Americans should be thankful that Elon Musk devoted his time to DOGE and shining a spotlight on government waste.
Tesla shareholders have less reason to cheer.
I say this not as a Musk hater, but an admirer of his brilliance and patriotism to his adopted country.
Yet in announcing last week he’s totally done with the aforementioned Department of Government Efficiency, Musk did underscore a blind spot in his day job running Tesla, the world’s preeminent electric vehicle company.
It is mostly Tesla that makes him the world’s richest man, with an estimated net worth of $425 billion, according to Forbes.
It is Tesla and the stock he holds that made him an opinion leader, using the currency to buy Twitter, rename it X and establish the platform as maybe the most important news operation in the world.
SpaceX is revolutionary, as is Starlink, and maybe soon, his AI application, xAI, but Tesla is at the heart of Musk Inc. for now and maybe forever.
And there’s good evidence that Musk has taken Tesla for granted, including disregarding its many critics, the short sellers who have been warning for years about holes in the company’s business model and his erratic management style.
Musk outlasted most of the shorts, many of whom (like the renowned James Chanos) long ago threw in the proverbial towel on their bet the stock would plummet to reflect their version — maybe the most accurate version — of Tesla’s operating reality and the weirdish ways Musk has at times run things.
This is a company with a stock that is tremendously overvalued by traditional metrics, yet its CEO took a sabbatical to hang out in the White House while things were starting to go sideways back at the office.
Tesla has so-so profits of just around $7 billion in 2024, but eked out just $400 million in the first quarter of 2025, a significant two-year low.
Herd on the Street
Investors are the ultimate herd animal.
The Musk is brilliant meme (and forget everything else like Tesla’s sometimes weak operating performance), and his odd, very un-CEO-type quirks have been in the herds’ collective head for years now, propelling the stock ever higher no matter what Musk says or does.
With that attitude, investors largely ignored Musk’s antics, like the time he oddly blurted out that he had a buyer for Tesla at a significant premium and none emerged.
Or when he (over)paid $44 billion for Twitter (it was worth closer to $4 billion), and also how he tried to wiggle out of the deal after realizing he screwed up.
The herd thought it was brilliant when Musk turned politically right, endorsed Donald Trump for president, and then became a key adviser.
Shares of Tesla exploded on the bet that fanboying Trump would make Tesla invulnerable to the anti-EV strains in the MAGA movement and the GOP in general, and of course, a rebellion from Tesla’s lefty, tree-hugging, anti-MAGA customers.
The optimism ebbed when reality set in as business slipped while Musk was spending all his waking hours in the White House and tweeting about politics (or whatever they call it now on X), not exactly habits that CEOs worried about production metrics indulge in.
The costs to shareholders are adding up. EV deliveries dropped sharply in Q1.
A sometimes violent consumer backlash of Elon haters ensued with boycotts and vandalism.
Shares have recovered more recently as Musk signaled he was moving away from Trump and DOGE, and back to Tesla, but the underlying issues with the company remain.
Consider Tesla’s China conundrum.
Tesla builds a lot of its cars in China, approaching nearly half its units sold by some estimates, as it seeks to tap into the massive Chinese consumer base.
At first the thinking was that Musk could soften Trump’s anti-China trade position.
Ditto for the general GOP disposition to end Biden-era tax breaks for EVs.
Let’s just say Trump is as much of a China trade hawk as ever (in response, Mainland consumers are now opting for EVs from China’s BYD), and the GOP is still looking to zero out Biden’s clean-energy tax credits that include breaks for EVs.
Gordon Johnson, a longtime Musk and Tesla critic, sees other headwinds for Tesla and its shareholders.
“Tesla has objectively lost its product edge, with many competing cars now offering better” range, interiors and faster charges, Johnson said, basing his criticism on consumer surveys.
He also noted that Tesla for years hyped the proprietary nature of its battery technology, which may be true only in the most narrow sense, because it sources its battery parts elsewhere.
Sure, the nasty political backlash of tree-hugging progressive EV buyers who hate that Elon worked with Trump hurt sales, but losing the product edge has also hurt.
Johnson said China sales — again, a big part of Tesla’s revenues — are now declining sharply because of Trump’s trade war with the Mainland that will likely persist through any framework that is reached.
Tesla bulls out there like my good pal Dan Ives say it’s the future we all should be looking at when it comes to Tesla, not the past.
And that future is a potentially transformative technology in autonomous vehicles that will meld all the stuff Muskis really good at, like AI and robotics.
