Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick advised Americans to buy Tesla stock on Tuesday and called the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, “probably the best person to bet on I’ve ever met.”
“I think if you want to learn something on this show tonight, it’s buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters, urging viewers to put their money in the company of a Trump administration employee. “It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap.”
The car manufacturer, which Musk has led since 2008, has seen its shares plummet more than 40 percent this year amid backlash against Musk’s role as an advisor to President Donald Trump and concerns that it’s losing ground to competitors in the electric vehicle market.
Musk hasn’t helped its cause, and has instead fumbled from one scandal to another, giving what appeared to be multiple fascist salutes on Election Day, playing footsie with the far-right extremist Alternative für Deutschland in the lead-up to last month’s German election, calling for federal judges to be impeached, and leading the administration’s DOGE task force, which has pressured agencies into erroneous cuts to nuclear safety workers and federal staff working on the avian flu outbreak.
With a recent political and business track record like that, Lutnick said that it’s time to buy the dip.
“It’ll never be this cheap again when people understand the things he’s building, the robots he’s building, the technology he’s building,” he told Watters of Tesla’s stock.
Tesla has delayed the rollout of new products in the last year, including a robotaxi service and a line of humanoid robots. (Lutnick encouraged Watters to “go online” and research the robots, citing Musk’s prediction they will enter mass production next year and claiming they will clean people’s homes: “I’m telling you we are gonna have very nice bathrooms.”)
Meanwhile, the company’s core electric vehicle business has taken a dent in recent weeks, with figures showing drastic sales declines in Europe, Australia, and China.
Ross Gerber, a wealth manager who has long supported Tesla, called on Musk to step down from his CEO job this week, claiming his attention is being occupied by his administration job and is hurting the company’s share price.
As for Lutnick, it is highly unusual for a Cabinet secretary to recommend individual stocks, even more so when the company in question is run by a White House advisor.
“Why on earth are Cabinet officials promoting a company’s stock?” asked Dan Shapiro, a former National Security Council and State Department official who served as former president Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel, in a social media post. “And the stock of a senior government employee at that? This is through the looking glass of ethics violations.”
Lutnick, a former chief executive of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, is a self-described “fiscal conservative” which would also put his intervention as a government official on behalf of a floundering stock at odds with his proclaimed free market values.
Republicans have also—rhetorically, at least—opposed the idea of the government “picking winners,” which advocacy for a stock from the Commerce Secretary seemingly contradicts.
“If this cabinet secretary himself owns any of the stock he’s touting on TV, he’s probably committed a serious ethics offense,” wrote David Frum, a journalist and former staffer in Republican George W. Bush’s White House, in a social media post.
“If he doesn’t own the stock himself, then he probably hasn’t broken any laws, but is engaged in a shameful breach of trust with the audience watching.”
Politico reported early this month that even White House officials have grown skeptical of Lutnuck’s grasp of economics.
Trump has put him in charge of tariffs, and the administration’s start-stop rollout of levies on imports from abroad have roiled markets and sabotaged diplomatic relationships with many of America’s closest allies and trading partners.
Multiple White House and administration officials told the outlet it was unclear to them if Lutnick understood how tariffs and the economy work.
“He’s trying to be a mini-Trump,” one of the officials told Politico. “I don’t think he got the memo that only Trump gets to be Trump. It just reinforces that he doesn’t really know how to do the job.”
