Elon Musk Clashes With Top Trump Adviser as Tariff Tensions Boil Over
Elon Musk called Donald Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks” Tuesday, once again betraying the administration’s deep rift over the president’s disastrous tariffs.
Navarro found himself in hot water with Musk after he called the billionaire bureaucrat a “car assembler” during an appearance on CNBC Monday.
“When it comes to tariffs and trade, we all understand in the White House—and the American people understand—that Elon’s a car manufacturer. But he’s not a car manufacturer. He’s a car assembler, in many cases,” Navarro said.
“If you go to his Texas plant, a good part of the engines that he gets, which in the EV case is the batteries, come from Japan and come from China, the electronics come from Taiwan,” Navarro said.
Navarro explained that Musk’s view on tariffs differed from the White House’s because he wanted to continue to use “cheap foreign parts.”
Musk was furious. “Navarro is truly a moron. What he says here is demonstrably false,” he wrote in a post on X Tuesday.
In a separate post, Musk claimed that “Tesla has the most American-made cars.”
“Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks,” he added.
Musk included a link to an article from 2023 citing a Cars.com study that found Tesla produced the “most American” cars. One extremely important caveat: the study included Canada as part of the U.S., which is, of course, subject to Trump’s “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on all imported vehicles and autoparts.
The more recent version of that same study, from 2024, found that the Tesla Model Y still topped the list, though it noted that the company no longer held “a vice grip at the top of the order thanks in part to changes in this year’s workforce calculations.” Still, the study included Canadian parts content as U.S. parts.
And crucially, Navarro’s not wrong that Musk’s electric vehicle company relies on foreign parts. Tesla’s batteries are manufactured at its Giga Shanghai factory in China in collaboration with Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Even if Tesla wanted to produce its batteries domestically, it would need to source materials such as nickel and lithium from other countries.
Over the weekend, the billionaire attacked Navarro’s defense of Trump’s tariffs on X, and posted a video of economist Milton Friedman that explains the global nature of supply chains, which was interpreted as a criticism of Trump’s sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” on nearly every country.
Navarro replied by saying Musk “doesn’t understand” trade.
“The thing that’s, I think, important about Elon to understand, he sells cars. That’s what he does,” he said during an interview on Fox Business Monday. “He’s simply protecting his own interests, as any businessperson would do.”
“He’s got X, he’s got a big microphone, we don’t mind him saying whatever he wants,” Navarro added—though he may come to regret that sentiment.