• Stanley Druckenmiller has long been a close mentor and friend of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But Druckenmiller, one of Wall Street’s most revered investors, emphatically distanced himself from President Donald Trump’s sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” and the ensuing market sell-off, reiterating he doesn’t believe taxes on imports should exceed 10%.

Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are lambasting President Donald Trump’s sweeping “reciprocal tariffs,” which have sent global markets into a tailspin. Billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller is a longtime mentor and friend of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has dismissed concerns of a recession, but one of the world’s most revered investors has emphasized he’s no fan of taxing imports more than 10%.

That 10% threshold is the minimum baseline for the taxes imposed on goods from every U.S. trading partner—as well as the penguins on the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands—which went into effect Saturday. Many countries and territories are due to be hit with much higher tariffs, including a 50% tax on imports from Lesotho, one of the world’s poorest nations. Even allies like the European Union and Japan were hit with tariffs of 20% or higher.

A global sell-off ensued after Trump presented his chart of reciprocal tariffs Wednesday, with the S&P 500 declining 10.5% over the next two days. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers found it was the index’s fourth-worst two-day plunge since World War II, following “Black Monday” in 1987, the 2008 financial crisis, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of the world’s most famous money managers, including Trump backer Bill Ackman, have suggested the carnage was avoidable. In an interview with CNBC in January, Druckenmiller said the risks from tariffs were overblown relative to their potential rewards, provided they remained below 10%.

The 71-year-old is renowned on the Street for never suffering a down year while running his investment firm, which he founded as a hedge fund in 1981 and then converted into a family office in 2010. He’s also been a big critic of America’s rising deficit. When it comes to paying America’s debts, he said he’d prefer hikes to tariffs than raising income taxes.

“It’s more like they’re the lesser of two evils,” he said.

But when a clip of the interview was shared on X Sunday, Druckenmiller emphatically underlined his opposition to the latest tariff salvo in a rare post on the social-media platform.

“I do not support tariffs exceeding 10%,” he wrote, “which I made abundantly clear in the interview you cite.”