I sold all my Tesla shares (TSLA), here’s why
I fully divested from Tesla (TSLA), selling all my shares. I’m going to try to explain why. At Electrek, we like to be clear about our biases rather than claim we have none.
I’ve followed Tesla since 2008 and invested in the company after it went public in 2010. I started writing about EVs, and especially Tesla, full-time in 2015.
I invested in the stock mainly because I fully supported Tesla’s mission to accelerate the advent of electric transportation. I thought then, and still do today, that a combination of battery-powered vehicles, with the ethical sourcing of raw battery materials, battery recycling, and renewable electricity production to power electric vehicles, is the only solution to making the transportation sector long-term sustainable while decarbonizing it.
Over the years, I had become a fan of electric vehicles, but I was clueless about how they could become mainstream until I read Elon Musk’s 2006 ‘Tesla secret master plan’. The plan made sense to me: make a high-end electric vehicle that is uncompromising against its gas-powered counterparts. Once you prove that it can be done, make increasingly cheaper and higher-volume EV models with the same approach.
That sounds simple, but it was a difficult task from an engineering perspective. Either way, it seemed to be the only way to meaningfully move the industry toward battery-electric vehicles.
On top of Musk’s blog post, which Tesla has recently removed from its website, I was also convinced by lectures given by Tesla’s original two co-founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
While these guys have been forgotten by many as part of Tesla’s history, partly due to Musk’s own effort, I credit them as early pioneers of the electric revolution. They were great early communicators of the feasibility of electrifying the auto industry and the necessity to do it.
Not without hurdles, Tesla did it. I am not going to recap Tesla’s entire incredible history, but the company was successful in convincing the world and the auto industry that electric vehicles are here, here to stay, and the future of the industry — something that most were denying less than a decade ago.
Tesla engineered and designed several highly competitive and attractive EV products, managed to ramp them up to millions of units, and forced the rest of the industry to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in electric vehicles.
This was possible due to a lot of different factors. A lot:
- The vision of Tesla’s early leadership
- Elon Musk’s early funding and leadership
- The incredible talent that the mission attracted, including many early employees that became critical to Tesla, like JB Straubel, Drew Baglino, Deepak Ahuja, Franz von Holzhausen, and many more
- The support of early investors like Antonio Gracias, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Skoll, and Steve Jurvetson, among others
- The support from other automakers, like Daimler and Toyota, who both invested in Tesla at a critical time
- Government support was a big one, especially California’s support. California regulations, which spread to other states in the US known as ‘CARB states’, were critical in Tesla’s early success and were also factors in Daimler and Toyota’s investments as the automakers made deals with Tesla to help them produce EVs to comply with the state regulations. Later, the federal EV tax credit helped, the IRA helped, the solar tax credit, and more also helped.
- The support from passionate owners
- The support from passionate retail investors
I’m most likely forgetting some factors, but these are some of the most important ones, in my opinion.
Many will say that they weren’t equally important, and that might be true, but I seriously doubt that Tesla would have survived if you removed any of these factors.
If you contributed to any of these factors, it’s my personal opinion that you should be proud to have contributed to the electrification of the auto industry.
The Shift
In the last few years, Tesla has become a widely different company. My main issue with this shift is that I no longer feel like the original mission to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport or renewable energy is a priority.
Now, it’s all about AI, self-driving, and robots.
I’m not saying that those things are wrong or that they will not happen. I think all these technologies are important and will transform the world, but it’s simply not what I invested in.
I would also argue that Tesla is not the same company, which makes sense since the company is no longer about its mission.
That’s my main issue. It can’t be more evident than Tesla’s EV deliveries tracking down year-over-year for the first time in a decade, Musk canceling EV programs in favor of Robotaxi, and even the CEO going as far as saying that “Tesla is worth nothing without self-driving.”
My other issue is the leadership. I don’t trust Elon Musk anymore. I think a combination of social media addiction and the cult of personality around him has broken his feedback loop and set him on the wrong path.
I think he disqualified himself from running Tesla or any public company when he started threatening to breach his fiduciary duty to shareholders if he didn’t get 25% control over Tesla.
On top of my distrust of the CEO, I think that his own changes in the last few years, combined with the shift away from the mission, have driven a lot of the rest of the leadership away:
As part of my job, I track the comings and goings of top talent at Tesla very closely, and in the last few years, I’ve seen tons of high-level departures and very few new top hires.
There’s still a lot of great talent at Tesla, I’m not denying that, but I think it’s also clear that there has been a significant talent exodus at Tesla, especially over the last year.
Despite these issues becoming clear to me over the last few years, I remained a shareholder because I naively thought things could go back to normal. I thought maybe Musk would wake up from his social media-fueled madness, or shareholders would give him the boot.
This brings me to my next issue: I am becoming unaligned with the majority of Tesla shareholders.
It couldn’t have been clearer when 73% of them voted to reinstate Musk’s ~$50 billion compensation package without any change after a legal discovery process showed that the board and the CEO didn’t follow due process in getting the original shareholder vote.
Some greedy lawyers and a courageous judge gave Tesla shareholders an opportunity to tell Musk and Tesla’s board that the company deserves proper governance and not be “run like a family business,” as Tesla’s largest independent investor said.
The timing was incredible. The opportunity came right after:
- Musk threatened shareholders to not build products he himself claimed were critical to Tesla if he didn’t get 25% of the company
- He sold tens of billions of dollars worth of Tesla shares to buy Twitter, said he would stop selling and yet kept going
- He entirely lost his mind for a while and challenged Mark Zuckerberg to an MMA fight, then chickened out (I thought this was all a joke at first, and it might have been at first, but it undoubtedly became not a joke)
- Musk seemed completely uninterested in Tesla for about a year, when he was running Twitter, SpaceX, Neurallink, the Boring Company, and xAI – with many of those companies recruiting from Tesla. Then, he returned and fired 15-20% of the company, including the entire charging team for no good reason.
- Finally, he canceled the stock options of Tesla employees
The last one was a big one for me. Musk had just canceled the stock options for Tesla employees just a month before the judge’s decision to rescind his own stock option package. Right after the judge’s decision, Musk got interested in Tesla again, started talking about the company more, and, of course, started to fight to get his own stock options back.
In his view, his stock options are essential, but those of Tesla employees? Less so.
I thought that Tesla shareholders would see the hypocrisy in this. They would see that Musk has become a burden at Tesla more than an asset.
Instead, despite all those factors, Tesla shareholders convinced themselves that it was “the right thing to do” to give more money to the wealthiest man in the world. Not only that, they made “lists” of shareholders who said they were voting against the package and told them to go ‘f*ck’ themselves and that they wouldn’t be part of the Tesla community anymore.
I don’t want to be a part of that anymore. I still love many of Tesla’s products and I will keep reporting on them, but I am completely unaligned with the investor base, so I don’t think it makes sense for me to be a shareholder anymore.
Finally, and for full disclosure, the last reason why I sold has nothing to do with Tesla. I see a lot of signs that we are entering a recession. I prefer to be more liquid in those situations, and Tesla is up 10% in two days for seemingly no reason, so it felt like a good time to get out since I don’t feel aligned with shareholders.
I sincerely hope the best for them, though. I know that many of them are well-intentioned people. That said, I recommend caution as I think you are also in the company of low-moral individuals who are poisoning the TSLA community.
FSD side note: what if Tesla does solve self-driving? I am mentioning it because I know this is something that keeps a lot of people in, but there’s no FOMO for this MOFO. If it happens, it happens. I’ll celebrate it and shed a tear for my wallet.
I’m the first to admit that if Tesla can solve self-driving with its approach, it would result in unprecedented value creation, but I am simply not convinced that this will happen anytime soon or before others can solve it.
Why? As a Tesla shareholder, you have two options: take Elon at his word or trust the data.
For the reasons mentioned above, I don’t trust what Elon says, so we can forget about the former.
As for the latter, despite Tesla now openly using miles between interventions as a metric to track FSD progress, the automaker has never released this data. This is a giant red flag.
For the data, we have to rely on our own experience with the system and the experience of others. I’ve had Tesla FSD for years and I’ve been impressed at times and unimpressed other times. The only thing I’m certain of based on my experience is that it is currently nothing close to an unsupervised self-driving system.
We can also use the crowdsourced data, which is limited, but the best we have since Tesla refuses to release its own:
The average of the v12.5.1 versions, the latest to be released, is 32 miles between disengagement and 128 miles between critical disengagement.
This compares to 30 miles between disengagement and 189 miles between critical disengagement for v12.3.6, which is the last FSD version that went into a wide release earlier this year.
Elon is talking about 3x that this month and maybe 6x that next month. He has been consistently wrong about these predictions, but even if he was right, most experts are talking about 400x to 1,000x needed to achieve an unsupervised robotaxi service.
Even with exponential growth, this will take way longer than what Elon is claiming right now. Then, it needs to make that work on the current hardware and the HW3, which is already running a smaller model than HW4.
If the Tesla investment thesis relies on this program to work, which is what Elon himself is saying, it’s a pass for me.
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Hyundai has unveiled the design refresh of its Ioniq 6 sedan, and announced that it will become a family of cars rather than a single model, with an N Line trim and upcoming N performance model, much like its sister car the Ioniq 5.
Hyundai has been doing great with its EVs lately, hitting sales records and getting great reviews.
Much of that focus has been on the Ioniq 5, an attractive crossover SUV with lots of capability at a good price – and a bonkers N performance version which has been breaking different kinds of records.
The Ioniq 6, conversely, hasn’t attracted quite as much attention, even though it has some records of its own (it’s the most efficient vehicle in the US… for under $70k).
Between its admittedly odd looks – much more aerodynamic and rounded than the comparatively blocky 5 – and it fitting into the less-popular (but better) sedan form factor, it just hasn’t captured as much imagination as the 5.
It has also fallen somewhat behind. The Ioniq 5 got a big update this year, including a native NACS port, the first non-Tesla mass market vehicle to hit the road with one of these included (and it even charges faster than a Tesla does on home turf). The 6, however, is still sitting on its original design from when it first started production/shipping in 2022/23.
But that’s about to change, as Hyundai is giving the model some love with a design update and some hints at new things to come.
We’ve seen spy shots of these design updates before, but now Hyundai is showing them to everyone at the Seoul Mobility Show.
Hyundai showed two models today, the standard Ioniq 6 and the “N Line,” an upgraded trim level with some interior and exterior changes to look a little more sporty. Hyundai has used similar nomenclature for its other models, and that carries over here.
Both have a redesigned front end, making it look more aggressive than the prior bulbous and aerodynamic shape, and narrower headlights.
The N Line looks even more aggressive than the standard model, though, with an even more aggressive front and rear end.
Hyundai says that the redesign will also include interior enhancements for “a more comfortable, intuitive experience,” with a redesigned steering wheel, larger climate control display, upgraded materials and redesigned center console with more physical controls.
Beyond this, the refresh was light on details – intentionally, with a full unveil of specs and changes coming later. We can imagine a lot of the improvements on the 2025 Ioniq 5 will be carried over, such as a native NACS port for example, and potentially a slightly larger or faster-charging battery.
We had also previously heard hints that an N version (yes, “N” and “N Line” are different, no, we don’t know why they used these confusing names) of the Ioniq 6 is coming, and Hyundai reiterated those hints today – even giving us a glimpse of the car in the background of one of its shots.
Now THIS one looks quite aggressive, with a bigger double wing and potentially some changes to the diffuser (it’s hard to tell from the shot, as the N Line also has a modified diffuser).
The ioniq 5N has earned rave reviews from enthusiasts for its bonkers driving dynamics and comparatively reasonable price for a true performance vehicle. But it’s still an SUV format, and frankly, an SUV will never be a sportscar no matter how many horsepower you put into it (I will die on this hill).
The 6, however, with its sedan shape and footprint, could make for a much more compelling sports package once it’s all put together. So we’re very excited to see what Hyundai can do if they apply the same magic they put into the 5 into a new 6N. Looking forward to July.
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Over the next two years, homebuilder Lennar is outfitting more than 1,500 new Colorado homes with Dandelion Energy’s geothermal systems in one of the largest residential geothermal rollouts in the US.
The big draw for homeowners is lower energy bills and cleaner heating and cooling. Dandelion claims Lennar homeowners with geothermal systems will collectively save around $30 million over the next 20 years compared to using air-source heat pumps. Geothermal heat pumps don’t need outdoor AC units or conventional heating systems, either.
Geothermal systems use the sustained temperature of the ground to heat or cool a home. A ground loop system absorbs heat energy (BTUs) from the earth so that it can be transferred to a heat pump and efficiently converted into warmth for a home. Dandelion says its ground loop systems are built to last for over 50 years and should require no maintenance.
Dandelion’s geothermal system uses a vertical ground closed-loop system that is installed using well-boring equipment and trenched back into the house to connect to a heat pump. The pipes circulate a mixture of water and propylene glycol, a food-grade antifreeze, that absorbs the ground’s temperature. A ground source heat pump circulates the liquid through the ground loops and it exchanges its heat energy in the heat pump with liquid refrigerant. The refrigerant is converted to vapor, compressed to increase its temperature, then passed through a heat exchanger to transfer heat to the air, which is circulated through a home’s HVAC ductwork.
Daniel Yates, Dandelion Energy’s CEO, called the partnership with Lennar a “new benchmark for affordable, energy-efficient, and high-quality home heating and cooling.” By streamlining its installation process, Dandelion is making geothermal systems simpler and cheaper for homebuilders and homeowners to adopt.
This collaboration is happening at a time when Colorado is pushing hard to meet its clean energy targets. Governor Jared Polis is excited about the move, calling it a win for Coloradans’ wallets, air quality, and the state’s leadership on geothermal energy. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said that “ensuring affordable access to geothermal heating and cooling is essential to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, and we’re excited to be part of such a huge effort to bring this technology to so many new Colorado homes.”
And it’s not just about cutting emissions – geothermal heat pumps help reduce peak electric demand. Analysis from the Department of Energy found that widespread adoption of these systems could save the US from needing 24,500 miles of new transmission lines. That’s like crossing the continental US eight times.
Colorado is making this transition a lot more attractive through state tax credits and Xcel Energy’s rebate programs. These incentives slash upfront costs for builders like Lennar, making geothermal installations more financially viable. The utility’s Clean Heat Plan and electrification strategy are working to keep energy bills low while meeting climate goals.
Read more: This will be the first geothermal energy storage system on the Texas grid
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Polestar has removed the Polestar 2 from its US website header in an early sign of how new tariffs will restrict choice and competition for American consumers, thus increasing prices.
The Polestar 2 is Polestar’s first full EV – the original Polestar 1 was a limited-edition plug-in hybrid.
It started production in 2020 in Luqiao, Zhejiang, China, where Polestar and Volvo’s parent corporation, Geely, was founded.
And there’s the rub: while Polestar’s newer EV, the 3 (which we just drove the new single motor version of last week), is built in South Carolina, the 2 is not.
Unfortunately, that interacts with some news that has been getting a lot of play lately: tariffs.
The US has been gradually getting stupider and stupider on the issue of tariffs, apparently determined to increase prices for Americans and decrease the competitiveness of American manufacturing in a time of change for the auto industry.
It is widely acknowledged (by anyone who has given it a few seconds of thought) that tariffs increase prices and that trade barriers tend to reduce competition, leading to less innovation.
It started with 25% tariffs on various products from China, implemented in the 2018-2020 timeframe. Then, in 2024, President Biden implemented a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, effectively stopping their sale in the US. These tariffs included some exceptions and credits based on Volvo’s other US manufacturing, which Polestar had used to keep the most expensive versions of the 2 on sale in the US, while restricting the lower-priced versions from sale. Nevertheless, they were a bad idea.
Now, in yet another step to make America less competitive and inflate the prices of goods more for Americans, we got more tariff announcements today from a senile ex-reality TV host who wandered into the White House rose garden (which he does not belong in). These tariffs do not include the same exceptions as the previously-announced Biden tariffs.
Apparently this has all been enough for Polestar, as even in advance of today’s tariff announcements, the company suddenly removed its Polestar 2 from its website header today.
The change can be seen at polestar.com/us, where only the Polestar 3 and 4 are listed in the header area. On other sites, like the company’s Norwegian website or British website, the car is still there. The Polestar 2 page is still up on the US website, but it isn’t linked to elsewhere on the site (we’ll see how long it stays up).
We reached out to Polestar for comment, but didn’t hear anything back before publication. We’ll update if we do.
It makes sense that the Polestar 2 would still be for sale elsewhere, as it only started production in 2020. Most car models are available for at least 7 years, so this is an earlier exit than expected.
So it’s likely that all of the tariff news is what had an effect in killing the Polestar 2.
Then again, this is also just the second day of a new fiscal quarter. Perhaps the timing offers Polestar an opportunity to make a clean break – especially now that the lower-priced version of its Polestar 3 is available.
Despite the lower $67.5k base price of the new Polestar 3 variant, that represents a big increase in price for the brand, which had sold the base model Polestar 2 for around $50k originally, before all of these tariffs.
Update: Polestar got back to us with comment, but understandably, it doesn’t say much:
Polestar is a three-car company and Polestar 2 is available for customers now. There are a select number of Polestar 2s in stock at retailers that can be found on Polestar.com, but Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 will be the priority in the North American market.
Electrek’s Take
This isn’t the first car that America has been deprived of due to tariffs. The Volvo EX30, one of our most anticipated vehicles, and Electrek’s Vehicle of the Year for 2024, had its American availability pushed back due to tariffs.
Volvo decided to build the car in Belgium and export it to the US, but now that new tariffs apply to the EU as well, maybe that low-priced, awesome, fast, small EV will instead stay in Europe instead of being shipped overseas.
This shows how mercurial tariff fiats from an ignoramus are bad for manufacturing, as they mean that companies can’t make plans – and if they can’t make plans, eventually, they’ll probably just write the country making the random decisions out of their plans so they don’t have to deal with the nonsense.
And we’ve heard this from every businessperson or manufacturer representative we’ve talked to at any level of the automotive industry. Nobody thinks any of this is a good idea, because it objectively is not. All it does is make business harder, make the US less trustworthy, make things more expensive, and overall just harm America.
Yet another way that Americans are getting screwed by this stupid nonsense. 49% of you voted for inflation, and 100% of Americans are now getting it. Happy Inflation Day, everyone.
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