As the tech billionaire and his EV company take a beating, Apple castigates itself over Siri failures and a Meta tell-all book evokes a strong reaction
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. In this week’s edition: Elon Musk suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Apple beats itself up over Siri, and Meta goes after one of its own over a tell-all book.
Musk took a beating last week, as did Tesla
My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports:
The past 10 days have marked several of the most significant setbacks for Musk in months. Tesla, arguably his marquee company, continued to fall in value as investors worried about the threat of trade war and possible recession – as well as declining profits. Escalating protests against the company over the billionaire’s role in the government also grew in number and intensity across the US, coupled with rising cases of vandalism and social stigma against his cars. SpaceX has also struggled, with one of its rockets dramatically exploding in midflight last week and then an announcement that it was delaying a rescue mission to retrieve “stranded” astronauts. The company tried again two days later.
Adding to Musk’s headaches, his social media platform, X, experienced widespread outages throughout the day on Monday. During a Fox Business interview, he claimed that it was the result of a “massive cyberattack” that the company had traced to the area of Ukraine.
Musk is also dealing with increasing pushback over his role at Doge. Multiple outlets reported that the “first buddy”, as he’s christened himself, got into a heated exchange with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a White House meeting last week, which ended with Donald Trump appearing to rein in Musk’s power to make staffing decisions at government agencies with a Truth social post. A federal judge in California also issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday to reinstate thousands of the workers that Doge mass fired. Meanwhile, polling this week from Quinnipiac University shows that despite Musk repeatedly declaring that the public loves what Doge is doing, a strong majority of people disapprove of his initiative.
To shore up Musk’s fortune, Tesla held a sales event on the lawn of the White House. Donald Trump browsed several of the company’s vehicles and eventually announced he would purchase one and label vandalism against Tesla showrooms as domestic terrorism.
The scene was a striking use of the presidency to endorse the business of the commander-in-chief’s biggest financial backer. However, the display also gave the impression that Musk needed Trump to reverse his string of losses and quell the backlash against him.
