Yesterday evening, Tesla reported first-quarter earnings for 2025, and they were abysmal: Profits dropped 71% from the same time last year.
Musk sounded bitter on the call with investors that followed, blaming the company’s misfortune on protesters who have raged at Tesla dealerships around the world over his role running DOGE and his ardent support of far-right politicians.
“The protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized. They’re paid for,” he said, without evidence.
He should be totally overjoyed, not bitter.
The current stock price, despite YTD of -36%, is still way over any kind of realistic valuation. And by that I mean orders of magnitude off.
Price to earnings makes it still look like a very, very, very hopeful/optimistic startup in the development phase, rather than a withering, fake luxury, niche automaker facing boycotts and being “run” by a full-blown Nazi that everyone hates.
If you still own Tesla shares, get the fuck out of it now. The recent collapse is nothing.
This 100%. Tesla remains massively overvalued, and it’s on the basis that in the future the company will dominate with self drive cars. It’s vaporware on a scale never before seen.
Tesla has fundamentally flawed self-drive technology because someone stripped out essential tech to save money. Lidar is essential to self driving cars but some genius decided they knew better than their own engineers and the self drive industry as a whole and instead made their vehicles and tech camera only. That genius? Elon fucking Musk.
The guy’s an idiot. The company is an overpriced joke.
Luckily the party is probably on its way to being over. It’s not like Elon decreasing his public presence with the president will make sales suddenly rebound.
What everyone here is also missing is that it’s 71% profit loss with tax credits which means they saw this loss coming and scrambled to cash in some stuff so it didn’t look as bad. Without that, they would have reported a decent loss like they will next quarter.
And fundamentally how would they fix their current issue? They could distance from elon but that would be a slow burn. They can’t make new cars. Can’t discount their cars much. They can’t do much of anything except lose more money.
And fundamentally how would they fix their current issue? They could distance from elon but that would be a slow burn
They can’t distance from Elon because his supposed genius is a key factor in why they’re so absurdly overvalued. If they dump him, they immediately get viewed as a car company. Car companies have P/E ratios of about 7, if they’re well run like Toyota. That would mean they’d lose 95% of their value.
If they don’t distance from Elon, then they have to deal with his personal brand constantly tarnishing their corporate brand. Somehow they have to convince themselves that people will get over Elon fast enough to get their sales back up. Even if he “gets out of politics”, whatever that means, I don’t see that happening. He has burned all his bridges, and there’s no going back.
Also, it’s absolutely ridiculous that they would have a high valuation because of self-driving cars. Tesla is the company in absolutely last place when it comes to developing self-driving car technology. They don’t even use LIDAR, so they can be fooled by a Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner trick.
Waymo is probably in first place in self-driving tech. They have actually been running a taxi service for years using self-driving cars. Cruise was probably in second place before they were shut down and absorbed into GM. So, you could maybe say GM is in second place. Zoox, Pony.ai, Motional, etc. are also all doing well. Tesla is probably dead last, and their very public failures are dragging the industry down. The fact that they called their tech “full self-driving” and that it was so bad prompted all the other companies to rename what they were doing so they weren’t associated with Tesla.
Eventually someone’s going to make a killing shorting Tesla. The only problem is that markets can remain irrational longer than most people can remain solvent. Who knows when this might finally end.
Psst… you know that Waymo is also looking into AI models that don’t use lidar? And it’s not just Tesla and Waymo now either, there’s some others as well.
https://waymo.com/research/emma
We introduce EMMA, an End-to-end Multimodal Model for Autonomous driving. Built on a multi-modal large language model foundation, EMMA directly maps raw camera sensor data into various driving-specific outputs, including planner trajectories, perception objects, and road graph elements.
Thats not to say that it will be a success, but ya know, maybe it’s actually possible, and even Waymo seems to think it’s possible and worth researching. Thats a lot of people looking into something thats clearly “fundamentally flawed”
However, EMMA also exhibits certain limitations: it can process only a small amount of image frames, does not incorporate accurate 3D sensing modalities like LiDAR or radar and is computationally expensive.
And found it wanting compared to systems that incorporate LiDAR
I was just looking through the linked PDF and I’ll actually retract what I said earlier about not finding it wanting, and them just listing limitations.
In the research paper linked it is more explicit
“Despite these promising results, EMMA is not without its limitations. In particular, it faces challenges for real-world deployment due to: (1) limitations in 3D spatial reasoning due to its inability to fuse camera inputs with LiDAR or radar, (2) the need for realistic and computationally expensive sensor simulation to power its closed-loop evaluation, and (3) the increased computational requirements relative to conventional models. We plan to better understand and address such challenges in future work.”
This is more clear that it’s not just listing limitations, but it also finds it not doing as well because of it.
That I’d call wanting.
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Some people are jumping on LLM hype to try to shoehorn it into a hot technology? What a surprise!
As I understand it, it is fundamentally possible, but at this point one of the worst bottle necks is the physical processing power required to analyze the video feed. Millisecond paced analysis of multiple aspects of multiple HD video feeds in real time by “AI” still takes some pretty heavy duty computational hardware at this point, which is impractical in a real world vehicle. It is prudent to do the research now though to be ready for the day when the hardware catches up. That said, I reckon that Waymo is in a much better position to do this research than than Tesla. Being under Google/Alphabet, they have access to the nearly 2 decades worth of Google Maps and Google’s machine vision training work, among other things, like not being a meme stock company headed by an emperor whose clothes are beginning to dissapear.
It is fundamentally flawed because everyone that tries it ends up killing motorcyclists.
If they can kill motorcyclists faster than motorcyclists can kill themselves that is impressive.
I want you to seriously think for a moment if you would say that to someone who has lost a friend or a father, who was doing nothing wrong, to a preventable issue resulting from Elon Musk being a penny pinching cunt.
I’d not intentionally be a dick to someone who obviously has learned that lesson the hardest way.
I’d absolutely say that to someone random in the hopes that it saves someone’s friend or brother. If you’re riding a motorcycle without always having how dangerous they are near the front of your mind, you’re not long for this world.
Assisted driving is nowhere near the primary cause of motorcycle deaths. Phones are worse, by at least a couple orders of magnitude.
(And yeah, removing lidar was fucking stupid)
Tesla stock went up after the earnings.
What a fucking joke.
The problem is it’s in the S & P 500 and a lot of ETFs have it packaged in as a result. If pensions find managers start dropping TSLA…
I wonder how much is big pension funds vs. foreign interests (mainly Saudis and Russian Oligarchs)?
The current stock price, despite YTD of -36%, is still way over any kind of realistic valuation. And by that I mean orders of magnitude off.
It is a stock only in the name. For all intents and purposes, it is a crypto memecoin.
if tsla dropped 71% (more) like its profits have, it would still way over
Agreed. Their P/E ratio is still in dreamland. Look at the P/E ratio of any other car company and compare to this dumpster fire of a company.
People like fElon say they aren’t like other car companies; they are a “technology” company. I say that’s bullshit.
“The protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized. They’re paid for,” he said, without evidence.
No. When you do a double seig-heil on national television we protest for free.
Fuck, I’ll pay to protest at this point. I’m livid at this assface.
Don’t give them any ideas.
Fuck that, take my ideas.
I’ll donate $50 to the legal defense of anyone who rids us of this turbulent billionaire, and I’m not the only one who would
I interpreted what you wrote as paying the government for the right to protest.
I wholly supported crowd funding the fixing of legislation and ending billionaires and preventing billionaire influence in our political, economic, social, and environmental systems.
Nobody’s got to pay me to convince me Musk is a nazi piece of shit, he did that all on his own.
Where do I submit my paid protester invoice?
Shorting TSLA is my favorite thing right now. The one tiny bright point in my life.
Are there any ETFs that I can put money into that short Tesla for mentally handicapped retail investors like me? For example, inverse REITs are an easy way to short the housing market.
Unfortunately no. There is the Bear Cave though. https://thebearcave.substack.com/
It is a mistake to lead off with “here’s the thing about Elon Musk,” because there’s LOADS of things with Musk, but in particular. Let’s set aside how ludicrous it is to claim that the protesters are being funded by some outside source, because sure that’s worked in the past, and of course it’s the Democrats, those notably cash-positive people, who are doing it.
Elon Musk is THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD. If anyone could beat a theoretical money-backed protest against him, it would be him. Just offer to beat the offer of anyone funding the protesters. That’s it! If they’re only in it for the money then the protest would fold immediately.
More than that, Musk has literally paid people to vote in his favor in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race! The levels of hypocrisy are so staggeringly great that it risks materializing actual hippopotamuses on his properties.
At most companies, it’d be long past time to show the CEO the door. But Tesla’s stock price is inextricably linked to Musk and his onetime image as Silicon Valley’s greatest living genius.
BWaHAAHAhaahaha. Ahhh what a fuckin’ idiot Elmo is.
Don’t let up, this is just nothing to him. Make it painful.
Good. Hope it gets even worse.
They would have lost hundreds of milliions if it weren’t for carbon credits, which have now been removed.
Looks like revenue this quarter was $19.34B. That’s slightly less than the 2024 Q1 result of $21.3B. Looks like Q1 is usually lower, let’s make this trend continue to following quarters.
These are numbers for all of Q1 too, and people didn’t really start the protests until a few weeks to a month in. So in theory last quarter had a few more good weeks than next quarter will.
I want my money Elmo!
If you say it’s paid, pay me. Pay up or shut up
do none of the investors just go “shut the fuck up you sig heiling cunt”?
“They’re paid for”
Bro, if people hate you and your company enough to employ and pay others to protest, then you and your company must be an all new level of shitty. I’m not quite sure the claim/excuse you’re making is the defensive shield you think it is. It sounds much more like an admission of total failure…
And yet the board still thinks it’s a good idea to retain you? I guess it’s heartwarming they’re more loyal to you than they are to the company.
Bro, if people hate you and you company enough to employ and pay others to protest, then you and your company must be an all new level of shitty.
His people—conservatives—don’t follow logic. They have a victim complex and see anything that negatively affects them as someone else’s fault and not the consequences of their own actions. If there isn’t an obvious perpetrator, they scapegoat one into existence.
I’ve debated some of these people and it’s hopeless trying to get them to connect the dots. You can keep presenting them with logic and evidence, and they keep shifting the goalposts and changing the topic to justify their beliefs. A summary of one of my attempts to convince someone that Trump isn’t universally beloved by average Americans went roughly like this:
- “Trump has improved the average citizen’s quality of life”
- “Then why are there 5 million protesters coming out every month?”
- “I haven’t heard of any large protests”
- (links to 50501 Wikipedia page)
- “They’re ‘protesters’ funded by the left”
- “All 5 million of them? That would be extremely expensive, even if it’s just $100 a person. Nobody could afford that.”
- “Remember, all the billionaires are Democrats” (Thiel? Musk?)
- “That’s not even their playbook. It’s cheaper and more effective for them to lobby for changes that benefit themselves.”
- “But they can’t do that anymore because Trump is in charge, so now paid protesters are their preferred choice”
- “Suppose they are paid. With 5 million people, there’s absolutely no way that they’re being paid will remain secret.”
- “OK fine, maybe it’s only a couple hundred thousand being paid.”
I don’t doubt that some tiny handful of people would be paid to protest for some reason or another, but I highly doubt it’s anywhere close to what MAGA conservatives think. IMO, it’s more likely that protesters would be paid by the other side to make the protest violent so they could crack down on them.
If they were being paid and he knew they were being paid and by whom, they’d have some easy lawsuits to recoup damages and end the protests.
Funny how that’s not happening.
Because then it’s one evil actor instead of you know tens of thousands.
But it’s just projection anyway. Every accusation is a confession.
This bubble does not just need to be popped, it needs to evaporate.
