Yahoo Finance

Tesla endorsements from President Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick raising some eyebrows, as shares of Tesla have tumbled more than 30% this year. Yahoo! Finance's Rick Newman joins us now with more. Rick.

Hey, guys. Uh, so finally somebody got around to pointing out that for the commerce secretary to go on TV and basically make a stock recommendation, I mean, that is, that's a blatant violation of government ethics rules. Public officials are not supposed to take any position on commercial products, whether they say buy it, sell it, whether it's a stock, some kind of goods or product. I mean, you just don't do that. So I guess Trump has so normalized unorthodox behavior that not too people not too many people even noticed that happened this week. But a broader question is like, is this actually going to help Tesla? And I don't think so. I think, um, these efforts by Trump and his officials to try to help get people to go out and buy Teslas and maybe pop the stock a little bit. I mean, this just looks like desperation and it makes sense because, uh, you know, for most of its history, Tesla automobiles, they are electric cars that burn, that emit no pollution. I mean, these appealed mostly to Democrats and liberals and environmentalists, um, who are now boycotting the brand. So Trump is trying to get, who else is going to buy Teslas if all the environmentalists now hate Elon Musk because he's so hard in with Doge and with the Trump administration? Are Trump supporters now going to listen to Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick and say, oh, wow, maybe it's time for me to buy Tesla or to buy an electric vehicle. I mean, I don't think so. So, you know, this debate is going to go on for a long time. How does Tesla kind of revive itself? Uh, the most obvious way would be for Elon Musk to say goodbye to the Doge commission and go back to running Tesla, but I don't think that's going to happen. So this is going to be quite an interesting case study in what happens when a CEO goes phenomenally political, uh, at some point and it hurts the company directly.

Rick, as you say that, I mean, as somebody who's covered politics for a while, has that happened before? Do we have any kind of playbook for this?

So, not that I can think of, and I, and I encourage anybody who knows to let me know. I mean, so, I mean, you know, back up for a minute. I mean, CEOs, many CEOs have political views, and they've always, there've always been CEOs who supported one party or another, you know, always angling to become treasury secretary, or whatever it might be, commerce secretary, labor secretary. There's, there's nothing new about that. What's new with Elon Musk is that, um, you know, he is, he is gone for, he says that he used to vote Democrat mostly between like 2010 and 2020. Uh, during COVID, he clearly began to develop libertarian views, and now he's becoming, he's really becoming kind of an authoritarian. He's, he's just going into the government single-handedly and trying to bend these agencies to his will. So, um, I cannot think of a time when a business person, especially an active business person. I mean, think of Hank Paulson, you know, when he came in from Goldman to be the treasurer treasury secretary under George W. Bush, um, he was done at Goldman. He wasn't still, you know, running Goldman Sachs, or he wasn't planning to go back to Goldman Sachs, he didn't. Um, so a lot of these people once they turn political, that's sort of how they burnish their career toward the end. Obviously not what Elon Musk is doing here. So to my mind, this is a unique situation with a radicalized CEO who's still trying to run a company and get regular consumers to buy his products.

Rick, thank you. Have a good weekend.

Bye, guys.