Repricing Elon Musk and his empire
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Tesla, Musk's only publicly traded face, lost more than $150 billion in value on Thursday. Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Apu Gomes/Getty Images
Just a few months ago, investors were willing to massively increase the valuations of Elon Musk's companies, in part because of his proximity to Donald Trump and the centers of Washington power. That ended yesterday.
Why it matters: Markets and private investors attributed literally hundreds of billions of dollars of value to the idea that Musk's privileged access would flow to the success of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and the like.
- Investors will now potentially have to reprice a Musk empire at odds with Trump as opposed to at his side.
What they're saying: "The quickly deteriorating friendship and now 'major beef' between Musk and Trump is jaw dropping and a shock to the market and putting major fear for Tesla investors on what is ahead," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, one of Wall Street's most outspoken Tesla bulls, wrote as the feud erupted yesterday.
By the numbers: Tesla, Musk's only publicly traded face, lost more than $150 billion in value yesterday. Musk himself personally lost almost $20 billion. (The stock is indicated to open sharply higher today, though, after both men took the temperature down overnight.) But that's just part of the puzzle.
- Only last December, a secondary share sale valued SpaceX at $350 billion, CNBC reported, $140 billion more than it was worth six months before.
- More recently, Musk's technology companies Neuralink and xAI were out raising money at lofty valuations as well.
- Roll up Tesla, SpaceX (including Starlink), xAI (including X), Neuralink and the Boring Company, and until a few days ago, you were nearing $2 trillion in valuations.
Between the lines: It's impossible to say for certain those businesses would have been worth the same, or more, or less, if Musk's relationship with the president had been different, or never existed at all.
- But the association clearly didn't hurt.
That's on top of billions of dollars in contracts that Musk's companies have with the White House, which Trump directly threatened on Thursday.
- Musk responded to Trump's threat by suggesting he would decommission NASA's SpaceX Dragon spacecraft — he later walked that back, but that contract alone is worth about $5 billion.
Reality check: Musk's companies were worth a lot of money well before he endorsed Trump in July 2024.
- Tesla had traded like a meme stock, rather than a car company, for years. And the valuation of SpaceX had already risen 20% in six months prior to the political endorsement.
- Private markets are also infinitely less volatile than the stock market, so it's not as though any portfolio changes are imminent for his companies aside from Tesla. Those investors' problems are more long-term.
The bottom line: There was Musk before Trump, and there was Musk during Trump. Now investors have to figure out what Musk after Trump is worth.
