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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Japanese equipment giant Kubota brought 22 new or updated machines to the 2025 bauma expo earlier this year, but tucked away in the corners was a new retrofit kit that can help existing customers decarbonize more quickly, and more affordably.
No matter how badly a fleet may want to electrify, harsh economic realities and the greater up-front costs typically associated with battery electric remain high hurdles to overcome, but new retrofit options from major manufacturers are popping up to help lower those obstacles.
The latest equipment maker to put its name on the retrofit list is Kubota, who says its kit can be installed by a trained dealer in a single day.
That’s right! By this time tomorrow, your diesel-powered Kubota KX019 or U27-4 excavator (shown) could be fitted with an 18 or 20 kWh li-ion battery pack and electric drive motors and ready to get to work in a low-noise or low-vibration work environment where emissions are a strict no-no. Think indoor precision demolition or historic archeological excavation.
Then, if necessary, it can go right back to diesel power.
From diesel to electric and back again
If that sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve talked about a similarly flexible power solution from ZQUIP. The battery packs and diesel engines are much larger in that application, but the basic sales pitch remains the same: electric when it benefits your operation, diesel it doesn’t.
Kubota says its modular retrofit kits is a response to the increasing global demand for sustainable alternatives by focusing on making machinery that’s flexible and repairable enough to be “reusable,” and offer construction fleet managers a longer operational lifespan, superior ROI (return on investment), and lower TCO (total cost of ownership) than the competition.
Kubota’s solution also notably reduces maintenance costs and operational overheads. With no engine and associated components, servicing time and expenses are considerably reduced, saving customers both time and money. Additionally, with electricity costing far less than fossil fuels, it offers a highly economical advantage.
International Rental News reports that other changes to the excavators include a more modern cab controls with a digital instrument cluster, a 60 mm wider undercarriage for more stability, and an independent travel circuit allows operators to use the boom, dipper, bucket, and auxiliary functions without an impact on tracking performance.
Kubota’s new kit, first shown at last year’s Hillhead exhibition in the UK, will officially be on sale this summer – any day now, in fact – though pricing has yet to be announced.
Electrek’s Take
If you’re wondering how it is that we’re still talking about bauma 2025 a full quarter after the show wrapped up, then I haven’t done a good enough job of explaining how positively massive the show was. Check out this Quick Charge episode (above) then let us know what you think of Kubota’s modular power kits in the comments.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Kubota, via International Rental News.
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Elon Musk isn’t happy about Trump passing the Big Beautiful Bill and killing off the $7,500 EV tax credit – but there’s a lot more bad news for Tesla baked into the BBB. We’ve got all that and more on today’s budget-busting episode of Quick Charge!
We also present ongoing coverage of the 2025 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix and dive into some two wheeled reports on the new electric Honda Ruckus e:Zoomer, the latest BMW electric two-wheeler, and more!
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If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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Environment
FERC: Solar + wind made up 96% of new US power generating capacity in first third of 2025
Solar and wind accounted for almost 96% of new US electrical generating capacity added in the first third of 2025. In April, solar provided 87% of new capacity, making it the 20th consecutive month solar has taken the lead, according to data belatedly posted on July 1 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and reviewed by the SUN DAY Campaign.
Solar’s new generating capacity in April 2025 and YTD
In its latest monthly “Energy Infrastructure Update” report (with data through April 30, 2025), FERC says 50 “units” of solar totaling 2,284 megawatts (MW) were placed into service in April, accounting for 86.7% of all new generating capacity added during the month.
In addition, the 9,451 MW of solar added during the first four months of 2025 was 77.7% of the new generation placed into service.
Solar has now been the largest source of new generating capacity added each month for 20 consecutive months, from September 2023 to April 2025.
Solar + wind were >95% of new capacity in 1st third of 2025
Between January and April 2025, new wind provided 2,183 MW of capacity additions, accounting for 18.0% of new additions in the first third.
In the same period, the combination of solar and wind was 95.7% of new capacity while natural gas (511 MW) provided just 4.2%; the remaining 0.1% came from oil (11 MW).
Solar + wind are >22% of US utility-scale generating capacity
The installed capacities of solar (11.0%) and wind (11.8%) are now each more than a tenth of the US total. Together, they make up almost one-fourth (22.8%) of the US’s total available installed utility-scale generating capacity.
Moreover, at least 25-30% of US solar capacity is in small-scale (e.g., rooftop) systems that are not reflected in FERC’s data. Including that additional solar capacity would bring the share provided by solar + wind to more than a quarter of the US total.
With the inclusion of hydropower (7.7%), biomass (1.1%), and geothermal (0.3%), renewables currently claim a 31.8% share of total US utility-scale generating capacity. If small-scale solar capacity is included, renewables are now about one-third of total US generating capacity.
Solar is on track to become No. 2 source of US generating capacity
FERC reports that net “high probability” additions of solar between May 2025 and April 2028 total 90,158 MW – an amount almost four times the forecast net “high probability” additions for wind (22,793 MW), the second-fastest growing resource. Notably, both three-year projections are higher than those provided just a month earlier.
FERC also foresees net growth for hydropower (596 MW) and geothermal (92 MW) but a decrease of 123 MW in biomass capacity.
Taken together, the net new “high probability” capacity additions by all renewable energy sources over the next three years – i.e., the bulk of the Trump administration’s remaining time in office – would total 113,516 MW.
FERC doesn’t include any nuclear capacity in its three-year forecast, while coal and oil are projected to contract by 24,373 MW and 1,915 MW, respectively. Natural gas capacity would expand by 5,730 MW.
Thus, adjusting for the different capacity factors of gas (59.7%), wind (34.3%), and utility-scale solar (23.4%), electricity generated by the projected new solar capacity to be added in the coming three years should be at least six times greater than that produced by the new natural gas capacity, while the electrical output by new wind capacity would be more than double that by gas.
If FERC’s current “high probability” additions materialize, by May 1, 2028, solar will account for one-sixth (16.6%) of US installed utility-scale generating capacity. Wind would provide an additional one-eighth (12.6%) of the total. That would make each greater than coal (12.2%) and substantially more than nuclear power or hydropower (7.3% and 7.2%, respectively).
In fact, assuming current growth rates continue, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar is likely to surpass that of either coal or wind within two years, placing solar in second place for installed generating capacity, behind only natural gas.
Renewables + small-scale solar may overtake natural gas within 3 years
The mix of all utility-scale (ie, >1 MW) renewables is now adding about two percentage points each year to its share of generating capacity. At that pace, by May 1, 2028, renewables would account for 37.7% of total available installed utility-scale generating capacity – rapidly approaching that of natural gas (40.1%). Solar and wind would constitute more than three-quarters of installed renewable energy capacity. If those trend lines continue, utility-scale renewable energy capacity should surpass that of natural gas in 2029 or sooner.
However, as noted, FERC’s data do not account for the capacity of small-scale solar systems. If that’s factored in, within three years, total US solar capacity could exceed 300 GW. In turn, the mix of all renewables would then be about 40% of total installed capacity while the share of natural gas would drop to about 38%.
Moreover, FERC reports that there may actually be as much as 224,426 MW of net new solar additions in the current three-year pipeline in addition to 69,530 MW of new wind, 9,072 MW of new hydropower, 202 MW of new geothermal, and 39 MW of new biomass. By contrast, net new natural gas capacity potentially in the three-year pipeline totals just 26,818 MW. Consequently, renewables’ share could be even greater by mid-spring 2028.
“The Trump Administration’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ … poses a clear threat to solar and wind in the years to come,” noted the SUN DAY Campaign’s executive director, Ken Bossong. “Nonetheless, FERC’s latest data and forecasts suggest cleaner and lower-cost renewable energy sources may still dominate and surpass nuclear power, coal, and natural gas.”
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