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White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attends a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on March 24, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Win McNamee | Getty Images

Tesla shares fell almost 6% on Wednesday as data from Europe showed slowing sales last month, and investors grew increasingly concerned about President Donald Trump’s plan for tariffs.

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) revealed on Tuesday that Tesla saw a 40% year-over-year drop in new vehicle registrations in Europe in February, while overall battery electric vehicle sales were up 26%.

Meanwhile, the White House said on Wednesday that President Trump will announce new tariffs on auto imports in the afternoon. The president has hyped April 2 as “liberation day” and “the big one” for rolling out his plan to impose heavy tariffs on foreign trading partners, but Trump hinted earlier this week that auto tariffs could arrive sooner.

Movements of this magnitude have become commonplace for Tesla’s stock. On 14 separate days this year, Tesla shares have gained or lost at least 5%. Wednesday’s selloff, alongside a 2% drop in the Nasdaq, followed a five-day rally that included a 12% jump on Monday.

The trend for the year has been downward, particularly since President Trump began his second term in January, and brought Tesla CEO Elon Musk with him to the White House. Tesla shares are down 36% since Inauguration Day, after falling 28% in February, the steepest drop for any month since December 2022.

Following the ACEA report on Tuesday, RBC analysts wrote in a note that the February numbers only represented a drop of about 11,000 Tesla vehicle registrations in Europe, and emphasized that data for the month “might not be indicative of true demand.”

New car buyers in Europe, the analysts said, “could be holding out for the Model Y refresh,” or a “new affordable model,” which they expect in the second half of the year.

Tesla is set to fully ramp up production of the redesigned version of its Model Y SUV next month. The company implemented partial production shutdowns at certain factories earlier this year to upgrade Model Y manufacturing lines.

Some prospective EV buyers have been turned off of late by Musk’s political rhetoric and his work for the Trump administration, where he’s leading an effort to slash federal government spending, cut the federal workforce, and has said he wants to privatize many services, including social security.

William Blair analysts wrote in a note on Wednesday that, “pushback from Musk’s foray into politics” has led to “brand damage and even vandalism,” for Tesla at a time when the company’s supply has been impacted by its Model Y changeover, and “Chinese competition continues to heat up.”

Still, the firm maintained its buy recommendation on Tesla’s stock, pointing to growth in the company’s energy storage business, and its prospects in driverless ride hailing. Musk has promised that Tesla will kick off a robotaxi service in Austin in June. The company has yet to begin production of its dedicated robotaxi, dubbed the Cybercab.

Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating a commercial robotaxi service in Austin and other markets. And in China, several automakers are now offering an equivalent to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Supervised — a premium, partially automated driving system — as standard options rather than a paid service.

In China this week, Tesla renamed its FSD system “Intelligent Assisted Driving,” according to CNEVPost, after previously branding it as “Full Self-driving Capability.” Tesla’s system in all markets still requires a human at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.

WATCH: Tesla expectations ‘near a bottom’

Tesla expectations 'near a bottom,' growth to come after: William Blair's Dorsheimer

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New bipartisan bill would require companies to report AI job losses

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New bipartisan bill would require companies to report AI job losses

A pedestrian walks past Amazon Ireland corporate offices in Dublin, as Amazon.com, Inc., said on Tuesday it plans to cut its global corporate workforce by as many as 14,000 roles and seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI), in Dublin, Ireland, Oct. 28, 2025.

Damien Eagers | Reuters

A new bipartisan bill seeks to provide a “clear picture” of how artificial intelligence is affecting the American workforce.

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Wednesday announced the AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act. It would require publicly traded companies, certain private companies and federal agencies to submit quarterly reports to the Department of Labor detailing any job losses, new hires, reduced hiring or other significant changes to their workforce as a result of AI.

The data would then be compiled by the Department of Labor into a publicly available report.

“This bipartisan legislation will finally give us a clear picture of AI’s impact on the workforce,” Warner said in a statement. “Armed with this information, we can make sure AI drives opportunity instead of leaving workers behind.”

The proposed legislation comes as politicians, labor advocates and some executives have sounded the alarm in recent years about the potential for widespread job loss due to AI.

In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the AI tools that his company and others are building could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and cause unemployment to spike up to 20% in the next one to five years. Anthropic makes the chatbot Claude.

Layoffs have been announced recently at companies across the tech, retail, auto and shipping industries, with executives citing myriad reasons, from AI and tariffs to shifting business priorities and broader cost-cutting efforts. Job cuts announced at Amazon, UPS and Target last month totaled more than 60,000 roles.

Some experts have questioned whether AI is fully to blame for the layoffs, noting that companies could be using the technology as cover for concerns about the economy, business missteps or cost cutting initiatives.

WATCH: Is AI behind recent job cuts? Here’s what to know

Is AI behind recent job cuts? Here's what to know

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Tesla sales in Germany have cratered from last year, data shows

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Tesla sales in Germany have cratered from last year, data shows

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Tesla plant in Gruenheide, Germany, on March 13, 2024.

Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tesla sold just 750 electric vehicles in Germany for October 2025, less than half of what it sold a year ago, according to data out Wednesday from the country’s federal transport authority, known as KBA.

In October last year, Tesla sold 1,607 EVs in Germany.

KBA data shows 434,627 new battery electric vehicles year to date, the KBA data said, up nearly 40% from the same period last year. Of those EVs, 15,595 were Teslas, a decline of 50% for Elon Musk‘s automaker this year.

Tesla operates a massive vehicle assembly plant in Brandenburg, Germany, which is outside of Berlin, but the company is not a hometown favorite.

Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of AfD, Germany’s extremist, anti-immigrant party, have weighed on left-leaning consumers’ interest in the Tesla brand there.

Read more CNBC tech news

Tesla also faces a passel of European and Chinese competitors throughout Europe offering smaller and more affordable EVs, many priced below 35,000 euros.

During October, Tesla began selling a new, lower-cost version of its Model Y SUV in Germany. The stripped-down version of the SUV was priced at 39,990 euros for the German market — about 5,000 euros lower than the cheapest, previously available versions of the Model Y there.

It remains to be seen whether Tesla’s new, lower-priced model variants can help revitalize demand for their EVs in Germany or Europe.

Policy changes ahead may lift EV sales in Germany, overall.

Germany scrapped incentives to boost purchases of fully electric vehicles about two years ago, a policy change that led to a sharp drop in demand for fully electric vehicles, initially. The country is now poised to start up a new EV incentive program that goes into effect in January 2026, and is intended to help lower- and middle-income buyers adopt zero tailpipe emission vehicles.

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Op-ed: The fuel for the AI boom driving the markets is advertising. It is also an existential risk.

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Op-ed: The fuel for the AI boom driving the markets is advertising. It is also an existential risk.

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025.

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

With OpenAI’s recent release of its AI browser, the historic level of capital expenditures being made in the current AI arms race may accelerate even further, if that is possible.

From the reciprocal, and some have said circular, nature of hundreds of billions in commitments in investment, tied to future chip purchases, to the extent to which GDP growth is reliant on this boom, some have said this is a bubble. A Harvard economist estimates 92% of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was due to investment in AI.

But much more needs to be understood about the connection between the breakneck investment in AI and the business models that underpins the entire economy: the advertising technology (Ad Tech) industrial complex.

For the past 25 years the infrastructure of the internet has been engineered to extract advertising revenue. Search Engine Marketing, the advertising business model at the core of Google, is perhaps the greatest business model of all time. Meta’s advertising business, based on engagement and attribution, is a close second. And right behind both of these is Amazon’s advertising business, powered by its position as the largest online retailer. While a smaller portion of Amazon‘s topline, its highly profitable advertising business makes up a disproportionate percentage of Amazon’s profits. So much so that nearly every major retailer has spun up their own version of retail media networks, all driving significantly to the bottom lines and market capitalization of massive companies like Walmart, Kroger, Uber (and UberEats), Doordash and many more.

In fact, these platforms have been using AI to refine their advertising business models for years, in the form of algorithmic models that powered their search and recommendation engines, and to increase engagement and better predict purchase decision, seeking an ever-greater share of all commerce, not just what is typically thought of as “advertising.” These three multi-trillion-dollar market cap companies either
wholly, or substantially, derive their profits from advertising. And now they are using some portion of those historically profitable advertising revenues to fuel infrastructure investments at a level the world has not seen outside of War Time spending by governments.

But at the same time, the latest wave of AI has the potential to disrupt the very same trillions in market cap that is fueling it. AI will, without question, change how people search (Google), shop (Amazon) and are entertained (Meta). Answers delivered without clicking around the web. AI-assisted shopping. Infinite personalized content creation.

If AI represents such a potential existential risk, why are Google, Meta and Amazon such a huge part of the current arms race to invest in AI? The “moonshot” outcome of would be that achieving Artificial General Intelligence, or Super Intelligence, AI that can do anything a human can, but better, would unlock so much value that it would dwarf any investment.

But there is more immediate urgency to protect, or disrupt, the advertising business model fueling the trillions in market cap and hundreds of billions of current investment, before someone else does. While the seminal paper that launched this phase of AI, “Attention is All You Need” was written by mostly Google researchers, it was OpenAI and Microsoft, and now Grok as well, that launched the current AI arms race. And they are not remotely as dependent on the current advertising industrial complex. In fact,
Sam Altman has called the feeds of the major platforms using AI to maximize advertising dollars, “the first at-scale misaligned AIs.” He is clearly stating which businesses he believes OpenAI is trying to disrupt.

What comes next?

This time is different, but it also comes with different risks. The major difference with the current fever in infrastructure investment vs the dotcom bubble of 2000, is that in large part the companies funding it are among the most profitable companies in the world. And so far, there has not been indications of cracks in the business model of advertising that is both funding their investments, and their market capitalizations (along with so many massive companies people wouldn’t think about being in the advertising business).

But if AI does disrupt, or even break, the current advertising model, the shock to the economy and markets would be far greater than most could imagine.

Google, Meta and Amazon are still best positioned to create new business models, and as mentioned, have been using AI for far longer to support their advertising business models with great success.

However, fundamentally changing the way people interface with search, commerce and content online will require just that, entirely new revenue models, maybe, hopefully, some that are aligned, that are not advertising based. But whatever the model, perhaps it is helpful to consider that the justification in AI
infrastructure spending may not be to just unlock new revenue, but to protect the business models that make up a much more significant portion of the market capitalization of public companies than most people are aware.

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