When President Donald Trump held a Tesla booster event at the White House on Tuesday, standing alongside the automaker’s CEO Elon Musk and a row of the company’s EVs, he called Musk one of “our high IQ people.”
In the aftermath of the combination press conference, car commercial and auto show, Musk, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump and other Republicans in the last election, proved the president wrong.
The White House event was immediately criticized by some for what appeared to be a case of the president acting as a pitchman for his biggest political donor. Tesla’s stock has been on a downward trajectory ever since Trump’s inauguration, with a noticeably sharp decline happening in the days before Tuesday’s press presentation as Americans frustrated with Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency protested at the automaker’s showrooms, offloaded their EVs, sold their stock and took other measures to make their grievances known. When Trump was asked by a reporter if he thought buying a Tesla himself would boost the company’s sales and stock, the president responded, “Well I hope it does.”
It was a smart move for Musk at least in the short term — as Tesla’s stock has since gained back all the value it lost since Monday — but the CEO’s response to the backlash against the stunt was anything but.
On Wednesday, Musk reposted a meme on X, the social media platform he owns, that shows pictures of former President Joe Biden standing next to electrified vehicles at the White House above photos of Trump with Musk and his Teslas. It reads: “Biden Selling EV at Whitehouse GOOD, Trump Selling EV at Whitehouse BAD” [sic]. He reposted a few other similar memes and tweets that suggested any criticism of the event was a classic case of liberal hypocrisy.
In truth, this is yet another classic case of Musk rewriting history using memes, and expecting the American public to fall for his oversimplified and selfishly skewed version of events.
In August 2021, Biden held an event at the White House promoting investment in American-made EVs and the manufacturing and infrastructure needs surrounding them, culminating in the signing of an executive order that set a target of zero-emissions vehicles making up 50% of new cars sold by 2030. He invited executives from Ford, General Motors and Stellantis to be there, as well as representatives from the United Auto Workers union, which represents employees of those automakers. Tesla was notably not invited, likely because they are a nonunion company.
While Biden did drive a hybrid Jeep Wrangler on the grounds that day, he wasn’t there to promote a single vehicle or automaker. As he said in his remarks, his purpose was to spur EV manufacturing in the U.S. to compete against China and other countries.
“The question is whether we will lead or fall behind in the race for the future,” Biden said. “It’s whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries…here in the United States or we’re going to have to rely on other countries for those batteries. Whether or not the jobs to build these vehicles and batteries are good-paying union jobs, jobs with benefits, jobs that are going to sustain continued growth of the middle class. They have to be, they have to be made here in America.”
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The Tesla Cybertruck is an object of relentless online derision. An owner shares what driving the electric pickup on a daily basis is really like.Meanwhile, Trump had a different reason for promoting Musk’s company on Tuesday, one that he clearly outlined in his Q&A with the press.
“Look, I care about one thing,” Trump said. “When someone is a great patriot, they shouldn’t be hurt. He’s a great patriot. He didn’t know me from Adam until we met a little bit when I was in my first term, but he came out, he endorsed me very strongly, and I admired that and respected that.”
Musk knows his Tesla showcase at the White House is directly tied to his support for and donations to Trump, just as he knows the Biden administration’s EV event was tied to support for “[creating] millions of good-paying jobs that generate significant economic growth and opportunity,” as Biden said at the time. But as he’s done in the past, Musk is willfully promoting misrepresentations that help his own personal agenda. At the time of writing, the meme he reposted comparing the Biden and Trump EV events has been viewed 60.6 million times.
During Tuesday’s Tesla exhibition, a reporter called out to Trump, “What is your message to Americans right now, sir, who are worried about the stock market? What is your message to them?”
As the question was being asked, Musk stepped in and said they should go look at the Cybertruck.
“Let’s go see the Cybertruck,” the president responded. “I did buy one of these.”
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