Wall Street was pummeled for a second straight day on Friday, with prominent media and tech stocks like Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast and Apple taking a beating following President Trump’s new tariff plan.
The three major indexes all took major hits, with the Nasdaq dropping 5.82%, the S&P 500 dropping 5.97% and the Dow Jones dropping 5.50%. Friday’s sell-off marked the biggest single-day decline for the S&P 500 and Dow since COVID smacked the market in March 2020; Nasdaq’s Friday drop was its second-biggest since 2020, only trailing its Thursday sell-off for that unsavory title.
Apple, which has devices like the iPhone assembled overseas in China, India and Vietnam, has been rocked by the president’s tariff plan. The world’s most valuable company has seen its market cap drop more than $500 billion in two days, with Apple going from being valued at nearly $3.4 trillion on Wednesday afternoon to $2.83 trillion when markets closed on Friday. Apple’s stock was down 7.29% on Friday to $188.38 per share.
Warner Bros. Discovery, meanwhile, saw its share price drop 11.90% on Friday. Comcast dropped 6.55%, as the parent company of NBCUniversal is facing a potential drop-off in ad spending, as well as customers willing to pay for cable. Disney, which dropped 5.91% on Friday, could also have to weather customers having less money to spend on visiting its theme parks or its streaming service.
A number of media and tech stocks also took hits on Friday, including:
Google: -3.20%
Netflix: -6.67%
Amazon: -4.15%
Fox Corp.: -4.05%
News Corp: -5.72%
Roku: -8.26%
Paramount: -3.57%
All of those companies listed above were also down on Thursday. The back-to-back brutal days for Wall Street come after President Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariff plan, which included a 54% tariff against China and 24% on Japan. The president said the new tariffs would be America’s “declaration of economic independence” from other countries and help restore American manufacturing.
“April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn,” President Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. “In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs around the world. Reciprocal — that means, they do it to us, and we do it to them. Very simple, can’t get any simpler than that.”
President Trump did not seem too worried about the selloff on Thursday afternoon. He posted a clip of himself on Truth Social, telling reporters the market and the American economy are going to “boom” soon enough. He added that several countries are looking to “make a deal” to alleviate the tariffs, after America’s trade partners have “taken advantage of us for many years.”
Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives, in a note to clients on Friday, said he is worried the tariffs will wreck the market.
“The concept of taking the U.S. back to the 1980s ‘manufacturing days’ with these tariffs is a bad science experiment that in the process will cause an economic Armaddon in our view and crush the tech trade, AI Revolution theme and overall industry in the process,” Ives said.
The post Trump Tariffs Rock Wall Street Again as Apple Sheds $500 Billion in 2 Days appeared first on TheWrap.