Tesla currently finds itself in quite a dilemma: the company’s core business is in free fall, with Elon Musk at the helm.
However, now that Tesla’s stock is firmly in the “meme stock” category, it would likely crash without him pumping it.
Nothing can prove that Tesla is a meme stock that trades on vibes more than the stock going up 20% this week after it reported its worst earnings in years and came in way below expectations.
Tesla’s earnings trends point to a company in a difficult situation:
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Tesla’s vehicle deliveries have been declining since 2024, along with its automotive gross margins, despite a rise in EV sales globally.
Last quarter, Tesla would have lost money if it weren’t for the sale of regulatory credits, despite energy storage sales surging.
Energy storage is Tesla’s only silver lining. Still, the company has warned that it could become problematic since it relies on inexpensive Chinese battery cells, which are now subject to tariffs. Furthermore, the competition is intensifying with companies like CATL and BYD, which supply battery cells to Tesla’s energy storage products, having launched competing products.
With Tesla’s EV sales dropping, in part due to Musk alienating half of Tesla’s customer base, and in part due to his leadership pushing for autonomous driving rather than a more diverse vehicle lineup, the automaker is in clear need of new leadership.
Musk is becoming too political and controversial to be the face of a consumer product company, and he is splitting his time with six different projects, making significant mistakes in the process.
Under Musk, Tesla has launched a single new vehicle in the last 5 years, the Cybertruck, and it has been a total commercial flop. He has been consistently wrong about when Tesla would solve self-driving for the last 10 years. Most CEOs would have been fired by now.
At this point, it is difficult to argue that Tesla’s business would not benefit from new leadership.
However, there is one aspect of Tesla that would not benefit from Musk leaving: Tesla’s stock. It currently trades at an insane 165 price-to-earnings ratio amid declining earnings.
That’s unheard of in the auto industry, and it is also extremely rare in the tech industry, in which Musk attempts to position Tesla to justify such a high P/E even though most of its earnings are still tied to selling cars.
The only reason Tesla is currently able to maintain this is the fact that there are a surprising number of people who believe Musk when he says that Tesla is on the verge of solving “real-world AI”, which refers to self-driving vehicles and humanoid robots.
That’s it.
Tesla’s stock price has basically become an index of how much investors trust Musk’s claims about Tesla’s self-driving and robotic efforts – because no one can argue that it has anything to do with Tesla’s core business and fundamentals since those are in free fall and would justify Tesla trading at about a fifth of its current valuation.
Therefore, the stock price relies on people believing that Musk, who has been consistently wrong about Tesla solving self-driving and never releasing any data to prove otherwise, is right this time about Tesla being on the verge of solving the problem and ahead of the competition.
If Musk leaves, those people would likely take the stock with them, resulting in a potential crash.
Electrek’s Take
That’s quite the conundrum.. for some. For me, you save the business and not the stock. The stock will eventually come down at some point anyway. The business of selling millions of EVs is actually good for the world and employs about 100,000 people.
Musk has been able to keep things going for a long time, to his credit, with the hope that Tesla will eventually catch up to his hype, but it looks like the most likely outcome is that he can only keep things going until other companies start to scale their autonomous driving efforts.
Waymo is already completing 250,000 autonomous rides per week in the US. Musk has been able to make his cult ignore that by claiming that it’s not scalable, even though those weekly rides have more than doubled in the last year.
In China, Baidu, WeRide, PonyAI, and others are already becoming mainstream.
As those efforts become more popular and the number of people who use them regularly reaches the millions, it will become harder for Musk to present Tesla as a leader in autonomy while carrying a decade of missed deadlines.
I think Tesla has a real shot at solving general autonomy, but I believe it will happen closer to 2027-2028, with a new hardware suite. By that time, Tesla will have plenty of established competition, in addition to Waymo, and it will carry the significant liability of having promised self-driving capabilities on millions of HW3-4 vehicles that it cannot deliver.
This is not a great situation, and it’s entirely because of Musk.
However, he has his position at Tesla secured. Even Tesla shareholders who have serious doubts about Tesla’s self-driving efforts don’t want to oust him on the off-chance that he might be right. This points to most of Tesla’s value currently lies in the mystique of Musk being a “super genius.”
You often see it on social media. When someone criticizes Musk or Tesla, instead of providing a counterargument to the criticism, Musk fans will simply attack the messenger and ask: “Who are you to question Musk? How many rockets have you landed?”
This is cult behavior. You can’t question the leader. It’s a perilous situation that rarely has a happy outcome.
Musk is smart, and his companies have achieved incredible things under his leadership, but that doesn’t mean he is a super genius who can’t make mistakes.
He has been wrong many times and has lied on numerous occasions. He has proven himself willing to lie and mislead people for his own benefit. That’s not someone you should put your trust in. People, especially in the US, tends to assign a ton of value to someone who has amassed wealth.
I am not someone who automatically thinks someone is bad because they are a billionaire. However, I also know that if you are somewhat intelligent, connected to wealthy individuals, and have low morals, it is fairly easy to accumulate wealth. I think Musk fits this category with a messiah complex on top of it.
I am curious to know if anyone sees a way out of this conundrum for Tesla at this point. As a fan of Tesla’s original mission to accelerate the advancement of electric transportation, I believe Tesla can still contribute to that goal, but not with Musk at the helm.
Yet, the only people who can kick Musk out are Tesla shareholders, and as described above, they are incentivized not to push him out because it would likely lead to a significant decline in Tesla’s stock price.
What can be done? I’ll hang out in the comments to see if you have ideas.
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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.
Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!
I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!
Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.
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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.
Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!
Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.
The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.
The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!
I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.
That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.
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The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.
Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images
Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.
This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.
In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”
The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.
One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.
Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.
They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.
Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.
At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.
In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more
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