Bulwark Takes - Elon's Worst Day Ever…Just Got Worse

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Andrew Egger and Ben Parker talk Elon’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day after an embarrassing loss for Republicans in Wisconsin, his rumored impending exit from the the White House, and clear messages from Tesla stocks.

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one pound increments as you get stronger, so you're always challenged. Tonal lets you choose from a variety of expert-led workouts, from strength to aero hit to yoga and mobility to keep you coming back for more. For a limited time, go to tonal.com to get $500 off your tonal purchase, plus a free four-year warranty. That's tonal.com for $500 off, plus a free four-year warranty. Tonal.com. Hi, everybody. Ben Parker from The Bulwark here with my colleague, Andrew Egger. You know, our boss sometimes says that the sweetest thing in life is to watch bad things happen to bad people. So we're just going to take a few minutes and talk about Elon Musk's no good, horrible,

terrible, very bad day or whatever it's supposed to be. You got all the adjectives right. They just run in the right order. Yeah, it's been 24 hours for the big guy, the vice big guy, Elon Musk, poured an insane amount of money and a lot of time and a lot of ketamine fueled attention into last night's state supreme court race in wisconsin a race which the republican candidate uh went on to lose by 10 points to the chagrin of mr musk i've had a lot of points it's not the most points you can lose a race by but it's a good amount it's a landslide right they usually say 10 points is a landslide. Is that what they say? Yeah, I think they say that. We can say that.

I think it's like a borderline quasi-landslide. It's a big win. It's a big win. Wisconsin's a swing state. Donald Trump won Wisconsin last year. Big fat off-year election win, but still a big fat win for the Democrat in that state. The hits keep coming. What else has Elon been in the news about today?

Yeah, so I will just mention that it did seem that for a guy who posts on Twitter like a hundred times a day, sorry, X, like a hundred times a day, he did go pretty quiet for a few hours yesterday evening as the results were coming in. And then you found it today. He found some like voter ID referendum that also passed in Wisconsin. And after dumping millions and millions of dollars into the Supreme Court race and giving out million dollar checks to like Republican operatives who like weren't randos, but actually were like the head of the college Republicans or whatever it was in Wisconsin. He finds this one little voter ID referendum. He goes, oh, this is the thing that really matters. Right, right. Yeah, that was pretty good. You found this silver lining in the thing. No, I mean, it was a big fat political face plant for Elon Musk, who has been, you know, kind of seeing himself as master of the universe type guy, you know, since the election, since before the election. Take over, Elon, yes, take over.

I really do think, you know, last year's presidential election went to his head in a really significant way where it was like, we have, you know, this, this moral mandate from the people to do essentially anything we want to do because, you know, Donald Trump's the people's president and I'm kind of his, his vizier in a lot of ways. And, and I think this, I think this result has come as a pretty significant shock to him. It has come. So look, okay, the next thing we need to talk about is and isn't related to this, right? Because there's a Politico headline just out a couple of hours ago this morning, essentially saying that Donald Trump is now

telling his allies that Musk's time in the White House is going to be wrapping up. Now, some of this is procedural. Musk is technically a special government employee, an outside guy brought in, you know, to assist in an official capacity for a period of 130 days. And I guess it's renewable. You know, there's ways you can kind of get around it. And Trump had, for quite some time, Trump and Trump allies had been sort of suggesting, no, Elon's here to stay. Like, this is his technical role right now, this 130-day window. But, like, he's a big part of the team. He's going to be a big part of the team.

That's the way it's going to be. Not so much now, not so much now. So it's the timing of this is very interesting that Trump has seemingly soured on Musk. Musk has been lagging Trump in the polls by a lot for a while. Like this, that's not a new thing. But this, it almost seems so serendipitous that the timing of that story would drop right after this sort of large and embarrassing electoral defeat for a cause that Musk had championed. I don't know. What do you make of that? Yeah. No, you mentioned the 2024 election and how much it went to Musk's head. And I think he may not realize exactly how late in the game he got in on that. Trump started running for reelection before he left the White House. We now know this from all

the books that have been written, that he was already planning at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, for his eventual comeback. He spent years and years getting ready for that 2024 election. And Musk came in, well, it was only late in the summer. He started pouring in money, appearing with Trump at rallies, especially in Pennsylvania. So, you know, there's this, we'll call it a five-year process of Trump getting reelected. And Musk came in for the last few months and was like, oh, I'm running the show now, which is classic Elon Musk behavior. And there's no question that he played an extremely important role. I mean, like Trump needed that money real bad. You know, he was burning through it because he was

relatively parsimoniously using campaign money or his super PAC money to pay all his legal bills and things like that. I mean, he was kind of in the hole for a while there. Musk came in and backfilled a lot of that. And not only that, but he also helped bring in, he was kind of a big part of that, that kind of late campaign redirection away from sort of like traditional Republicans or traditional MAGA Republicans, traditional MAGA Republicans, long standing MAGA Republican base, and bringing in, you know, like Joe Rogan people. Yeah, I think that's right. The disaffected youths. I mean, Musk was a part of that. But Musk is not somebody who speaks to the heart of like the median current Republican voter in the same way that Donald Trump does. His range is much smaller. His appeal is much more limited to a much more idiosyncratic crew. And so I think when he goes out and kind

of freelances on a project like this,, Trump was Trump was posting about this election, too. But this was like a Musk project. And it did not it did not go at all the way he hoped. Yeah. So now Musk is in hot water with the White House. And Trump is apparently saying to his inner circle, oh, this guy's out. Now, look, we've seen Trump administrations before. Sometimes he sours on people and they stick around or whatever.

So we'll see what happens. But that wasn't the only piece of bad news he got just this morning. Because also we got Tesla's quarter one report, which shows that this is from the Wall Street Journal. The global vehicle deliveries, the number of actual cars they gave to actual customers is down 13% in quarter one of 2025. Global vehicle deliveries down 13% in quarter one of 2025. Global vehicle delivery is down 13%. This is already a company that was way overvalued compared to something like Ford or GM or Toyota, considering the number of cars they actually delivered

and the numbers are plummeting. Seems probably like because demand is drying up because a lot of people, especially not in the U.S., seem to kind of hate Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, these numbers are pretty astonishing. I mean, it's their it's their their worst sales quarter ever in percentages. Right. I mean, like like a like kind of blaring red flag alarm. You know, there's trouble happening at Tesla. What's really funny about this is their stock price is on balance up today. It's up today. That's right. So far. Because the two pieces of, yeah, right. So far, when we're taping this, the two pieces of news are, wow, horrible sales numbers for Tesla. But also, maybe he's leaving the White House. Maybe

this long process of Elon Musk bludgeoning the existing Tesla brand in the hearts and minds of its relatively liberal, relatively affluent, relatively environmentally minded consumer base. Maybe that is finally coming to an end. Maybe the bleeding will stop. And so you see investors say, oh, well, maybe he's going to reorient. Maybe we can finally put this whole episode behind us as a brand for Tesla. We'll see. I mean, I kind of feel like this moment is going to sort of remain lodged in the minds of a lot of people. But yeah, it's just very strange. I mean, like just literally just a couple of weeks ago that Elon really did look like the Terminator just in terms of the security of his perch at the White House. If you roll the clock

back a few weeks, you weeks, Trump was looking to Elon rather than to his own cabinet secretaries for a lot of these things. Elon's doge guys were kind of like overruling guidance from cabinet secretaries and cabinet secretaries were plainly not pleased about this, like at their own agencies. But Trump would give Elon the vote of confidence over and over again. And that did start to shift already a couple of weeks ago. There was a bit of a scuffle between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon, where Trump ultimately came down and said, yeah, it's the secretaries. It's the people who are constitutionally appointed to run these agencies that are going to run these agencies.

Elon, your advisory. And it was Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, right, who were the first ones to, what was it, the five bullet points thing, to say no, back to your point about, you know, the original maggots, the old school maggots. It was the old school maggots teaming up against the new school maggots. But even then, even then, I mean, like,

Musk did have one hook really lodged in Trump's psyche, which is that Trump just loves the idea of this, like like lossless government efficiency that Elon keeps promising to deliver that like, we're just going to cut like a trillion dollars out of the federal deficit for free. And nobody's going to even notice they're gone because all this stuff is waste, fraud and abuse. I'm going to find it. You're going to get the credit. And Trump's like, great, sign me up. That sounds awesome. Because if you do that, then I don't have to cut the actual things that we spend money on to balance the budget, like, you know, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and

the defense budget and things like that. It was always kind of totally fraudulent. I mean, kind of totally fraudulent. It was always a completely insane way to talk about cutting the government. But that was what Elon pitched to Trump. And Trump was like, well, if you can do that for me, you know, you're my golden goose. So, I mean, I do think some of this was kind of inevitable. We're just running into some sort of material realities here because everything that they cut does have a cost and they feel these costs deeply now because they get reported on publicly and they have to undo some of them in kind of this slipshod haphazard way. And that's why you see him so much less popular than Donald Trump in the polls these days. But again, like the speed of the dissent relative to how stable and entrenched in there he looked

a couple of weeks ago has been pretty fascinating. Yeah. So I do think, you know, we mentioned Tesla stocks so far today are up on the news that maybe Musk will be going back to just being a businessman rather than being co-president. But it's still worth mentioning, especially considering a lot of Musk's personal fortune is tied up in Tesla stock, that we are a quarter of the way through the year and Tesla stock is down 25% year to date. It has lost one quarter of its value. And maybe that's because they're not delivering cars to people, but maybe that's because this guy's personal brand has just so soured people on the product

he's selling. And also they're about electric cars and everything. But have you ever seen someone just blow up that much value at one time just by being a jerk in public? And that's the difficulty of it, right? Is that so much of the value of the company was that brand. I mean, this was a company that was enormously, enormously overinflated stock price relative to actual income, relative to actual number of cars sold, all of that. A lot of that was predicated on the idea that they were going to be this cutting edge that was going to have a lion's share of the electric car market as the US moves more and more toward that market. And so it was all kind of forward-looking in that way. But what that means is that when you deal yourself this kind of

enormous self-dealt wound, it has an outsized effect on that too, because you can't fall back on this just like nuts and bolts, like this really strong and healthy current business that you already have, because that's not the way it works. The whole point of the value of Tesla is it's this forward looking thing. It's going to scale into the thing that is worth as much as it's worth on paper. And so it's just, I mean, like we said, the price is up briefly today. That may be a trend. You never know. Maybe he actually does kind of reinvent himself again. But it's also very possible that a lot of that damage is baked in.

And a small change to current trajectory has a huge impact on kind of the future parabolic arc of this thing. So we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know exactly how it's going to work. But yeah, the weirdest thing about this to me, let me just say this one more thing. The weirdest thing is like, you would think you have these two things, right? You have Elon Musk and his business empire, you have Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. And you would think that like, if you mix these two things together, you know, one's more popular than the other, one might, you know, drag the other down, one might, you know, boost the other up. But what is bizarre is that Elon's work in the government has made both

of them less popular. It's made Tesla less popular and his pre-existing holdings less popular, more toxic, worth less money. And it has now proven a drag on the federal government. It's like this bizarre situation where the clusterfuck is greater than the sum of its parts. I mean, it's really kind of striking. I mean, it's a bad it's, it's really kind of, kind of striking. I mean, like it's a bad movie on, it kind of seems like in a lot of ways. Uh, no argument. Well,

there you go. Uh, is that everything? Are we going to wrap it and take us out then? Yeah. So, you know, this is it.

We have a lot of bad news that we cover all the time. So, you know, if you watch the channel all the time, you know, it's mostly doom and gloom, but every now and again, we get to enjoy bad things happening to bad people.

A little bit of good news, a little bit of accountability in the world, a little bit of justice. Still the richest man in the world. Yeah, listen, right. We're trying to enjoy it.