Elon Musk took shots at Trump administration trade adviser Peter Navarro for defending the tariff strategy that led to the worst week for US stocks since COVID.
Navarro has been a regular on the airwaves touting the tariffs which he insisted will bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States, despite experts saying otherwise.
Musk, who has lost nearly $18 billion just on his Tesla stock alone, in the two-day crash was not impressed with Navarro.
When an X user defended Navarro’s expertise on trade, citing his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, Musk wrote, “A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing. Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem.”
When another user stepped in to defend Navarro saying he is “100% correct” on trade, Musk replied “He ain’t built shit.”
On Wednesday, Trump announced ‘reciprocal’ baseline tariffs of 10% on most US trading partners and more targeted tariffs on many countries, including 34% on China, 20% on the European Union, 46% on Vietnam and 32% on Taiwan.
In the clip Musk was responding to, Navarro was on CNN arguing that Trump is “trying to do under the principle that the president wants to charge those countries what they charge us.”
However, several experts were left scratching their heads trying to understand how Trump came up with tariff rates.
“There does not appear to have been any tariffs used in the calculation of the rate,” said Mike O’Rourke, chief marketing strategist at Jones Trading, in a note to investors, according to CNN. “The Trump administration is specifically targeting nations with large trade surpluses with the United States relative to their exports to the United States.”
