"He ain’t built s**t out of it": Elon Musk lashes out at Peter Navarro for his comments on Trump's tariffs

South African tycoon and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, strongly criticized the US president's senior adviser Donald Trump, Peter Navarro, in reaction to a video in which the trade adviser defended the Republican leader's tariffs amid a sharp drop in the markets. At one point, the owner of companies such as X and Tesla went so far as to use expletives, stating that it was hard to take Navarro seriously since "He ain’t built sh*t."

Musk's criticism took place on X, in response to an interview Navarro had with CNN in which he defended President Trump's tariff strategy. In the interview with journalist Phil Mattingly, the White House trade adviser argued that Trump was making the right decision by imposing tariffs on the world's largest economies, explaining that past trade deals had represented a transfer of wealth from the United States to abroad.

"Here’s the analytical issue we’re trying to do under the principle that the president wants to charge those countries what they charge us. As you pointed out, Vietnam has an applied tariff rate that’s much larger than ours, but doesn’t come near the tariff we charge them, so the question is how do you value the following, Phil. So let me count the ways. You’ve got to value currency manipulation, you’ve got to value the VAT tax distortions, dumping, export subsidies, technical barriers of trade, agricultural barriers to trade, quotas, bans, counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, and all of that. So here’s the punchline. If you look at the trade deficit… should the U.S. have chronic and sustained deficits? They should not.," Navarro explained.

Musk's response

To those words, Musk wrote on X, in response to Navarro's video, that he had been unimpressed with his statements, then mock his academic background. "A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing. Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem," wrote the South African tycoon, to which a user replied that he was wrong in his assessment, since Navarro was right in his analysis. To these words, Musk responded that the president's senior advisor "ain’t built s**t."

Musk's words against Navarro broke the silence that the South African tycoon had largely maintained on Trump's tariff announcements, for which his Tesla company's shares fell 10%, representing a loss of billions of dollars from Musk's net worth.