Just under three months ago, President Donald Trump stood next to Elon Musk outside the White House to choose a new Tesla. Following his explosive feud with the Tesla CEO, Trump may be about to ditch his shiny EV too.
A senior White House official confirmed to Business Insider that Trump was considering selling or giving away the red Model S, which has a list price of about $80,000. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Trump picked out the Model S from a lineup of Tesla vehicles during a sales pitch-like event with Musk at the White House in March.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
At the time, it was a show of support from Trump to his biggest financial backer, with Tesla stock plunging and the company becoming a target for protests due to Musk’s efforts to slash the government workforce at DOGE.
At the event, Trump said he was buying a Tesla because “it’s a great product, as good as it gets,” and because Musk had “devoted his energy and his life to doing this, and I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people.”
Since then, the relationship between the president and the world’s richest person has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.
A high-profile spat began on Thursday with Musk criticising Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill in a series of posts on X. Trump then called the billionaire “crazy” and suggested that “the easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s governmental subsidies and contracts.”
The feud damaged Tesla’s stock price, closing down 14% on Thursday and wiping $138 billion off the company’s valuation. Shares staged a recovery on Friday, rising nearly 5% in morning trading and remain down by a fifth this year.
If Trump does decide to sell his Model S, he should probably get a move on. A study by used car site iSeeCars in April found that used Model S prices had dropped more than any other model over the past year, as the resale value of used Teslas continues to slide.
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
