Trump puts U.S. at risk with increasing reliance on Musk
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Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. So this was the front page at Bloomberg News today. Banner headline, markets rocked by Trump show economic fear across Wall Street. Right under that, next headline, NASDAQ 100 sheds $1.1 trillion in value. Right under that, next headline, stocks fall most this year with recession warnings blaring. Right under that, next headline, Tesla tumbles most since 2020. Next headline over, billionaires at Trump's swearing-in have since lost $209 billion. Quote, the start of Trump's second term has delivered a stunning reversal for many of the billionaires who were seated behind Trump in the Capitol Rotunda while he was being sworn in. That was the front page at Bloomberg News today.
Banner headline at NBC News this afternoon, quote, markets suffer brutal sell-offs as recession fears grow. This was the banner at USA Today. Quote, stocks plunge amid recession fears. Here was CNBC. Dow tumbles nearly 900 points. NASDAQ suffers worst day since 2022 as recession fears erupt. Tesla shares plunge 15%. That's in a day. Suffering steepest drop in five years. Musk says he is running his businesses, quote, with great difficulty as shares tank. And it just keeps going. I mean, you know, how specific do you want to get? Tariffs are lose-lose for U.S. jobs and industry, Economist says. BlackRock executive says Trump deportations will have severe impact on agriculture and construction.
FinTech, meaning financial technology stocks, plummet as Wall Street worries about consumer spending. And even this one, industry specific, another industry specific one, Delta Airlines slashes earnings outlook citing weaker US demand. Why is Delta citing weaker US demand for air travel? It's because, quote, demand for air travel, demand in the domestic market for air travel slumped in February after a series of aviation industry accidents, winter storms, and reduced government travel. Just on that one piece of it, whether or not Americans are interested in flying anywhere these days. After yet another plane crash this weekend, this time in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the Atlantic magazine is now reporting on how things are going at the FAA under Donald Trump and his top campaign donor, Elon Musk, who owns both Twitter and also SpaceX, the troubled space company, with its subsidiary, Starlink, the satellite internet company. The Atlantic reports, quote,
occur, sometimes suddenly, it falls to aeronautical information specialists to update charts and maps and flight procedures that each day guide more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers across America's more than 29 million square miles of airspace. Quote, Trump's drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Elon Musk's Doge initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical information specialists. and other workers in critical safety roles at the FAA. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12% of the nation's aeronautical information specialists have now been fired or have exited the agency. 12% of everybody who has that job in America is gone since Trump took over. aeronautical information specialists, the people who rewrote planes when bad stuff happens.
This, of course, comes after The New York Times reported on a confrontation a few days ago at the White House between Musk and the Fox Business Channel host who Donald Trump saw fit to install as our nation's transportation secretary. Quote, Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk's team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. Quote, what am I supposed to do, Mr. Duffy said? I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? And stick a pin in that for a second. We'll come back to the president's top donor and what he's doing to American air travel in just a moment and how we ought to be thinking about that given what's going on in the news right now.
But as the markets crash today and as Wall Street and the business sector and economists broadly start to righteously freak out about what the American people have wrought by reinstalling Donald Trump in the White House— Have a look at this from this weekend. This was another weekend in which we saw people protesting all over the country at Elon Musk's car company, at Tesla dealerships everywhere.
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