Tesla falls after Commerce secretary recommends buying stock
132 comments
·March 20, 2025jampa
alamortsubite
> People are saying Tesla stock is falling due to Musk, but he has been an asshole publically since the Thailand incident
I agree, but I also think the full-throated nazi salutes on tv delivered a greater blow to Tesla's customer base than your comment implies.
ryandrake
Exactly. Tesla's business performance may or may not be good, but OP's analysis is ignoring the huge elephant in the room. It's true that Elon has been an asshole for a long time, but his recent actions cross the line from asshole into something an order of magnitude worse.
SauciestGNU
Dealing with assholes is the price of living in a society. Open naziism crosses the line of things we're obliged to tolerate in our society.
tim333
Yeah, it's only really since the salute that Tesla sales have dropped noticably.
senectus1
that AND combined with his shadow presidency... its a scary combo. A nazi is bad, a billionaire nazi is very bad but a billionaire nazi in gov with no accountability is very very very bad.
(not to mention the building communications and mechanism to space travel monopoly. These things Plus the above are unfathomably evil villain bad)
JohnFen
> People are saying Tesla stock is falling due to Musk, but he has been an asshole publically since the Thailand incident where he called the rescue diver a pedophile
Absolutely true, but it's only relatively recently that he's been actively and publicly participating in the effort to destroy the US.
disqard
Right, earlier he was targeting individuals due to his deep-seated insecurities.
These days, he targets entire classes of US Citizens (e.g. Federal employees) due to his deep-seated insecurities.
archagon
And don’t forget members of the “parasite class!”[1]
(Fucker is still invited to YC’s AI Startup School, by the way.)
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-musk-reposted-meme-120...
dtquad
Alleging that white men who live in South East Asia are pedophiles is part of the wider pedo panic in anglophone countries. Nobody really cared. I feel bad for the rescue diver.
joquarky
It's so far off the bell curve that I can only assume psychological projection is involved in his reasoning.
trowawee
The financials have always been crap, though. A lot of his previous assholery was limited to very online people. Guarantee if you poll 100 people if they've heard of the "Thailand pedo guy thing with Musk", most will have no idea what you're talking about. Now it's on every news channel every night.
rsynnott
> People are saying Tesla stock is falling due to Musk, but he has been an asshole publically since the Thailand incident where he called the rescue diver a pedophile.
There's a visibility issue; that, and most of his antics, was largely only seen by Very Online people, but over the last few months the fact that he's stark raving mad has become increasingly obvious to the general public (via Nazi salutes etc).
joquarky
> stark raving mad
Was that reference intentional? Well done either way.
I also don't appreciate that he's sheltering and excusing his behavior under self-diagnosed mental health umbrellas. That only harms the perception of those who legitimately have those conditions.
null
submeta
Tesla‘s valuation was partly stemming from what was projected on Musk: A whiz-„kid“ who was treated like he found cure for cancer. Many quickly realized that he could not deliver (a self driving car) or a refuge in space for when humanity will be killed by a mega-asteriod. Slowly he demystifies himself by coming up with crude far right ideas and by not delivering.
ko_pivot
Whether you support Elon/DOGE or not, pretty wild to shred a $1T consumer brand like Elon has.
DevX101
A big part of TSLA's valuation was being a meme stock. Was never actually worth $1T.
bryanlarsen
At one brief period of time, TSLA had an annualized P/E of 40 and a CAGR of 50%. Those were not unreasonable numbers.
But with it's now negative CAGR, P/E should be in the range of 10 or so.
mingus88
This is not his first rodeo trashing a wildly successful brand.
When will the board wake up? I guess they never will as his own relatives are board members.
He should never be allowed to head a company again after his performance with Twitter and tesla
joquarky
He also effectively dismantled one of the rarest and most coveted achievements in marketing: the transformation of a common verb into a universally recognized reference to a specific product.
By renaming Twitter, he erased the cultural shorthand of "tweeting," a level of brand entrenchment that most companies can only dream of attaining.
duxup
It's hard to buy into their valuation that at one point was ~6x Toyota.
josefritzishere
Tesla is absurdly over-valued. They're going to experience a correction eventually... Elon has been delaying the inevitable because he's over leveraged.
ilrwbwrkhv
TSLA actual stock price should be 30. Waiting for it to reach there.
jqpabc123
"It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again."
Proof on multiple levels that the primary skills of this administration are con artistry and fascism --- which are more or less the same .
The PE ratio of the typical auto manufacturer is around 10 or less.
GM, Ford, Toyota --- all less than 10.
The PE of Tesla is 115 --- and they sell fewer cars than any of the above.
By any reasonable measure for an auto manufacturer, Tesla is outrageously overpriced. And before someone drops Musk's line that Tesla is something other than an auto manufacturer, allow me to point out 90% of Tesla earnings come from the manufacture and sale of autos.
ETTD --- Everything Trump Touches Dies. Tesla is working to become the latest example.
wraaath
One other thing that hasn't been heavily talked about: What $/share on TSLA will trigger margin calls on the massive loans that Musk took out collateralized by his TSLA stock. Once those get triggered, the snowball effect of market sales by the loan holders will accelerate the downward price trajectory.
disqard
As much as I want his house of cards to implode, I'm worried about contagion.
I'll never forget how his Twitter mass-layoffs initiated that same practice to spread throughout the tech industry (yes, it was coming, but he did "cast the first stone").
For better or worse, what Elon Husk does today, the rest of the stock market does tomorrow.
jqpabc123
I'm worried about contagion.
Too late. Wall Street has been infected with MAGAtts.
The other day I read where some analyst said he maintained a "buy" rating on Tesla because he worried doing otherwise would hurt the administration's image.
archagon
Will banks have the balls to trigger margin calls on a key player in a cruel and vindictive administration? I kind of doubt it. “Cost of doing business.”
pas
> "It'll never be this cheap again."
likely true, as it will be even cheaper until it collapses. (in inflation adjusted dollars)
dkjaudyeqooe
Expect this post, and any even obliquely critical of Musk or Trump, to be flagged into oblivion.
I've tried to not be cynical but it's bleedingly obvious that there are a group of Musk/Trump supporters here flagging these posts.
Various discussions claim that it's political (and thus "off topic") posts that are flooding HN but there has been very few appearing on the front page, even though they're sunk out of view these posts attract many upvotes and comments.
There are all sorts of off-topic and incidental posts on HN and that's always been the case. Now there is aggressive censorship of one type of post. Just skipping or hiding posts that you're not interested in is not enough apparently.
There is not much that can be done about it, dang has essentially shrugged, which is fine. But please lets not pretend its not happening and that it's not absolutely repugnant.
eddyg
From the Hacker News guidelines⁽¹⁾ (emphasis mine):
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You should not be surprised when "mainstream" stories are flagged. Folks come to Hacker News for stuff they won't hear about on TV.
Redoubts
> there has been very few appearing on the front page,
there are like 3-5 of these a day
disgruntledphd2
I think it depends on where you go.
These stories typically drop off /news pretty quickly, but /active has loads and loads of them. I also seem to see flagged ones, which is probably down to my settings.
AlecSchueler
On the first two pages of /active I see roughly one per day. Are the feeds different for different people? Or maybe the our definitions of "loads" are different in this case. It's true that if I were suddenly seeing so many posts about geckos I would find it a lot.
bryanlarsen
hckrnews.com is a great interface to see which stories hit the front page and have dropped off.
scarecrowbob
One way to interact with HN as a social media site, because it -is- a social media site, is to mostly use the site through it's search bar.
I've had a set of quick links to searches for topics I am interested in for quite a while, typically for the last 24H, sorted by time, usually comments. For instance, I have had a link to a search for "Musk in title" on my bar since the Twitter acquisition, which has made it a lot easier to see what actually gets flagged and what doesn't. Similarly, if you really want a pretty horrific set of opinions, a search for Hamas will reveal that there are plenty of vocal folks here okay with incinerating children.
On one hand, I understand that a lot of folks have a very specific idea about what they want to see on HN.
On the other hand, I'm mostly here because I want to get the opinions of "centrist" capitalists, VC folks, and aspiring tech folks about a wide range of cultural issues. I don't usually want to have those kinds of folks (who I believe are often exhibiting some kind of sociopathy) in my other social media feeds or, god forbid, meat-space life.
Anyhow, it's entirely possible to bend the site to ones' usage (it is a "hacking" space after all). There is much more on the site than what happens on the front page and it's much more useful to log in and see the flagged/dead content.
dkjaudyeqooe
Thats a good way to approach it, essentially customise your view of HN.
The front page is pretty ordinary most of the time because of uninteresting items, or interesting items have fallen off.
Of course the problem with flagging is it distorts what people see, or can see, since it essentially hides the topic (or at least burys it).
1970-01-01
You're complaining about "no politics" rules consistently. Why do you think we need them?
dkjaudyeqooe
No I'm not, I'm saying this particular subject should not be treated differently.
I only reference politics because it's other people's focus, or excuse for censoring.
duxup
Peak cronyism from the current administration.
jauntywundrkind
Peak cronyism so far!
watwut
Nah peek cronyism is when Musk company is getting new large nasa contracts after Musks getting control over government.
And when people doing regulation actions against Musk were fired.
r00fus
No, that will happen with Tesla, SpaceX and other cronies get massively lucrative no-bid contracts from various government agencies.
josefritzishere
How is this not illegal for a government official to reccomend buying stock in a company run by another government official? This is naked corruption.
Kapura
Laws only matter when people enforce them. The United States has been profoundly lax in holding rich white men accountable for basically a century now; while this should absolutely be seen as the baseless corruption that it is, it is extremely foolish to expect anybody to do anything about it. They have no appetite for punishing somebody from the elite classes.
ceejayoz
It's not strictly illegal, but it's against Federal ethics rules.
The problem is, punishment is exclusively up to their superiors. Which, here, is the President.
Kellyanne Conway did this in the first Trump admin. No real consequences then, either.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/Kellyanne-Con...
> Federal ethics rules on conflicts of interest specifically exempt the president and vice president. But for any other executive branch employee, the rules prohibit using public office for personal gain, or “for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of friends, relatives or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity.”
locopati
when it comes to the President, he's already stomped all over this part of the Constitution
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C7-1...
carbocation
Thanks for posting this. My gut reaction was to say "no, this is a law: the Hatch Act." But the Hatch Act covers partisan political activity while on duty, which is distinct from commercial activity. As you noted, commercial activity is only 'restricted' via a rule.
shawabawa3
It is but it doesn't matter when maga control all 3 branches of government
bovermyer
The Ministry of Truth would like a word with you.
unsupp0rted
Elon is only a government official when it suits me. When it doesn't suit me he's an unelected private citizen outsider.
yongjik
If Biden's Secretary of Commerce did this, they would've got sacked and it would be plastered over the news for weeks. Democrats should stop pretending that rules and decorum still matter. You can't claim democracy is at danger and then hold up a small paddle meekly and claim you did your job.
Animats
Here's the ethics statement of Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce.[1] He's from Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was Chairman, and had to resign from quite a few boards to work for the Government. He has ownership in many businesses, but Tesla is not listed.
[1] https://extapps2.oge.gov/201/Presiden.nsf/PAS+Index/43644031...
regularjack
And he didn't even NFA it. I'm looking forward to the class action of all the people who lost their life savings after following his advice.
ceejayoz
The Commerce secretary will almost certainly be given qualified immunity from civil suits.
AnimalMuppet
Wow. Cabinet members are openly shilling stocks now? Stocks of well-connected government insiders?
The US is acting like a third-world country.
archagon
Did you miss the friggin’ president turning the White House front lawn into a Tesla showroom? This feels like small potatoes in comparison.
orwin
Alfred Hugenberg didn't end well either, even when he supported the winning side.
dkjaudyeqooe
Whatever you think about Musk or Trump, it's very strange that government officials are pushing each other's stock. It's a hard sell you'd expect from a boiler room:
"It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again."
"I mean, who wouldn't invest in Elon Musk? You gotta be kidding me."
fullshark
Another new low for this administration.
3D30497420
I'd say this doesn't even rank in the top 50 terrible things this administration has done since taking office.
The car commercial in front of the White House was hilarious though. At least there is some dark humor along with all the, well, actual darkness.
seper8
What a banana republic the USA has turned into.
Literal oligarchy happening out in the open, in front of our eyes.
Waiting for the delays for Austin robotaxi to be announced, then more red for Tesla.
netsharc
In an imaginary future...
Elon: "The robotaxis are working great!"
Press: "What about these 10 fatal accidents in the first week?"
Elon: "Cut the cameras, arrest that woman! If any news media reports this they'll be prosecuted, and I'll post your home address and where your kids go to school on X.".
NTSB: "We've been DOGE'ed so we have no information about any Tesla Robotaxi accidents. As far as we can see, 0 fatalities with Tesla cars!"
NTSB whisteblower: "Not mentioned is that they're being blindfolded so they can't see shit!".
Press release: "Austin city government has taken the option [totally not under duress] to use Tesla's robotaxis for transport of all government workers. The mayor said, reading from a scribbled note 'this will improve efficiency and save costs.'. The city will pay Tesla $50 million in the first year, increasing to $150 million in 5 years."
Stock market: "Sell, sell, sell!"
Elon: "These investors shorting TSLA are breaking the law and violating free speech. If they don't invest in TSLA we're going to send the IRS!"
People are saying Tesla stock is falling due to Musk, but he has been an asshole publically since the Thailand incident where he called the rescue diver a pedophile.
It is falling because it is a bad stock with no ground in reality: it is clear that Tesla has lost all its positive momentum. When was the last time we heard about Tesla delivering something exciting?
Meanwhile, BYD just announced their 1000V platform this week, God's eye FSD for every car last month (and they are already selling those in China). On the other hand, Tesla has just been promising the world and delivering nothing but more promises and pushing deadlines.
Take that last demo they made in Universal Studios. Everything was faked, the robot was human-controlled, and the FSD was in a controlled environment with a human in the background, ready to intervene. Now look at that P/E. It sits at >100 in a company that is not growing anymore, 2x-3x more valuable than Toyota. You really can't justify it.