Summary
Elon Musk gave Donald Trump a scripted sales pitch during a White House event where Trump inspected Teslas.
Photographers captured Trump holding notes with phrases like “SAFEST car” and “affordable.” The stunt followed a 15% drop in Tesla’s stock, linked to backlash over Musk’s involvement in DOGE.
Trump defended Musk on Truth Social, blaming the decline on a “Radical Left” boycott.
Meanwhile, Musk’s other ventures, including X and SpaceX, are struggling with outages and test failures.
And it was related to a policy initiative, and he didn’t have price notes and feature lists.
“Business that benefits from policy initiative let’s president use their stuff for a photo op during pitch tour” has a very different connotation than “president tries to sell people the car of his backer from the Whitehouse lawn”.