- The S&P 500 jumped 1% on Friday amid a positive jobs report and a rebound in Tesla’s stock after a disastrous Thursday in which Elon Musk and President Donald Trump battled on social media.
The markets have their mojo back. After the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a strong jobs report on Friday, the S&P 500 posted a daily gain of 1% and weekly rise of 1.8%. The Nasdaq jumped 1.2%, and the Dow Jones rose 1%. The S&P 500 crossed against the 6,000-point mark, just 2.4% below the all-time highs it posted in February.
Economists polled by FactSet had predicted that the U.S. would add only 130,000 jobs in May amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war, a marked decrease from the 177,000 reported in April. On Friday, the U.S. government announced an addition of 139,000 jobs last month and revised down the number it said were added over March and April by 95,000.
The federal agency also said that the unemployment rate in May stayed flat at 4.2%. Analysts are closely watching that number to see whether Trump’s suite of severe tariffs were having an impact on the economy. “The unemployment rate should be more important than payrolls, given potential disruptions to labor supply,” wrote analysts for Bank of America Securities in a Friday research note before the jobs data was published.
Meanwhile, Tesla, the electric car manufacturing giant, saw its stock rebound 3.7% on Friday. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and a former close Trump confidante, had a dramatic break with the 47th president on Thursday after he criticized the commander-in-chief’s tariffs and proposed budget. “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year,” he wrote on X, the social media platform he owns.
A record $150 billion-plus was wiped off Tesla’s market capitalization on Thursday and Musk saw his net worth drop $34 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Still, Tesla’s share price rebounded Friday amid the broader market surge.
Other tech titans were also up. Meta saw its shares jump 1.9%, Apple was up 1.6%, and Microsoft rose 0.6%. And Circle, a stablecoin issuer that just went public on Thursday, continued to ride its red-hot IPO as its shares rocketed 30% to end the week.
Friday’s positive gains capped a chaotic week that also saw investors watch Trump’s negotiations with the Chinese government over tariffs. On Thursday, the U.S. president spoke with Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic, in an effort to deescalate a trade war between the two countries.
