Major figures in the business world have spent the last 48 hours sounding alarms about the economic consequences of President Donald Trump’s trade war — some even reversing their previous supportive stances.
While many small businesses across the United States have for months decried Trump’s policies and the uncertainty they’ve injected into their operations, last week’s tariff rollout stunned America’s C-suites. In a CNBC flash survey of CEOs published Monday morning, 69% expected a recession, with 37% saying they expected to cut jobs this year.
“Disappointingly stupid and illogical,” one CEO said in describing Trump’s tariffs to CNBC. “Without faith that our government knows what it is doing, it is impossible for businesses to thrive.”
Speaking in a televised interview with Bloomberg, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink echoed the sentiments of the survey. “Most CEOs I talk to say we’re in a recession right now,” he said.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in his annual shareholder letter that Trump’s tariffs would “slow down growth” as “input costs rise and demand increases on domestic products.” On Friday, the bank raised its odds for a recession from 40% to 60%.
Dimon’s comments are a sharp reversal from those he made in January urging people to “get over” Trump’s tariff policy because they were “good for national security.”
But he isn’t the only business leader changing his tune following steep market losses and a myriad of recessionary indicators.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said in an X post Monday morning that “the global economy is being taken down because of bad math,” capping off a weekend of missives that called for a 90-day pause on tariff implementation and others aimed at Trump’s policy team. The Pershing Square CEO also said that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “profits when our economy implodes,” a statement he walked back hours later.
“This is not what we voted for,” wrote Ackman, who also had officially endorsed Trump last summer.
On Sunday, billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said in a rare post on X — in response to another user posting a January interview on trade policy — that “I do not support tariffs exceeding 10% which I made abundantly clear.”
Richard Branson, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Virgin Group, called on the Trump administration to “own up to a colossal mistake and change course” before the economic fallout spreads.
“As the dollar is weakening, US consumer prices will rise,” Branson continued. “And countless small and medium-size enterprises will go, and already are going, bankrupt as a result. This is not a winning long-term strategy.”
The uneasiness has even spread to Trump’s own circle of advisers. In what appears to be his first major break with the president, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared a seemingly anti-tariff video on X on Monday morning featuring an economist lauding the “operation of the free market.”
Musk also said Saturday during a speech at an event held by Italy’s right-wing co-ruling party that “Europe and the United States should move, ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and America.”
In response, Peter Navarro — largely seen as the architect of Trump’s tariff policy — dismissed Musk as a “car assembler” in a CNBC interview Monday.
“He’s a car person,” Navarro said. “That’s what he does, and he wants the cheap foreign parts.”
