Will Elon Musk's 'big bet' on Trump pay off for him and Tesla?
Billionaire Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has been vocal in his support for former President Donald Trump's election campaign. Intelligent Alpha CEO and founder and Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Doug Clinton sits down with Josh Lipton on Market Domination Overtime to discuss what the election outcome means for Musk and how his political involvement affects investors. "It will be a very interesting night for Elon Musk," Clinton says, adding, "He's obviously made a really big bet on the election going one direction. And I think if it goes against him if Kamala Harris is elected president, I think it probably is a negative for him." He notes that Tesla could stand to benefit from a Harris presidency, given she could provide further tax incentives for electric vehicles as part of a green energy push. Clinton says that Musk will likely "find some way to try to mend fences and say, 'Look, obviously, it didn't go the way that we were campaigning, but we have this agenda that actually does very much align with some of the principles of the Democratic Party.' I mean, Elon probably has done more for bringing sustainable energy into the markets, kind of into the mass markets, really in the US and globally than maybe anybody else in the world." As an investor in Musk's companies, Clinton says, "We try to separate [Musk's companies from his politics]. At Deepwater, we are investors in xAI, and we're big believers that there's basically four companies on Earth that have a chance to build the foundation models that power sort of everything. It's Meta (META) with Llama, it's Google (GOOG, GOOGL) [with] Gemini, OpenAI with GPT, and then xAI with Grok. So that investment is really built, I think, more on just what can they do from a technical perspective." To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination Overtime here. This post was written by Naomi Buchanan
