- Elon Musk amped up his attacks on Donald Trump’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro, on X.
- The two men disagree on tariffs and have exchanged back-and-forth insults over the past few days.
- Stocks surged Tuesday morning after days of turmoil.
Elon Musk escalated his own sort of trade war this morning — not against another country, but against President Donald Trump’s top trade advisor, Peter Navarro.
Musk responded to a video of Navarro speaking on CNBC, writing in a post on X that “Navarro is truly a moron.”
He followed up by saying: “Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.”
Fewer than 20 minutes later, Musk shot out yet another insult, correcting another user’s spelling of Navarro’s name with a play on the R-word: “*Peter Retarrdo.”
Tuesday’s posts are the latest in a string of anti-tariff comments from Musk, who said over the weekend that America should establish a “zero-tariff” system with Europe. Musk, who has been heading up Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. A representative from the White House directed BI to a post on X quoting Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s response to the recent insults.
"Whatever. We are the most transparent administration in history, expressing our disagreements in public," Leavitt said, according to the post.
For his part, Navarro, Trump's senior advisor for trade and manufacturing, has also fired shots at Musk. During a Sunday interview on Fox News, he said that Musk is great "when he's in his DOGE lane" but is protecting his own business interests when it comes to criticizing the wide-ranging tariffs Trump announced last week. During the same interview, Navarro said that things are "fine" between the two men and "there's no rift there."
Yet Navarro turned up the heat on Monday when speaking on CNBC, possibly prompting Musk's recent comments.
"He's not a car manufacturer. He's a car assembler in many cases," Navarro said, saying that Tesla gets car parts from foreign nations.
The markets continue to be roiled by the tariff chaos, with US stocks surging Tuesday morning after a painful three-day sell-off.