Elon Musk is running his businesses “with great difficulty” while working with the Trump administration, the Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO said on Monday in an interview with Fox Business.

Tesla’s (TSLA.O), opens new tab shares slumped 15% to $222.15, weighing heavily on the Nasdaq (.IXIC), opens new tab, which tumbled 4% on fears that the Trump administration’s tariffs against major U.S. trading partners could throw the country into a recession.

The decline in Tesla’s market capitalization on Monday eclipsed the $86 billion combined stock market value of Ford Motor (F.N), opens new tab and General Motors (GM.N), opens new tab.

Monday’s losses evaporated the last of a Tesla rally late last year that nearly doubled its stock following the November 5 election of U.S. President Donald Trump. That surge was fueled by optimism that Tesla would benefit from Musk’s close relationship with Trump.

Investors in Tesla have been concerned that Musk’s work leading the Department of Government Efficiency to slash government expenditure was distracting him from running his companies, which include Tesla, SpaceX, X and xAI.

Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow asked him in an interview on Monday about the pressure. “I mean, how are you running your other businesses?” Kudlow asked. “With great difficulty,” Musk replied, with a sigh.

After the recent slump in Tesla’s shares, the stock has continued to trade at multiples far higher than other automakers, with supporters betting on Musk’s promises to deliver self-driving taxis and humanoid robots.

More recently, Musk’s role in sweeping cuts to the federal workforce at the behest of Trump has led to “Tesla Takedown” protests in the U.S. against the automaker, while Tesla’s sales in Europe have slumped. On Sunday, dozens of demonstrators gathered at the Tesla showroom in Lisbon to protest against Musk, with some holding signs reading “Boycott Tesla”.

“The public eye seems to be coalescing around what he’s doing for the federal government. So if you’re a shareholder, you can’t help but wonder if that’s not detracting from what he should be doing for the publicly traded company that he’s running,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth.

Musk’s support for far-right parties in Europe appears to be coming at a price for Tesla sales there. Tesla’s car sales in Europe tumbled 45% in January from a year earlier, while overall EV sales jumped over 37%, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association.

It is difficult to determine how much Musk’s political activities are factoring into Tesla’s vehicle sales, which last year declined on an annual basis for the first time.

Analysts point to other factors in the global EV market, including increased competition from Chinese brands and legacy automakers such as GM.

Musk’s X Stocks Deep Down $18 Billion as X Losing On His Personal Net Worth

Elon Musk took two significant financial blows on Monday, with stocks in Tesla slumping dramatically to a lower price than before Donald Trump’s November election victory and X suffering a major outage.

Tesla shares fell by more than 14 per cent by mid-day after UBS cut its forecast for the automaker’s first-quarter deliveries, and 15.43 per cent by the time the markets closed, making it Tesla’s worst day since September 2020.

Individual shares were down by more than $40, with journalist Yashar Ali noting that for every $10 the stock was down, Musk’s net worth declined by around $4.7 billion – totaling $18.8 billion.

Stock in the EV manufacturer is down more than 51 per cent from its all-time high, which was set in December. Traders predicted the tech entrepreneur’s close ties with the president would help with regulation.

However, Musk’s increasingly political social media posts, as well as his association with the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, are seemingly affecting Tesla’s brand in the U.S. and especially Europe.

Across the U.S. Tesla facilities and individual owners have reported seeing an increase in vandalism and arson attempts against the vehicles. Repeated incidents occurred at a Tesla store and service center in Loveland, Colorado, the most recent of which occurred on Friday, police told CNBC.

In addition, on Monday, X was hit with severe outages, with tens of thousands of users reporting their servers down, according to tracking site Downdetector.com.

The Tesla stock dive comes as part of a wider downward trend of losses tied to concerns about Trump’s economic policies, with the tech-centric Nasdaq Composite dropping more than 3 per cent.

According to Forbes, Musk’s net worth has dropped by a whopping $139.4 billion compared to his record $464 billion set in December – now sitting at just $324.6 billion.

As Tesla’s largest shareholder, Musk is still worth roughly $115 billion more than any other person on Earth, according to the outlet, though his net worth fell by $18 billion Monday amid the stock drop.

On Friday, Tesla completed its seventh straight week of losses – the company’s longest negative streak since debuting on the Nasdaq in 2010. The stock has fallen every week since Musk went to Washington to take up the self-styled role of “First Buddy.”

SpaceX Starting To Fail Before Launches

What’s behind the recent string of failures and delays at SpaceX?

It has been an uncharacteristically messy start to the year for the world’s leading spaceflight company, SpaceX.

Let’s start with the company’s most recent delay. The latest launch date for a NASA mission to survey the sky and better understand the early evolution of the Universe comes Monday night. The launch window for this SPHEREx mission opened on February 28, but a series of problems with integrating the rocket and payloads have delayed the mission nearly two weeks.

Then there are the Falcon 9 first stage issues. Last week, a Falcon 9 rocket launched nearly two dozen Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit. However, one of the rocket’s nine engines suffered a fuel leak during ascent. Due to a lack of oxygen in the thinning atmosphere, the fuel leak did not preclude the satellites from reaching orbit. But when the first stage returned to Earth, it caught fire after landing on a droneship, toppling over. This followed a similar issue in August, when there was a fire in the engine compartment. After nearly three years without a Falcon 9 landing failure, SpaceX had two in six months.

SpaceX has also experienced recent and recurring problems with the Falcon 9 rocket’s expendable upper stage. On February 1, a second stage deorbit burn failed after a Starlink launch. This led to propellant tanks from the stage crashing into western Poland, causing property damage but harming no one. It was the third time in six months that SpaceX had encountered an issue with the Falcon 9 second stage.

Finally, and most publicly, the company’s massive Starship has failed on its last two test flights.

Although the vehicle’s first stage performed nominally during test flights in January and March, returning safely to its launch site, the Starship upper stage exploded spectacularly in flight twice. On both occasions, a fire developed in the engine section of Starship, and the vehicle rained fiery debris trails over the Bahamas and other nearby islands. Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint.

Putting this into perspective

These issues have occurred against the backdrop of a largely successful and unprecedented launch performance.

For all of the problems described earlier, the company’s only operational payload loss was its own Starlink satellites in July 2024 due to a second stage issue. Before that, SpaceX had not lost a payload with the Falcon 9 in nearly a decade. So SpaceX has been delivering for its customers in a big way.

SpaceX has achieved a launch cadence with the Falcon 9 rocket that’s unmatched by any previous rocket—or even nation—in history. If the SPHEREx mission launches, as anticipated, it would be the company’s 27th mission of this year. The rest of the world combined, including China and its growing space activity, will have a total of 19 orbital launch attempts.

In the United States, SpaceX’s historic launch competitor, United Launch Alliance, has yet to fly a single rocket this year. In fact, the company has not launched in 156 days. During that time, SpaceX has launched 64 Falcon 9 rockets. So yes, SpaceX has had some technical issues. But it is also flying circles around its competition.

The recent failures are also unlikely to jeopardize, at least in the near term, SpaceX’s globally dominant position. The company provides the Western world’s only human access to orbit, and that’s unlikely to change for a while. NASA launches the vast majority of SpaceX’s science missions, and until United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket becomes certified, it remains the US military’s only way to get larger payloads into space.

All the same, these recent failures may be telling us something about SpaceX.

What Is Causing This

Without being inside SpaceX, it is impossible to put a fine point on what precisely is happening to cause these technical issues.

Probably the most significant factor is the company’s ever-present pressure to accelerate, even while taking on more and more challenging tasks. No country or private company ever launched as many times as SpaceX did in 2024. By way of comparison, NASA launched the Space Shuttle 135 times, a comparable number to the total of Falcon 9 launches last year (132), over a 30-year period.

At the same time, the company has been attempting to move its talented engineering team off the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs and onto Starship to keep that ambitious program moving forward.

To put it succinctly, SpaceX is balancing a lot of spinning plates, and the company’s leadership is telling its employees to spin the plates faster and faster.

Multiple sources have indicated that the Starship engineering team was under immense pressure after the January 16 failure to identify the cause of a “harmonic response” in the vehicle’s upper stage that contributed to its loss. The goal was to find and fix the problem as quickly as possible.

Let’s step back and appreciate that Starship is an experimental system, by far the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, and it catastrophically failed in January. During a span of just seven weeks, the Starship team had to study the failure, address any problems, and prepare new hardware.

How much of this is on SpaceX founder Elon Musk? Some have suggested his deep involvement in the 2024 presidential election, oversight of the Department of Government Efficiency, excessive social media activity, and more—like picking fights with US senators— have distracted him from the problems of SpaceX. And there’s no doubt that Musk has been focused on things other than SpaceX for the last half-year or longer.

Elon Musk is seen as the child of Donald Trump under the ADA act. Nevertheless acting for him as the the guardian in order not to get harmed in influential politics. The ADA act is the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 signed by George H.W. Bush which benefits all Americans citizen including Musk. The White House had to put Elon Musk and his son with Donald Trump in the Oval office in a press run for more than 48 hours to show and explain America, Musk was in Donald’s protectionism. Now, Tesla and X are deep sinking under the government of Donald Trump while Trump is causing major loses to Musk companies and sinking in the New York Stock Exchange.