I often do) for making the observation that got me thinking about this on a recent episode of his podcast, Elon Inc. Chafkin pointed out that Trump and allied Republicans have been getting hundreds of millions in Super PAC money from the Elon post election. While Trump has given Tesla endorsements that reek so badly of favoritism it could rub off, he hasn’t taken the kinds of risks for Elon that Elon has taken for Trump.

Despite Elon’s stardom among Republican voters, most of those voters are not going to buy a Tesla. The kind of people that have practical reasons to purchase an electric vehicle (upper middle class, climate conscious city dwellers) are not the people Elon appeals to. The Cybertruck is unable to usurp the market and cultural dominance of the F-150 among Republican voters. There’s probably some kind of beautiful and biting metaphor to be made about how the Cybertruck has about as much storage space as the average F-150 actually needs, but its glaring flaws in that department make it a non-option for so many truck buyers.

I don’t know what exactly Trump could do at this point to bail Elon out, even if he really wanted to. Obviously it’s a lot less likely that federal prosecutors are going to go after Tesla and SpaceX now, but that was never a massive concern the way it was for the other industries Trump rode to the White House, (crypto, venture capital, AI). It remains to be seen what exactly Elon is going to do to turn this situation around, or if it might even just resolve itself. But so far, he hasn't recouped the losses incurred by his new job.