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Elon Musk just made public and material lies aimed at Tesla shareholders. Here’s the proof with the relevant transcript.

Now, let’s see if the SEC still has teeth or if the US has fully entered its scam era under the Trump administration.

Today, Musk made false statements aimed at Tesla shareholders and directly addressed the stock price.

Here’s the video, transcript, and relevant information that proves Musk was lying:

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Tesla sales are strong everywhere but Europe

The CEO started the segment by claiming this:

Europe is our weakest market. We are strong everywhere else. Our sales are doing very well at this point. We don’t expect any meaningful sales shortfall.

Tesla’s weakest market is Europe, but sales are not “strong everywhere else.”

We have up-to-date data from China up to last week, and Tesla is having its worst performance in years in the critical EV market:

This is Tesla’s worst quarter start in the last two years based on the insurance registration data. It’s already confirmed that Q1 2025 sales were terrible everywhere, but up-to-date data in Europe and China confirm that Tesla is still struggling in China and Europe.

That’s also despite Tesla offering more incentives and discounts in China than ever. Model 3 and Model Y, representing over 95% of Tesla’s sales in China, are currently offered with 0% financing at Tesla’s cost.

When pressed about Tesla’s sales still being down in Europe, Musk answered:

Yes, that’s true of all manufacturers. There’s no exception. The European market is quite weak.

It’s a bummer that the host didn’t push back on this because it’s a blatant lie.

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) released the data a few weeks ago.

In the EU, EFTA, and the UK, Tesla’s sales were down 37% in Q1 2025. It’s true that other automakers were also down, but not “all manufacturers” and certainly plenty of “exceptions”:

As you can see, the Volkswagen Group was up 5% as a whole and the VW brand itself was more than 12% in the first quarter.

Renault and BMW were also up, as was SAIC.

The lie is even more blatant when you only look at the EV market, where Tesla operates. Battery electric car sales surged almost 24% in Europe in the first quarter, while Tesla’s sales dropped 37%.

Now, this was the last quarter. Maybe Musk could get away by claiming the turnaround is happening now or other automakers are now struggling in Q2.

However, this is also not true based on the latest up-to-date data.

Several European markets report daily vehicle registrations and based on this data, Tesla (left) is tracking way behind the same period last year and about the same as its terrible Q1 2025, while VW (right) is currently significantly outperforming right now compared to the last quarter or the same period in 2024:

This is also true of BMW, Ford, Hyundai-Kia, and several other automakers. So Musk’s claim of no exception is not even remotely true.

The stock market confirms Tesla is doing great

Musk used Tesla’s stock price as some sort of proof of what he is claiming:

Obviously, the stock market recognizes that since we are back now at over $1 trillion market cap. Clearly the market is aware of the situation. It’s already turned around.

This is a misleading statement. The stock price is in no way representative of Tesla’s sales. Musk has admitted that in the past. He said that “Tesla was worth nothing” if it didn’t solve self-driving.

The stock is completely disconnected from Tesla’s vehicle business.

More specifically, Musk is also wrong to claim that the market is “aware of the situation.”

Last quarter, Wall Street analysts were trying to track Tesla’s sales, but they missed badly.

For most of the quarter, Wall Street believed Tesla would deliver more than 400,000 vehicles and only started to update their estimates way down toward the second half of the quarter.

Even then, they still ended up overestimating Tesla’s deliveries by 40,000 units.

Therefore, it’s clear that the market is not well “aware” of Tesla’s current sales levels. The same thing is happening in Q2 2025. The current Wall Street consensus is that Tesla will deliver about 420,000 vehicles in Q2 2025 when the best data available show that Tesla is tracking below Q1 2025, when the automaker delivered 336,000 vehicles.

There’s still a month to go in the quarter, but it’s unlikely that Tesla will be able to accelerate deliveries enough to reach over 400,000 units.

Later on in the segment of the interview embedded above, Musk again referenced the stock price:

Again, you can just look at the stock price. If you want the best inside information, the stock market analysts have that and our stock wouldn’t be trading near all-time highs if things weren’t in good shape. They are fine. Don’t worry about it.

Again, we have clear data that show that “stock market analysts” are terrible at tracking Tesla’s sales, and the stock price is in no way representative of a company’s current performance.

It is simply representative of the demand for Tesla’s stock, which Musk himself admits is linked to Tesla’s autonomous driving effort.

Sales numbers are strong, no problem with demand

When pushed back on the demand front, Musk added:

The sales numbers are strong. And we see no problem with demand.

This is another lie. On top of the previously discussed declining sales, it’s worth mentioning that those declines are compared to 2024, a year when Tesla saw its first full-year decline in sales since starting volume vehicle production a decade ago.

In 2024 and now into 2025, Tesla has throttled down its production capacity to about 60% of its overall capacity due to low demand.

Even with fewer vehicles available, Tesla is now offering record discounts and subsidized financing rates at a great cost to the company – clear indicators of demand problems.

Where is the SEC?

These are clear, verifiable, and material lies aimed at Tesla shareholders. It’s a security violation that the SEC should be going after.

This will be a great test of how corrupt federal agencies are under the Trump administration.

The lies are verifiable right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they wait until Tesla reports its official deliveries for Q2 2025.

If they are significantly down versus Q2 2024, as expected, it would be easy to prove that Musk was misleading shareholders with these claims today.

What are the odds on the SEC actually going after this or letting it slide?

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Tesla inks $16.5B deal with Samsung for HW6 chips, but still no HW3 solution

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Tesla inks .5B deal with Samsung for HW6 chips, but still no HW3 solution

Tesla will use Samsung for as a supplier for its self-driving computer’s next-gen hardware in a $16.5 billion deal, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

But despite planning two generations ahead, the company still doesn’t have a solution to bring the promised full autonomy to hardware that it’s been promising that capability to since 2016.

Earlier today, Samsung announced a 22.8 trillion won ($16.5 billion) deal that would run through 2033. In that filing, Samsung did not name the customer, only that it is a “large global company”. Later, Bloomberg reported that the customer is Tesla, and Musk confirmed this on twitter. Then in his usual bravado, he stated that the deal is “likely much more than that.”

Musk also stated that the chips will be made in Samsung’s facility in Taylor, Texas. Manufacturing is likely to start in 2026.

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Samsung makes the chips for the self-driving computers in Tesla’s current vehicles, but the next generation will be made by TSMC, first in Taiwan and then later in Arizona. Then the next-next generation will be covered by this new Samsung deal.

The new deal is significant due to TSMC’s global dominance of chipmaking. Samsung has had significant unused capacity, so the Tesla deal is a big boost for the company’s chip foundry business.

Tesla has gone through several generations of chips, previous referred to as “HW,” standing for “hardware,” with a number indicating their generation. More recently, Tesla started referring to its chips with “AI” instead of “HW,” in order to incorporate the tech buzzword du jour.

Currently Tesla is on HW4/AI4, and TSMC will make HW5, then Samsung will make HW6 again.

These generations of hardware each get successively more capable, and can handle more data and thus theoretically become better at self-driving tasks.

Current Tesla HW4 vehicles cannot drive themselves, and are only capable of SAE level 2 operation, which requires an attentive driver behind the steering wheel (though Tesla’s solution does work better than most others). Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ system is currently operating in Austin without anyone in the driver’s seat, but has a “safety rider” who can take control of the vehicle, blurring the line somewhat on which SAE level it is operating at.

But what about HW3?

There’s a problem with the differentiation between these generations of hardware: ever since 2016, when Tesla was on version 2 of its hardware, it has promised full self-driving capability on all of its vehicles.

This was announced in a blog post on October 19, 2016, which has since been deleted from Tesla’s website but is still available through archive.org.

Tesla stated, at the time, that every single Tesla vehicle produced after that date had the hardware that would allow for full self-driving.

It eventually became apparent that HW2 would not be capable of full self-driving tasks, and Tesla upgraded to HW3, promising all HW2 customers that they would get a free upgrade to HW3 if they bought Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, which has varied in price over time but once cost $15,000.

However, Tesla still tried to charge owners $1,500 for that hardware upgrade, even though Tesla sold cars claiming that they had all the hardware needed for full self-driving.

One owner had to take Tesla to court to get them to deliver on this promise, and Tesla is still charging $1,000 for this hardware owners already bought. And that’s not the only one, there are a number of other self-driving false advertising cases that have gone to court, arbitration, or reached a settlement.

Now, with the change from HW3 to HW4, we’re seeing indications of a similar run-around.

We’ve already seen differing FSD software versions based on which hardware level vehicles have, with HW3 vehicles getting updates later than HW4 vehicles do. On last week’s Q2 earnings call, Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja said:

What we want to do is get unsupervised done on hardware four first. Once it’s done, then we’ll go back and look at what we need to do with the hardware three cars. Like I said, the focus is first to get unsupervised out and then we’ll go back and see what more work we need to do.

“Unsupervised” is Tesla’s new name for actual full self-driving, which would allow a vehicle to drive without the supervision of someone in the driver’s seat. This as opposed to “supervised FSD,” a phrase Tesla started using after about a decade of promising full self-driving without delivering it.

Here, Taneja said that HW3 cars will eventually get FSD, but Tesla hasn’t really figured out the path to that, and it’s focusing on new cars first, then will go back around to see what needs to happen.

Previously, Musk had stated that Tesla “will have to upgrade people’s hardware 3 computer,” but more recently it has become apparent that Tesla really doesn’t have a plan for that upgrade. And Taneja’s comments suggest that Tesla will still try to wedge FSD onto HW3, despite previously admitting that the system is not capable of it.

The existence of future HW5 and even HW6 chips also suggest that current systems are not capable of full self-driving. If HW4 is FSD-capable, then why would Tesla need two more generations of chip in the next two years in order to do the tasks that it promised all of its cars could do a full decade prior?

So, much more than having no solution for HW3 cars (or even HW2 cars, some of which have gotten free upgrades, but others who have been charged $1,000 to upgrade to a computer they already paid for), does this mean that Tesla is going to kick the can further down the road, and eventually have no solution for HW4 and HW5 either?

And, when will we know about these solutions? Tesla has sold millions of vehicles with the promise of self-driving which will seemingly need an upgrade at some point. And many of those vehicles are old enough, at this point, to be retired, despite spending up to $15,000 on a piece of software that has never been delivered to them.

An HW6/AI6 computer will surely have all sorts of new whizbang capabilities, but we were promised those capabilities years ago, and they’re still not delivered yet.


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Mary Kay goes electric with new Pink Cadillac OPTIQ (cue the music)

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Mary Kay goes electric with new Pink Cadillac OPTIQ (cue the music)

Mark Kay’s iconic Pink Cadillac awards are driving into the future for 2025. The company’s first-ever electric Pink Cadillac OPTIQ made its debut during the Mary Kay annual Seminar in Charlotte this weekend, symbolizing a “recharged vision” for the future of the popular brand.

Pioneers in monetizing friendships female empowerment and entrepreneurship, the Pink Cadillac is considered one the most coveted symbols of achievement for Mary Kay sales reps, signifying not just great sales (GM Authority reported that it took ~$102,000 in annual sales to qualify back in 2001), but also leadership, a history of mentoring others, and a sustained reputation of excellence among their peers.

The women you see behind the wheel of the Pink Cadillac are the real deal, in other words, and the big Caddy really does mean something to people in the know.

The iconic pink Cadillac was born in 1968 when Mary Kay Ash purchased a Cadillac Coupe De Ville from a Dallas dealership and promptly had it painted to match the pale pink Mary Kay lip and eye palette. General Motors later named the color Mary Kay Pink Pearl, and the shade is exclusive to Mary Kay.

MARY KAY

Now, the Pink Cadillac is going to stand for environmental sustainability, too, enabling Mary Kay’s top performers to set yet another positive example for anyone aspiring to their success.

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“For decades, the Mary Kay pink Cadillac has symbolized accomplishment, aspiration, and the power of recognition,” said Ryan Rogers, Chief Executive Officer of Mary Kay. “With the introduction of the all-electric OPTIQ, we’re honoring that iconic legacy while driving into a transformative future—one grounded in our commitment to sustainability and dedication to inspiring and celebrating the achievements of our independent sales force for generations to come.”

Mary Kay announced its new Pink Cadillac with this video, below.

Same Legacy, New Energy


“The legacy continues with the new, all-electric (and still very pink) Cadillac Otiq [sic],” reads the official Mary Kay copy on YouTube. “The Optiq remains instantly recognizable with the pink pearl exterior, while modernizing with sleek, cutting-edge features. In addition, this vehicle showcases our commitment and dedication to sustainability by reducing our carbon footprint while continuing to inspire.”

Speaking of inspiration, I can’t hardly hear the words “Pink Cadillac” without thinking of the song. But, since “Bruce Springsteen” has become something of a trigger word for the MAGA snowflakes in the audience, I’ll post a different, but similarly great song about rose-tinted GM flagships from Dope Lemon. You can let me know what you think of it in the comments.

As ever, the Cadillac is not a “gift,” per se – but typically takes the form of a two year lease paid for by Mary Kay. No word yet on what the exact shape and form the OPTIQ deal will take.

Electrek’s Take


Whatever you might think of MLMs or businesses like Amway, Avon, or Mary Kay, they play a big part in the social dramas of hundreds (if not thousands) of neighborhoods and online communities. The people at the top are influential, and the people “below” them genuinely try to emulate them and follow their lead.

Thanks to Mary Kay, that might soon mean a decision to buy an electric vehicle – and that result would be a win for everyone.

SOURCE | IMAGES: Mary Kay.


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First drive – RBW’s electric Roadster is a sporty modern take on British classics

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First drive - RBW's electric Roadster is a sporty modern take on British classics

RBW, a British handcrafted electric car manufacturer, brought its cute little Roadster out to Santa Monica and invited us up for a drive.

RBW has built cars in the UK for a few years now, but is about to set up US manufacturing in Virginia. Along with that comes a version of its Roadster modified for the US market, and we got a sneak peek with a short drive in Santa Monica.

The RBW Roadster is a small, hand-built, retro-style EV, meant as a modern take on British classics. But it’s not an actual classic itself – it’s a newly-built vehicle, with a new body, modern safety features, and even some electronics, like CarPlay and Android Auto (but not much else – there’s no huge, cockpit-defining screen, just a 9″ one, with retro gauges in front of the driver. But it does have a backup camera!).

Our drive was short, just a quick trip up and down the most trafficky part of Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, without much chance to really stretch the vehicle’s legs. So we can’t verify range or tell you how it handles on the limits, but we can tell you about the basic controls and feel of the vehicle.

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On a mostly smooth road, the car offered a comfortable ride dynamic. We didn’t get a sense of chassis noise because the top was down (which I surmised was an intentional effort by the company – I’ve used the same trick when showing off my car before).

The steering is tight and has a good weight to it, and the retro-style steering wheel felt great in my hands.

Of particular interest to me, as a long-time EV driver, is how the throttle pedal is tuned. Lots of EVs add some intentional delay or smoothing to throttle inputs, which ends up making the pedal feel mushy and indirect, reducing the control you have over the vehicle.

For reference, the cars I drive most often are the Tesla Roadster and Model 3, which both have excellent direct pedal feel.

And I’m happy to report that the RBW Roadster’s throttle pedal feels very similar to the cars I love to drive. The car feels quick, and responds exactly to what I want it to do, when I want it to do it. But it’s not excessively “punchy” like some of the more absurdly-powered EVs can be (like the Tesla Model S Plaid or the Macan Turbo S).

It does not, however, have off-throttle regenerative braking, aka one-pedal driving. Pressing the brake pedal engages regen, but letting off the throttle lets you simply coast. I personally prefer one-pedal driving, but one consideration RBW had is that since the car does not have traction control, regenerative braking on the rear axle (where the motor is) could potentially present a safety issue on slippery roads. So, fair enough I guess, but I still do prefer one pedal.

Speaking of pedals, the brake pedal was placed quite far from the accelerator. This is a plus and a minus – a minus because it’s quite different from most vehicles these days, where the pedals are placed closer, for ease of reaching them with your right foot. A plus because higher separation might reduce the chance of “crossing the pedals” and accidentally pressing both with the same foot in an emergency situation, and because it enables left-foot braking, which is generally better for performance driving… in the hands of a trained driver, anyway.

That said, this isn’t exactly a performance car. It’s fun, it’s responsive, but it’s not powerful. The version we tested had a 0-60 time of only around 9 seconds, so it didn’t give you the “throw your head back” feeling that so many EVs on the road these days do. It’s responsive, but not fast.

RBW says the American version will have more motor power than the UK version, but it’s still trying to figure out exactly how to tune it. This should bring 0-60 times down by about a second. But we can’t help but think that it would be nice with even a little more power than that, which we think should be possible given the car’s 50kWh battery and ~2,900lb weight, specs that are similar to my similarly-sized Tesla Roadster (as you can see below – along with the GT version of the RBW, on the right).

Here’s an issue: all the specs we were given seem extremely fluid. While talking to the company, I got several different numbers for any given specification. It seems to me like the company is still figuring out exactly what changes it will make for its US models.

This is somewhat to be expected of a small, hand-built manufacturer, especially since buyers can ask for certain modifications or personalizations (seat height, for example, which is important in a small car like this). But it does make it tough to write an article about it.

Nevertheless, the car drives well, and RBW seems to have gotten a lot right about the dynamics of the vehicle. It executes well on its goal – a fun, small British-style roadster, a great weekend car for those who have the means.

As for the means, the RBW Roadster will start in the $140-150k range, so it’s not cheap. But if you’re looking for something like this, it’s just about the only game in town, and it’s a good execution of the feel of a nimble roadster for weekend cruising.

RBW is currently taking $1,000 reservations for 2026 builds, and you can have a look at configurations (paint, roof, interior, wheels) over on its website.


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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.

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