Of his now infamous comments, cheering on a decline in American automaker Tesla’s stock price (ticker TSLA), Tim Walz now says that it was all a joke and it’s your fault for being offended. As it happens, Telsa’s stock has been up over 10 percent in the past week.
In a video clip posted of his latest walk back, Walz says at the 21-second mark, “I was making a joke.” He then adds “These people have no sense of humor.” What isn’t funny is that state government pensioners own millions of Tesla shares and that Walz serves as chair of the State Board of Investment.
In the truest statement Walz utters during this sequence (:08 mark), the Minnesota Governor confesses, “This guy [Musk] bugs me in a way that’s probably unhealthy.” That’s Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the world’s largest automaker by market capitalization.
The occasion of the latest Walz remarks was a stop on his national “town hall” tour of Republican congressional districts. This one was held in the liberal enclave of Rochester (home to the world-famous Mayo Clinic) and the only Minnesota stop on the tour.
The tour appears to be in support of Walz’s already faltering bid for the 2028 Democratic Presidential nomination. His Rochester stop was not a town hall in any sense. Attendees had to be pre-registered (if not pre-screened), questions had to be submitted in advance, via a portal, and the location itself (a Rochester high school) was kept secret from the general public.
The question that Walz was shown responding to above was, “What can we possibly do about Elon Musk?”
Nonetheless, the Rochester event made national news (Fox News, New York Post) and was widely covered and live-streamed by local media. The original Walz remarks about Tesla made international news (Times of India, Sky News AU).
Curiously, the state’s largest newspaper, the Minnesota Star Tribune, appears to have skipped the Rochester event. However, the Star Tribune did run with a story today about how Walz sightings at the Minnesota state capitol have been ever rarer these days. Pointedly, Walz has so far refused to meet, one-on-one, with the newly elected Republican Speaker of the state house of representatives, Lisa Demuth.
Charity beings at home, Governor.
