Tesla shares fell 6% in premarket trading on Thursday after the company reported a second straight quarter of declining automotive sales.

Elon Musk’s electric carmaker reported a top and bottom line miss on second-quarter results, noting that automotive revenue fell 16% year-on-year to $16.7 billion.

On an earnings call, Musk said Tesla “probably could have a few rough quarters” ahead as a result of the expiration of federal electric vehicle tax credits.

“I am not saying that we will, but we could,” Musk said.

Tesla has been facing rising competition in key markets like China and Europe, especially from lower costs Chinese electric vehicle players.

Data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, or ACEA, released on Thursday show Tesla’s new car registrations, declined in June in Europe.

Tesla shares have been hammered this year with the stock down nearly 18% to date, not including the Thursday premarket move.

Along with Tesla’s core auto business coming under pressure, Musk’s own political activity has been in focus. 

The tech billionaire played a key role at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, under President Donald Trump‘s administration and has endorsed Germany’s extreme anti-immigrant AfD party. In recent months, the two former allies have clashed over the president’s spending bill. Musk has since said he is forming his own political party.

Some investors have urged the billionaire to step away from politics, for fear that his involvement is hurting Tesla’s brand and sales.

Tesla investors have been eagerly waiting for the company to release a cheaper model to refresh the aging lineup and perhaps reinvigorate sales. Tesla management said it started limited production of the more affordable model in June and expects to ramp that up in the second half of the year.

Still, the outlook for the rest of the year remains murky as Tesla did not provide any official guidance — in a departure from earlier this year, when management said Tesla would return to growth in 2025.

“Management initially guided for deliveries growth in 2025. We interpret no guidance as a signal that management is no longer forecasting volume growth. This aligns with our expectation for deliveries to decline in 2025,” Seth Goldstein, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said in a Wednesday note.

U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to keep “woke AI” models out of Washington and to turn the country into an “AI export powerhouse” through the signing of three artificial intelligence-focused executive orders on Wednesday. 

The phasing out of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives — an umbrella term encompassing various practices, policies, and strategies aimed at fostering a more inclusive and equitable culture — has been a major focus of the second Trump administration. Now, the White House is bringing the battle to AI. 

The “PREVENTING WOKE AI IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT” order states that the federal government “has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.”

The executive order identifies DEI as one of the “most pervasive and destructive” of these ideologies to be kept out of AI models used by the government. 

“LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI,” the order said, adding that developers should not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM’s outputs unless those judgments are prompted by users. 

As acknowledged by the order, the use of AI is increasingly prevalent across Americans’ daily lives and is expected to play a critical role in the way they learn and consume information — making “reliable outputs” necessary.

In the eyes of the Trump administration, DEI in AI can lead to discriminatory outcomes; distort and manipulate AI model outputs in regard to race and sex; and incorporate concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality and systemic racism. 

“DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI,” the anti-woke order reads. 

Without giving specifics, the order refers to past examples of this, including a major AI model that changed the race or sex of historical figures such as the pope and Founding Fathers when prompted for images.  

In response to backlash last year, Google had pulled its Gemini AI image generation feature, saying it offered “inaccuracies” in historical pictures. Months later, the company rolled out an improved version. 

Instead of “woke AI”, the government should procure “truth-seeking” AI models that “prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory,” the order stated. 

However, it adds that the federal government “should be hesitant” to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace.

In other AI developments on Wednesday, the Trump administration signed an order to spur innovation in the technology by removing what it called “onerous Federal regulations that hinder AI development and deployment.”

Another order aims to establish and implement an “American AI Exports Program” to support the development and deployment of the U.S. AI technology stack abroad. 

The moves are part of the administration’s “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” which it says identifies 90 federal policy actions across three pillars: the acceleration of innovation, building of AI infrastructure, and leadership in international diplomacy and security.

Some of the biggest names of Estonia’s tech scene are backing Lightyear, a startup looking to become Europe’s answer to commission-free trading pioneer Robinhood.

Based in London, Lightyear develops an app that lets users invest in a range of over 5,000 stocks, exchange-traded funds and money market funds. It was founded by two former Wise employees, Martin Sokk and Mihkel Aamer, in 2021.

The company is set to announce later on Thursday that it has raised $23 million in a new round of funding led by NordicNinja, a Japanese-backed venture capital fund based in Europe. Estonian tech entrepreneur Markus Villig, who co-founded ride-hailing unicorn Bolt has also invested.

Lightyear CEO Sokk told CNBC that the firm didn’t necessarily need to raise more cash for the business but chose to do so because of the caliber of investors involved.

“People like Markus have been building massive companies in many, many markets, and this is something that’s really exciting for us because it’s so hard to go into all the markets and understand their local dynamics and what people need,” he said.

Lightyear currently operates in 25 countries. However, with help from angel investors like Bolt’s Villig, the firm will be able to launch in another five markets “pretty quickly,” Sokk said.

Villig told CNBC that it can be “challenging to scale a business across multiple countries in a heavily regulated sector,” adding that Europe’s less developed retail investing market provides ample opportunities for disruption.

Other Estonian angel investors who have previously backed Lightyear also participated in the funding round, including Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, Checkout.com’s former Chief Technology Officer Ott Kaukver and Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn.

Estonia is widely considered a prominent tech hub in Europe. The country is home to the highest number of unicorns per capita in Europe, according to the Estonian Investment Agency. Meanwhile, Estonia’s e-residency scheme has also enabled foreigners to become digital residents and launch their companies in the country.

The new round values five-year-old Lightyear at between $200 million and $300 million, significantly higher than its valuation in 2022 when it raised $25 million, according to two people familiar with the matter who preferred to remain anonymous as the information has not been made public.