Tesla, led by Elon Musk, has halted sales of two models of its electric vehicles in China owing to the ongoing trade war between the United States and China. President Donald Trump’s billionaire supporter Elon Musk has disassociated himself from the White House’s tariff proposal, even going so far as to label one of the plan’s creators a moron on X. Tesla is cutting its offer in China in response to Beijing’s statement that import taxes on certain Chinese goods will be raised to 145% and its retort that many US goods would be subject to a 125 percent import tax.
This is the reason why Elon Musk’s company has pulled key models from the Asian market
Reuters reports that the Model S and Model X, two American-made Tesla vehicles, have been taken off the EV manufacturer’s Chinese website. China’s EV industry is competitive, and as a result of Chinese tariffs, these US-made vehicles are too costly to compete. In addition, Tesla’s sales are lagging since Elon Musk publicly sided with Donald Trump. Despite the increased demand for electric vehicles, Eletrek, an EV market portal, claimed that Tesla sales are declining throughout Europe. Some nations have witnessed a startling decline in the quantity of Teslas bought when comparing the first quarter sales of 2024 and 2025.
Sales have decreased by 62% in Germany, where just over 13,000 Teslas were bought last year. While sales have decreased by 37 percent on average across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom, a non-EU nation, was the only European nation to enjoy a rise in sales, increasing by 6 percent. Tesla sales had also suffered before more tariffs were placed on vehicles entering China from the US. According to a Reuters story last week, sales have decreased by 11.5 percent year over year, and more declines brought on by tariffs may result in even lower orders in the months ahead. The Q1 2025 earnings report from Tesla is scheduled to be released on April 22.
Elon Musk’s recent moves might have decimated the government
Even while Elon Musk’s cuts have only saved less than 0.5 percent of the national debt, they are already making Americans sicker and poorer and requiring them to wait on phone support lines for hours at a time. Following months of brutal and frequently pointless cuts from a government that the billionaire Trump megadonor claimed was rife with fraud, waste, and graft, Elon Musk announced last Thursday that he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are expecting to make a total of 150 billion in savings.
It is not accurate to describe this as a colossally unimpressive statistic. Elon Musk’s “savings” here, which are already erroneous and exaggerated in the first place, were calculated by adding up expenditures that were either never really cut or were already cut, or both, and they only amount to 15% of the trillions of dollars he pledged to cut. It would only reduce one-tenth of a year’s worth of the average federal deficit over the last ten years, which is a pitiful one-fiftieth of what the federal government spent last year alone, and accounts for a staggeringly small fraction of the $36.21 trillion total United States national debt.
In fact, federal expenditure has increased under Donald Trump thus far in comparison to the previous two years under Joe Biden. Musk has been feeding the US government through a woodchipper for three months, but this hasn’t really solved the alleged issue. However, that does not imply that it has not had an effect. The tiny sum that Elon Musk says he has “saved” American taxpayers has turned out to be extremely detrimental to the way the US government operates and the vital services that millions of Americans rely on, such as:
- Over 216,000 workers lost their employment as a result.
- In the midst of a string of fatal plane crashes, the organization in charge of making sure air travel is safe underwent significant downsizing.
- A dysfunctional mess was created by the organization in charge of guaranteeing the trillions of dollars in Social Security benefits that keep the elderly and disabled out of poverty.
- Due to unexpected understaffing, national parks had to close for additional days, close visitor centers and amenities permanently, and postpone important projects.
- Programs that provided disabled Americans with the services, care, and legal safeguards they require to live their lives were destroyed.
