The Core Issue Between Elon Musk & Trump Tariff Leader Peter Navarro

Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and/or follow us on Google News!

---

Last Updated on: 9th April 2025, 12:58 pm

According to Elon Musk, a top economic advisor and key “tariff whisperer” of Donald Trump, who he helped to elect, is “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

A little bit of a rift has surfaced between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Donald Trump tariff leader Peter Navarro, aka Ron Vara (I’ll get to that toward the end if you’re not familiar with that issue).

Navarro is the key “tariff whisperer” when it comes to Donald Trump’s tariff policies. He was there in the first administration, but got blocked and shuffled away by other advisors who warned that his tariff ideas would crash the US economy, crush American households, and effectively make the US much poorer. However, Trump has had an obsession with tariffs since the 1980s, or even earlier, and Navarro was there by his side again during the 2024 campaign and early in his second term as president.

This week, Trump’s big rollout of tariffs hit, and countries around the world have been responding. First of all, just covering that initial part, economists and others have repeatedly explained that these tariffs are effectively a tax on US consumers. This is how it works:

• New rules require that companies important goods from other countries, including components of goods they make here in the USA, pay a tariff to the US government on those.
• The importing company is not going to slash its profits, of course, and will simply add those extra costs into the prices of the goods they sell — raising prices for US consumers.
• We all pay more for anything from coffee to shoes to food to cars.

Simple, right? Unfortunately, it’s still too complicated for Trump and team to understand.

Well, Elon Musk is not a fan of the tariffs. While he was happy to close down important programs and agencies like USAID, fire critical IRS employees and EPA employees and DOE employees and FAA employees (etc., etc.), and hack up the federal government — because those things didn’t obviously harm his companies (and, actually, ended some investigations into his companies) — he knows that tariffs on components of the cars, solar panels, and batteries he sells at Tesla are going to cost more, which will lead to Tesla raising prices, which will lead to fewer people buying Tesla’s products. Simple, eh?

Now, on to the recent trash talking between Musk and Navarro.

So, first of all, Navarro called Tesla a “car assembler” rather than a “car manufacturer.”

In response, Elon Musk said Navarro is “truly a moron.”

Here’s more of a summary from Elon Musk’s X/Grok on the spat:

In a followup tweet showing that Tesla’s cars are the “most American-made cars” in the country, Musk also said that “Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.”

In the tweet directly above, Musk also brings “Ron Vara” into the chat. If you haven’t caught the news on this, Peter Navarro has been referencing tariff expert Ron Vara for years to back up his claims about tariffs. As it turns out, Ron Vara is just Peter Navarro — twist the letters around in “Navarro” and you can get “Ron Vara.” Clever, right? Well … don’t answer that. Here’s a video on that if you want more:

So, how will Trump and his team resolve this fight between Musk and Navarro/Vara? By saying “boys will be boys” and doing nothing. Ah … too bad we don’t have proper men running this country, just overgrown boys.

To the top, though, what is the core issue between Elon Musk and Peter Navarro? Is it a dispute about what Tesla actually is? No, it’s the matter of whether a massive tariff war is good for the USA. Musk is clearly in the camp that it’s stupid and harmful. (Perhaps he should have thought more about that before helping to get Trump elected based on some beef about transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.) Navarro — mostly on an island of his own in the economic world — thinks tariffs will lead to massive reindustrialization and job growth in the United States, and way down the line, a better economy. This viewpoint is vastly different and disconnected from the economic globalization of the last several decades. Musk’s opinion is that this will just raise costs for companies and consumers.

In terms of Trump policies, Navarro is winning this one. Musk is out in the cold and his opinion doesn’t matter on tariffs, it seems. In general, it seems to be that Trump’s approach is “who is useful to me for doing the most damage to the country?” When the task at hand was destroying the federal government, putting tens of thousands of useful employees out of work, and hollowing out the halls of US democracy, Elon Musk was the man! Now that the focus is taxing the American public to a degree never seen before (literally), Musk is out and Navarro is in.

If only someone could have foreseen all of this….

By the way, as far as bringing blue collar jobs, manufacturing, critical mineral mining and refining, and economic growth back to the United States, Joe Biden and Democrats were doing that very effectively through incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA stimulated to building of numerous battery factories, other tech factories, and mineral mining and refining projects — all without slapping humongous tariffs/taxes on American consumers! Also, that approach to reindustrialization didn’t lead to giant reciprocal tariffs on US exports, the world turning away from the US much more, and a potential fiscal crisis with US debt and the value of the dollar. But those are all more complicated topics for a different article.

Also, yes, Biden did keep or put some tariffs on some products. While there was plenty of debate about whether that was good or bad, it was at least a much more pointed, narrow approach to using tariffs than Trump is implementing. Heck, Trump has even put tariffs on two uninhabited islands, which just goes to show how much research and analysis they are putting into these tariff policies.