President Trump Holds Press Conference With Elon Musk in White House's Oval Office

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside US President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Muska Culpa

Tesla officially recovers from the Musk-Trump feud

The stock is up on Musk’s apology and news on the robotaxi launch.

Rani Molla

6/11/25 8:33AM

The girls, it seems, are no longer fighting.

It’s been less than a week since Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent the fateful, expensive tweet that obliterated $152 billion in market cap from the electric vehicle company in a single day because of his falling out with the president.

But as of market opening Wednesday, the stock has erased all of the losses caused by the messy breakup.

To recap: after calling President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” a “disgusting abomination” a couple of days earlier, Musk directly attacked the president on June 5, saying that without the space billionaire, the real estate billionaire would have lost the election.

Such ingratitude
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025

Things went downhill from there, with Musk suggesting on his social media platform, X, that there’s a deeper connection between Trump and late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Musk also said Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession this year and threatened to decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, potentially stranding NASA astronauts at the space station.

Trump, for his part, took to TV and his own social media platform, Truth Social, to rake Musk over the coals and threaten his valuable government contracts.

The stock ate it, closing down 14% that day from its previous close of $332.05.

Since then, however, Musk has blinked. He’s deleted some of his most incendiary tweets and has issued an apology, saying he regretted “some of my posts” about the president and that “they went too far.” The mea culpa was on the heels of Musk teasing a June 22 date for the company’s long-awaited robotaxi launch.

In concert, those actions seem to have done the trick for the stock, which opened above the price it was before Musk started his Twitter war with Trump.

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Tesla and Google’s Waymo to Senate committee: Fix self-driving laws or China will win

Ahead of their appearances Wednesday at a Senate committee hearing on the future of self-driving, the two biggest names in the sector, Tesla and Google’s Waymo, are talking the same book.

Both companies are warning lawmakers that without a federal framework for autonomous vehicles — something Congress has debated for years and is now considering again as part of broader transportation legislation — China will seize the lead.

“The United States is locked in a global race with Chinese AV companies for the future of autonomous driving, a trillion-dollar industry comparable in strategic importance to flight and space travel,” Waymo Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña said in written remarks ahead of the event. “In the absence of US leadership on a national AV legislative framework, Chinese AV competitors will fill the gap and set the safety and technical standards for the rest of the world.”

Tesla Vice President of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy, for his part, wrote, “If the US does not lead in AV development, other nations — particularly China — will shape the technology, standards, and global market.” He added, “China will be the dominant manufacturer of transportation for the 21st century.”

The two companies face steep competition from Chinese firms, including Baidu, which operates a robotaxi service, and BYD, whose EVs offer driver assistance technology similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving and which has been outselling the US automaker.

Hit the Road, Mac: The Future of Self-Driving Cars

$126B

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Waymo is now worth $126 billion, after raising $16 billion in a funding round led by its parent company, Google. With this capital, Waymo plans to expand its robotaxi service to more than 20 new cities, including international markets.

On Wednesday, Waymo’s chief safety officer will testify at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing, alongside a representative for Tesla, urging lawmakers to create a national regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles.

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Dan Ives thinks Tesla will someday merge with SpaceX, too

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives is just like us: he thinks that Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX could someday become one company.

In a note this morning, Ives argued there’s a “growing chance” Tesla will eventually merge in some form with newly merged SpaceX and xAI, as Musk builds what he sees as a single, sprawling AI ecosystem spanning both space and Earth.

Over time, Ives wrote, he thinks Musk will look to “combine forces/technologies,” with the long-term goal of owning and controlling more of the AI stack. Ives thinks Musk could achieve that “holy grail” over the next year and a half.

Earlier today, we pointed out the myriad similarities between Tesla and SpaceX — shared impossible missions, common methods for achieving those goals, and a physics-first, economics-later ethos — as well as Musk’s long-standing penchant for knitting his companies together in the first place.