What The Hell America!

DONALD TRUMP SAYS HIS PUSH to cut off federal support for electric vehicles was a big impetus for Elon Musk’s dramatic turn against him this week.

Whether that’s really true is anybody’s guess.

On the one hand, Trump’s determination to end federal support of EVs couldn’t have taken Musk by surprise. “Ending the EV mandate” has been a Trump rallying cry since before he officially started running for president again. The obvious threat that posed to Tesla—which Musk runs, and which sells more EVs in the United States than any other company—didn’t stop him from endorsing Trump, or from spending more than $250 million to help elect him.

In fact, when Tesla investors on an earnings call last summer asked about Trump’s hostility to EVs, Musk said “long term, it probably actually helps” the company, as eliminating subsidies and incentives would put domestic competitors like Ford and GM at a competitive disadvantage.

But that was a year ago.

Now ending federal EV support isn’t just a slogan, it’s a set of real policy changes in the works, including provisions in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that the House passed last month and the Senate is debating now. That legislation would eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tax credits to support EV production and purchases that Joe Biden and the Democrats put in place back in 2022.

And far from helping the company, Tesla stands to lose big. More than a billion dollars in revenue a year is at risk if those tax credits go away, J.P. Morgan projects. The timing couldn’t be worse, because Tesla sales have been plummeting, thanks in no small part to the way Musk’s embrace of Trump has tarnished the brand.

So while it doesn’t take a ton of imagination to come up with alternative explanations for Musk’s pique—Trump nixing his choice for NASA leader? assumptions that administration officials dished to the New York Times about his personal life?—it’s hard not to believe that Trump’s war on EVs is somewhere on Musk’s list of grievances.

But you don’t have to like Musk, or approve of what he’s done in (and to) government, to think he might have a point about EV subsidies. Here’s why.