Elon Musk shared a clip of the late free trade economist Milton Friedman on Monday in a veiled shot at President Donald Trump and his market-tanking tariff crusade.
The Tesla CEO, whose company has lost over $100 billion in market cap since last week’s “Liberation Day” duties were rolled out, shared the clip on X without any additional comment.
In it, Friedman breaks down how a pencil is made from materials and labor across the globe: wood from the Pacific Northwest, rubber from Malaysia, lead from South America—not even accounting for shipping and manufacturing.
“Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil,” he says. “People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met. When you go down the store and buy this pencil, you are, in effect, trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people.”
This, Friedman explains, is an elementary example of why “the operation of the free market is so essential, not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.”
Without free trade, Friedman says, “not a single person in the world” could make a pencil.
Friedman died in 2006 at age 94. His economic policies helped shape the second half of the 20th century, and his disdain for tariffs goes way back.
“We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect; it protects the consumer very well against one thing. It protects the consumer against low prices,” he said in a speech at Kansas State University in 1978.
Musk has quietly expressed that, unlike seemingly every other issue of MAGA 2.0, he does not fully back the president’s placing a minimum of a 10 percent import duty on nearly every country in the world.
Over the weekend, Musk called for European nations and the U.S. to move toward a “zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone.” Such a statement put him at odds with Trump’s tariff guru, Peter Navarro, who said in a Fox News segment that the world’s richest man is a car salesman who is not an economics expert.
“Look, Elon, when he’s in his DOGE lane, he’s great,” Navarro said Sunday, adding that “Elon sells cars.”
Tesla manufactures its electric vehicles in the U.S. but is reliant on parts from around the world to do so, Navarro said, suggesting Musk’s opposition to tariffs might be to protect his own pockets.
Musk fired the first shot in the war of words, however. He posted to X that Navarro, who went to prison for defying Congress in the wake of Jan. 6, was more ego than brains who “ain’t built sh-t” and whose Harvard economics PhD is “a bad thing.”
The market’s reaction to tariffs has the U.S. on the verge of a recession, experts warn.
The S&P 500—as of opening Monday—had not dropped so far in a three-day period since 1987 and the infamous “Black Monday” during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, reported Bloomberg.
Such a dip, paired with Trump insisting his tariffs are here to stay, has Goldman Sachs economists estimating there is a 45 percent chance of an economic recession this year—up from 20 percent on April 1. J.P. Morgan advisers are even less optimistic. Reuters reported that, as of Monday, they put the odds of a global recession at 60 percent.
