When It Comes to the Economy, Does Trump Have Musk’s Pain Tolerance?

The stock market today was full of bad news for both President Trump and Elon Musk.

Markets around the world had their worst day of the year one day after Trump declined to rule out the possibility that his trade policies, including the aggressive tariffs he wants to put on trading partners like Canada and Mexico, could cause a recession. That could be a foreboding political sign for a president who campaigned on improving the economy — not on tanking it.

For Musk, the bad news centered on Tesla: Amid falling sales and growing protests over his role in the White House, the company’s shares slid to their lowest point since before Election Day. By the afternoon, they had fallen more than 15 percent for the day.

Musk is no stranger to white-knuckling his way through adversity. After he paid $44 billion to buy Twitter, the company’s value slid dramatically as advertisers and users fled the platform (it has ticked up somewhat because of his association with Trump). Tesla nearly went bankrupt earlier in its history, and Musk thought SpaceX might go under after a series of failed launches between 2006 and 2008. He considers high-profile mistakes, like failed rocket launches, to be part of the process. Reward requires risk.

“We don’t want to design to eliminate every risk,” he said, according to Walter Isaacson, who wrote a biography about Musk. “Otherwise we will never get anywhere.”

In recent days, Trump has sounded a little bit as if he were trying to assume Musk’s tolerance for pain. He has said that tariffs could cause a “little disturbance” to the economy, and acknowledged the possibility of a “period of transition because what we’re doing is very big.”

To put it in Muskian terms, Trump seemed to be suggesting that he might have to blow up a rocket or two before getting the economy to take off the way he insists it will.