Tesla shares tumble ahead of first-quarter earnings report
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attends a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on March 24, 2025.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
Tesla shares fell almost 6% on Monday, a day ahead of the electric vehicle company’s first-quarter earnings report, as analysts fret over “ongoing brand erosion.”
The stock closed at $227.50 leaving it less than $6 above its low for the year on April 8. The shares are now down 44% for the year after wrapping up their worst quarter since 2022 in March. It’s the 12th time this year the stock has dropped by at least 5% in a single session.
CEO Elon Musk’s many distractions outside of Tesla, especially his role within the Trump administration, are in focus, along with the company’s progress on a long-delayed robotaxi and self-driving technology for its existing cars.
In the online forum that Tesla uses to solicit investor inquiries in advance of its earnings calls, more than 300 questions were submitted pertaining to Tesla’s self-driving systems, around 200 came in about the company’s Optimus humanoid robots in development, and more than 160 questions poured in about Musk individually. One investor asked, “What steps has the board of directors taken to mitigate the brand damage caused by Elon’s political activities?”
After spending $290 million to help return Trump to the White House, Musk is now leading an initiative to slash tens of thousands of federal jobs, sell off or end leases for federal office buildings, and reduce U.S. government capacity.
Musk’s politics and antics have elicited a massive backlash in Europe and parts of the U.S. This year, the company has been hit with waves of protests, boycotts and some criminal activity that targeted Tesla vehicles and facilities in response to Musk.
Earlier this month, Tesla reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter, a 13% decline from the same period a year earlier.
The company is expected to report revenue of $21.24 billion for the first quarter, according to LSEG, which would mark a slight drop from the same period last year. Analysts expect earnings per share of 40 cents. Investors will be paying particularly close attention to any commentary about Trump’s widespread tariffs and the potential impact on revenue and earnings as the year progresses.
Oppenheimer analysts wrote in a note out Monday that “ongoing brand erosion” for Tesla in the U.S. and Europe is weighing on sales already, but a “bigger issue for the company is potential weakness in China demand and margin impact due to the Trump tariffs.”
They wrote that competition in China, coupled with “nationalistic” consumer trends there, could “drive sales toward domestic brands.” Tesla would then have to export more of its China-made cars, which could lead to “downward pressure on pricing,” the Oppenheimer analysts said.
Caliber, a research firm that tracks how U.S. consumer sentiment is shifting around major brands, found that only 27% of its survey respondents in March would consider purchasing a Tesla, compared to 46% in January 2022.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, a longtime Tesla bull, is hoping for a “turnaround vision” from Musk on Tuesday’s earnings call.
“Tesla has now unfortunately become a political symbol globally of the Trump Administration/DOGE,” he wrote, noting that “Tesla’s stock has been crushed since Trump stepped back into the White House.”
Ives estimated 15% to 20% “permanent demand destruction for future Tesla buyers due to the brand damage Musk has created” by working for Trump.
Late last week, Barclays maintained the equivalent of a sell rating and slashed its price target on Tesla to $275 from $325, citing a “confusing set-up” on the first-quarter with “weak fundamentals.” The firm said it could see a positive reaction if Musk is more focused on his automaker, and depending on what the company discloses about an anticipated “FSD event,” referring to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving offering.
Tesla said in announcing its reporting date that, in addition to earnings, it will provide a “live company update,” language the company hasn’t typically used in disclosures.
WATCH: Why investors are divided on Tesla’s turn to robots and self-driving cars
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new offering for researchers to use the company’s artificial intelligence technology in the advancement of scientific discovery.
Claude for Life Sciences is built around Anthropic’s existing AI models, but supports new connections with other scientific tools that are commonly used in labs during research and development.
It will be able to help researchers through all stages of the discovery process, from carrying out literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, drafting regulatory submissions and more, Anthropic said.
The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first formal entry into the sector, and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as its head of biology and life sciences.
“Now is the threshold moment for us where we’ve decided this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams told CNBC in an interview. “We want a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude, in the same way that that happens today with coding.”
Anthropic, which is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, develops a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has swelled to $183 billion in just four years.
The company launched a new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and said it is “significantly better” at life sciences tasks like understanding laboratory protocols.
Kauderer-Abrams said researchers have already been engaging with Anthropic’s models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build out Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish.
That meant Anthropic had to establish integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, among others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, like Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said.
“We’re willing and enthusiastic about doing that grind to make sure that all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
In a prerecorded demo, Anthropic showed how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs that test different dosing strategies.
The scientist was able to query her lab’s data directly from Benchling, generate a summary and tables of key differences with links back to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist generated a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission.
Anthropic said an analysis like this used to require “days” of validating and compiling information, but now, it can be done in minutes.
Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can bring about real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but it’s also under “no illusions” that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years are not suddenly going to take one month, he said.
Instead, Anthropic is focused on exploring the time-consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process “piece by piece” to determine where AI could be most useful.
“We’re here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it’s done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
WATCH: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model
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