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SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk sparred on social media Tuesday with White House Senior Counselor Peter Navarro, after Navarro said in an interview Monday that Tesla was a car “assembler” rather than a manufacturer.
“Tesla has the most American-made cars. Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks,” Musk said in an X post on Tuesday.
“Navarro is truly a moron,” Musk said in a separate post. “What he says here is demonstrably false.”
Both Navarro and Musk are two of Trump’s closest advisors, and Navarro previously served in Trump’s first administration as the director of the White House National Trade Council and the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
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Musk is currently spearheading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to curb government waste and spending as a “special government employee.”
The executive or legislative branches are permitted to take on temporary employees to address short-term projects for up to 130 days in a single 365-day period, which will expire at the end of May for Musk.
The tension between the two advisors comes days after the Trump administration unveiled a host of tariffs Wednesday. The policy sets out a baseline duty of 10% on all imports to the U.S., in addition to customized tariffs for countries that have higher tariffs in place on American goods.
Meanwhile, Musk is an advocate for free-trade policies.
Navarro told CNBC in an interview Monday that Musk is a “car person” who wants “cheap, foreign parts.”
“When it comes to tariffs and trade, we all understand in the White House, and the American people understand, that Elon is a car manufacturer, but he’s not a car manufacturer,” Navarro said. “He’s a car assembler.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt brushed off the disagreement as a sign of the administration’s transparency.
“Whatever,” Leavitt said, according to CNBC. “We are the most transparent administration in history, expressing our disagreements in public.”
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The White House referred Fox News Digital to Leavitt’s comment to CNBC when asked to weigh in on the matter.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the episode exposed the “chaos” within the Trump administration.
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“The chaos within the Trump administration was shown a few minutes ago when Elon Musk called Peter Navarro, the chief architect of these tariffs, a moron,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “That’s Musk’s word. He called him a moron. Their plan is so crazy, so controversial, that this administration cannot get its act together with them calling names about each other to against one one another about this tariff plan.”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
