Can Musk Pull Trump Back From theTariff Ledge?

Elon Musk has been criticizing Trump’s tariff policy — and publicly. Could there be a strategy?

Elon Musk is known for many things. Subtlety is not one of them.

When Musk shared a grainy two-minute video at 4:59 a.m. Monday to his 218 million followers, his post contained no words, and yet the message was clear. It showed the free-market intellectual Milton Friedman, in a 1980 clip well known to economists, waxing poetic about free trade as he sketched out the international origins of the parts that form a pencil.

Musk was expressing his discomfort with President Trump’s imposition of draconian new tariffs. And yet one has to wonder what Musk hopes to accomplish.

This is not a president known to brook much public criticism, after all. Try to imagine Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, subtweeting her boss.

And Musk repeatedly went out of his way to disagree with Trump over the weekend, suggesting he believes he is not subject to the same rules that govern others in the president’s inner circle.

Speaking by video on Saturday to an Italian far-right political conference, he said he hoped the United States and the European Union would “move to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone.”