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Tesla shares fell on Monday after the electric-car maker’s chief executive Elon Musk said he would form a new political party, escalating a feud with US President Donald Trump.
Shares in Tesla sank just over 7 per cent in early trading on Wall Street, taking their decline to 15 per cent over the past month, as Musk has repeatedly clashed with Trump.
Musk left the administration in May after the pair fell out over the president’s signature tax and spending bill.
In his latest broadside against Trump, Musk over the weekend announced that he would form a new political party, which he said was needed to combat the “one-party system” undermining US democracy.
Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, said Musk’s apparent decision to “dive deeper into politics . . . is exactly the opposite direction that Tesla investors [and] shareholders want him to take during this crucial period for the Tesla story”.
Trump hit out at Musk’s plans for a new party, writing on his Truth Social platform that he was “saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks”.
The bitter public feud marks a spectacular unravelling of the previously close ties between the two that were forged as the billionaire helped bankroll Trump’s return to the White House.
Trump then installed Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and gave him the job of finding trillions of dollars of savings across government.