It provides context for Musk’s lashing of Trump’s senior trade adviser Peter Navarro last week, labelling him “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks”.

Trump’s trade war with China has produced plenty of corporate casualties – Musk’s Tesla is only one.

They are rapidly discovering that contributing to Trump’s campaign – or becoming public fanboys – has not provided the insurance policy they had anticipated for their organisations.

AI hotshot Nvidia has just found out the hard way that cosying up to Trump doesn’t guarantee safety.

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang recently dined with Trump and days later declared he would build $US500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure on US soil. Yet, he was hit overnight with a US government decision to restrict the sale of certain AI chips to China.

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That decision cost Nvidia $US5.5 billion, and investors are now worried about the world’s hottest company becoming collateral damage in Trump’s tariff war.

Amazon founder and shareholder Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, is having to contend with the fact that the company’s goods are becoming more expensive – creating enormous dislocation and uncertainty for its army of third-party sellers. Just how much prices will rise depends on which country they are selling in.

And if Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg had thought his support for Trump would have rewarded him with government support for the antitrust case Meta is facing, he will now have experienced a dose of reality.

And the appearance last week that the tech bros got a reprieve when Trump announced a tariff exclusion for smartphones, computer chips, hard drives, memory chips and other selected electronics was short-lived.

Trump took to social media soon after to declare that “NOBODY is getting off the hook”.

So consumers will need to wait to see, for example, where the price of an iPhone will land.

Even if tech is ultimately dealt with more favourably than other sectors, the shares in these stocks have been savaged as investors factor in the re-emergence of inflation and a slowdown or even a recession in the US economy, on the back of Trump’s trade agenda.

You would have to wonder about the return on investment the rich tech supporters have received on their contributions to Trump’s campaign.

Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg have collectively lost more than $US80 billion since “Liberation Day”.

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