The Magnificent Seven on the ropes over Trump's tariffs

BarcelonaUS President Donald Trump baptized as Liberation Day (Liberation Day) on April 2, when he signed the executive order to implement his new tariff policy that has turned global trade upside down. Liberation Day It has also marked a turning point for the Magnificent Seven, as the seven most powerful American companies are known: Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp's parent company), Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla. The seven most valuable companies in the world seemed like a sure thing, but now they are faltering: are they no longer Magnificent?

Inspired by the iconic western The Magnificent Seven, which featured a group of seven gunmen, the financial world adopted the term to represent a group of influential companies; the seven with the highest performance and influence on Wall Street. They share the fact that they are all technology companies, listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, dominate very broad markets, and have a great capacity to adapt. For a few years now, these multinationals have been skyrocketing in the markets and closed 2024 at all-time highs: together they had a market capitalization of more than $13 trillion.

But 2025 has been a nightmare for the Magnificent Seven: Donald Trump's victory in the US has already installed a hint of uncertainty among investors, and the DeepSeek breakthrough, the Chinese artificial intelligence that emerged as a surprise and a blow to ChatGPT and OpenAI, ended up shaking the markets. At that time, NVIDIA, the major chip manufacturer, had already lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a single session.

But the worst was yet to come. The tariffs imposed by Trump directly affect these companies, which are heavily dependent on products manufactured in Asia. On the trading day alone, Liberation DayThese companies lost more than a trillion dollars, and Wall Street as a whole lost more than double that. Thus, so far this year, the aggregate index of the Magnificent Seven has fallen 22%, and its performance remains uncertain.

Technological euphoria

"The main reason for these sharp declines since the beginning of the year is that these are the companies whose profits have grown the most in recent years," explains Xavier Brun, professor of the master's degree in finance and banking at UPF-BSM.

"These are companies within a sector where it seems you can always grow further," Brun clarifies, which makes expectations of an upward trend very high. In fact, with the start of the AI wave, investors began to shift their capital toward these companies, which began to grow increasingly larger. "Furthermore, we have to keep in mind that passive management causes people to invest in indexes—that is, in aggregates of companies—so, of every 100 euros, about 30 go to the Magnificent Seven. Therefore, the more money that went into the stock market, the more these companies rose, and the market became self-reinforcing," he explains.

The result of all this was an all-time high in profits and very high expectations of growth thanks to the technological wave: "The price per square metre and profits have shot through the roof," says Brun. "It's the same thing that's happening with apartments: there were only a few prices per square metre, and then prices per square metre plummeted," he explains.

Will they stop being magnificent?

Apple, Tesla, and NVIDIA are the ones that have the most to suffer from Trump. On the one hand, "Apple produces in China, and therefore, if iPhones have to be made in the US, they will cost two or three times more," says Brun. "And if they put tariffs on iPhones, it will cost Americans twice as much to buy them, but not us," he explains. On the other hand, "Tesla has factories in Asia," and, in fact, its founder, Elon Musk, despite being Trump's partner in the American administration, has already expressed his discomfort with the US president's tariff policy. "These tariffs are prompting many calls to Trump from very important people, and the pressure will only increase," says Brun.

All in all, the Magnificent Seven will probably continue to be magnificent for some time yet, although the adjective may falter. "They have already received this title and always will be, but like the Nifty Fifty [the name given to the fifty best companies in the sixties and seventies, which included Polaroid] seemed to be invincible, many ended up disappearing," explains the professor. innovation have disappeared and, therefore, what Apple does is increase prices, something that crush the consumer and also the application developers," Brun explains.