Opinion by Theodore Schleifer on April 8, 2025.

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, 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 Donald 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 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.”

And that came after Musk twice took shots on X at administration trade hawk Peter Navarro: First, he ridiculed Navarro’s Harvard doctoral degree in economics as “a bad thing, not a good thing,” suggesting it meant Navarro’s ego exceeded his intelligence.

Then, in case anyone had not caught his drift, Musk arguably added a line to Navarro’s future obituary, saying he “ain’t built” anything, using an expletive for emphasis. (He later deleted the second insult.)

I’ve been covering the notoriously impulsive Musk for a while now. I don’t see a cogent strategy at work in making public his frustrations with his boss.

This is not the first time Musk has been at odds with Trump since joining his team and publicly so.

During the transition, Musk endorsed Rick Scott of Florida to be the Senate majority leader, getting ahead of Trump, who did not support Scott. Then Musk endorsed Howard Lutnick for Treasury secretary, which Trump ignored in choosing Scott Bessent.

Most prominently, Musk vocally defended the H-1B visa program against the more anti-immigrant, MAGA wing of the Republican Party, saying he would go to “war” to defend the program, which is beloved by the tech industry. Trump eventually sided with Musk.

In the early days of the Trump administration, Musk also dissed a Trump artificial-intelligence manufacturing plan. Trump gave him a pass for that one.

So does Musk have some secret plan here to get Trump to walk away from the ledge?

Trump has espoused tariffs and protectionism for decades. Musk’s online acting-out suggests he believes Trump’s stance may be negotiable assuming enough pressure is applied.

I have no doubt that Musk genuinely believes what he says about tariffs and trade. But it seems highly doubtful that a Milton Friedman video about a pencil will be able to change what Trump believes.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Theodore Schleifer/Haiyun Jiang
c. 2025 The New York Times Company