Wall Street is pointed toward small gains early Friday ahead of the government’s May jobs report, which should at least briefly take the spotlight off the feud between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk that erupted publicly this week.
Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved 0.3% higher before the bell, while futures for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each rose 0.4%.
Tesla rallied early, regaining some the whopping losses it suffered on Thursday when Trump and Musk sparred feverishly on social media. Shares of Musk’s electric car company rose 4.7% early Friday, a day after tumbling 14.5%.
The Trump-Musk spat started over the president’s budget bill then devolved rapidly. After Musk said that Trump wouldn’t haven’t gotten elected without his help, Trump implied that he may turn the federal government against his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.
By the end of the trading day, $150 billion of Tesla’s value had been erased, more than what it would take to buy all the shares of Starbucks and hundreds of other big publicly traded U.S. companies.
In other trading early Friday, Lululemon plunged more than 20% after the maker of yoga clothing cut its profit expectations late Thursday as it tries to offset the impact of tariffs while being buffeted by competition from start-up brands. Lululemon — like a slew of other companies recently — said its customers have grown less confident about the economy as Trump’s dizzying tariff announcements wreak havoc on markets.
Hopes that Trump will lower his tariffs after reaching trade deals with other countries have been among the main reasons the S&P 500 has rallied back so furiously since dropping roughly 20% from its record two months ago. It’s now back within 3.3% of its all-time high.
Trump boosted such hopes Thursday after saying he had “a very good phone call” with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, about trade and that “their respective teams will be meeting shortly at a location to be determined.”
China’s assessment of the call, as reported in state media, was less enthusiastic.
Later Friday morning, the U.S. Labor Department will report on how many jobs U.S. employers added — or lost — during May. The expectation on Wall Street is for a slowdown in hiring last month from a surprisingly strong April.
A resilient job market has been one of the linchpins that’s propped up the U.S. economy, and the worry is that all the uncertainty created by Trump’s on-and-off tariffs could push businesses to freeze their hiring.
Elsewhere, in Europe at midday, Germany’s DAX lost 0.2%, while the CAC 40 in Paris slid 1.6%. Britain’s FTSE 100 was flat.
In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index rose 0.5% to 37,741.61, while the Kospi in South Korea jumped 1.5% to 2,812.05.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.2% to 23,859.52 and the Shanghai Composite index edged less than 0.1% higher, to 3,385.36.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 shed 0.3% to 8,515.70.
India’s Sensex gained 0.8% after the Reserve Bank cut its key interest rate by a half a percentage point to 5.50%.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury held steady at 4.39% after dropping sharply on Wednesday as expectations built that the Federal Reserve will need to cut interest rates later this year to prop up an economy potentially weakened by tariffs.
In energy trading early Friday, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 7 cents to $63.30 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, fell 3 cents to $65.31 per barrel.
The U.S. dollar rose to 144.24 Japanese yen from 143.49 yen. The euro fell to $1.1414 from $1.1448.
