Did Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo impose a 50 percent retaliatory tariff on Tesla cars sold in Mexico, calling Elon Musk "pendejo"? No, that's not true: As of February 4, 2025, Lead Stories found no credible media or government reports confirming that she ever said what social media attributed to her. U.S. President Donald Trump said on February 3, 2025, that he and Sheinbaum had talked, and planned U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods were on put on hold for 30 days.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on February 2, 2025. It opened:
TRADE WAR UPDATE: Mexico Joins Canada, Imposes 50% Tariff On Tesla Cars
'El Presidente pendejo Musk made a big mistake putting tariffs on Mexico,' said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. 'These tariffs will not stand!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Feb 4 15:54:54 2025 UTC)
On January 20, 2025 (archived here), the day of Trump's second inauguration, he first announced February 1, 2025, as the then-planned date for enforcing U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods.
On February 1, 2025, Trump signed an executive order (archived here) enacting these measures.
On February 2, 2025, Sheinbaum issued a statement (archived here) in which she emphasized that "Mexico does not want confrontation" and made a vague, unspecified reference to "Plan B" that said nothing about Tesla and did not mention Musk.
On February 3, 2025, Trump posted on TruthSocial (archived here) that he had "a very friendly conversation" with the president of Mexico and that, as a result, the two countries "further agreed to immediately pause the anticipated tariffs for a one month period" during which additional negotiations were said to take place. Trump added that he looks forward "to achieve a 'deal.'"
A respective statement (archived here) published on the same day on the website of the president of Mexico confirmed the pause on tariff enforcement. It did not contain an outline of retaliatory measures targeting the business of Musk, a tech billionaire and Trump's close ally during his second term (archived here).
Lead Stories searched across Google News for fragments of the quote attributed to the president of Mexico in the social media post in question, using the keywords in English, as seen here and here, and in Spanish, as seen here and here, but none produced any credible reports confirming the claim.
(Source: Google News screenshot taken on Tue Feb 4 17:56:18 2025 UTC)
(Source: Google News screenshot taken on Tue Feb 4 18:00:47 2025 UTC)
(Source: Google News screenshot taken on Tue Feb 4 18:07:47 2025 UTC; the page was automatically translated to English by Chrome)
(Source: Google News screenshot taken on Tue Feb 4 18:03:20 2025 UTC; the page was automatically translated to English by Chrome)
Lead Stories performed a broad search for the keyword "Tesla" across Mexican government websites for the period between January 20, 2025, and this writing and later manually reviewed four pages of the resulting matches: None mentioned the 50 percent counter-tariff on these cars.
A search on Google News for the keywords "Mexico" AND "Sheinbaum" AND "Musk" AND "Pendejo" did not show any media reports about the president of Mexico using the offensive swear word to address Musk:
(Source: Google News screenshot taken on Tue Feb 4 16:04:42 2025 UTC)
A similar Google search across Mexican websites for keywords seen here, which was narrowed to the period between January 20, 2025, and this writing, didn't show any matches, either:
(Source: Google News screenshot taken on Tue Feb 4 16:52:28 2025 UTC)
Lead Stories contacted the Embassy of Mexico in the U.S. for additional comments but did not receive an immediate response.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims related to tariffs can be found here.
Stories of claims mentioning Elon Musk are here.
