Tesla deliveries down 43% in Europe while EVs are up 31%

I would guess the irritated phone calls have already become angry phone calls, from his creditors.

I see this repeatedly stated, but have never seen it substantiated in detail. How much stock collateralized debt does he have? Is any of it tied to SpaceX?

He took on 13 billion of debt for Twitter, but it seems like dreaming to think this would be enough even if Tesla went bankrupt.

Which is why X's investors re-valued X to $44bn recently even though just last September Fidelity valued it at $10bn. Seem to recall Trump's friends the Saudi's are big investors. Sure seems like billionaire deep state stuff when you get financially rewarded for your proximity to the prez.

I'm not sure he understands that he will always be the Crassus to someone else's Caesar. Things don't go well for the money man.

I wonder how many of the 14 want to have anything to do with him.

Get me off this timeline

Nah. If they manage to circumvent or amend the constitution, they'd just give Trump more terms in office rather than open up the office to Elon.

> 3 years left to convince the administration to allow

It is rare for Oligarchs to be in electable position. They do not need for that.

It might even be a challenge to see if there are any personal consequences.

Thanks anal_reactor, solid theory!

back to when exactly? Let's remember for a moment his behaviour with the Thai cave episode, he wasn't any better.

Thing is, people just put up stupid stickers about purchasing their Teslas before he went nuts, but he has never been centered.

> he should never use twitter tbh, back then elon is likeable until he tweet 20 times a day

Was that before or after he started over-promising/lying about Tesla's full self driving capabilities?

I don't think he was ever likable, it's just that back then his reputation hadn't caught up with his hype.

Never meet your heroes indeed.

I have a feeling that if Einstein, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Churchill or really any of the great historical figures had access to Twitter, there legacies (or lack thereof) would be very different today.

How is he going to manipulate his stock price without using social networks to spread rumors?

I think Twitter is partly responsible for destroying his mind, with the rest of the job being done by drugs.

It's an inherently toxic format. It promotes incoherent, contradiction-ridden, emotionally-driven, short-attention-span meme-think.

IMHO Bluesky is no better, which is why I'm not there. It's the same format, an incoherent soup of sound bites competing to emotionally trigger you into amplifying them. This format is the kind of thing a mad scientist would design with the explicit goal of rotting the human mind.

The good thing about books and longer-form works... even things as long as Reddit and HN comments... is that they can encapsulate complete thoughts that are connected to other thoughts. Building systems of thinking is how humans reason coherently about the world. Meme soup reduces us to some kind of animal level of grunts and short-horizon reactions but with language. It's gross.

I've been calling "social" media companies in general "the tobacco companies of the mind" for years.

The Nazi salutes, the repeated commentary on individual European countries politics, his explicit support of far right parties in various European countries (at the time) upcoming elections. The related spread of misinformation at best and disinformation at worst via his x account regarding individuals in Europe he opposed, and so on and so forth.

China could dump Tesla and never notice the production decrease.

I don’t think it will either, but the market does, apparently.

Look at the TSLA price since the announcement.

That's just because he cashed out of Tesla no?

Like if he didn't sell a ton of Tesla to buy Twitter he'd have more in Tesla?

It’s probably more stable as it caters to larger established entities like governments, large businesses, etc. Although he’s simultaneously undermining the US government so if there’s no taxes to pay for his contracts or agencies who need the function of anything modern because they’re so hobbled… Not entirely sure what the end game is here. So far he has mostly protected his interests in terms of government attacks I’d say, at least in the US. Outside the US I doubt any state would take him seriously other than maybe providing one time services like satellite delivery for less essential infrastructure if it’s competitive.

Revenue is less important than profits, and car manufacturing is generally a low-margin business. Meanwhile SpaceX' Falcon 9 is the cheapest rocket (something like $70m/launch), while the cost to SpaceX is $10-20m per launch. So there's 200%+ profit margin. Starlink doesn't have any real competitors now, and fast internet access in sparsely populated areas is a big market (also with big money from military uses). Most of SpaceX revenue is from Starlink.

The cynic says that the US government is the main buyer of launch capacity and pays top dollar and if a launch provider had an 'in' with the government then it could be very lucrative...?

Especially when the competition dies off leaving spacex the only one standing.

Not to mention... if/when there is a change in administrations, his lucrative contracts with the government will likely be canceled.

They do have a duty to look after the health of the company but in this case it’s complicated because the time to do something was years ago (say, when it was first obvious he’d been lying about FSD). Tesla is wildly over-valued as a car manufacturer or even a large tech company, and that’s all due to Musk’s ability to talk it up. If they act against him, the share price will drop significantly and stay there, because there are a lot of car makers and Tesla just isn’t a standout in 2025.

That’d be best for the company long-term but they’d have to survive the inevitable lawsuits first, not to mention the high likelihood of physical violence if Musk tweets about it. I think the board are basically sitting around praying that the horse learns to sing before they’re forced to act.

The board for Tesla?

It’s because musk is the Tesla stock price. The entire valuation of that company is based of the force of personality that musk has.

If they ousted musk, the Tesla shares would be worth less than any other auto maker instead of more than all of them combined.

> Doesn’t the CEO have fiduciary responsibility to not tank the company in a worldwide market?

I don’t think this is necessarily true in a legal sense

The board is full of his cronies.

China is the world’s largest EV market.

The US is a smaller EV market than Europe.

Lol, I agree about name-calling others (or saying that someone must be thinking something, as if the author can read minds), but you definitely aren't earning any good will with "btchsky". Maybe stay away from the social media you seem to not care for?

During ww2 in italy (and I guess elsewhere) some intellectuals participated in the war as well. Some on the side of the fascists, some on the side of partisans. And I doubt the ones in partisan groups would have discussed about mussolini in a respectful way

He’s a drug addict who goes around sig heiling, promoting seemingly every European fascist party he can find, and rambling about something called a ‘woke mind virus’. Like, it seems like a reasonable description.

dont blame hacker news for the abysmally sorry state of political and tech leadership right now. lots of people dont know this but there was a time when the statements of the President of the United States and his cabinet members / advisors were looked upon with some degree of reverential formality. now they are gutter trash on a daily basis.

It's an accurate factual statement, not a drivel.

Absolutely appalling that our precious Elon is being criticized on this holy bastion of tech, HN. Truly this is a sign of a total cultural collapse. Perhaps our ilk is better suited not participating in social media at all.

Tesla a meme stock though, it's more about the Elon cult of personality than any real market fundamentals. Its performance is only loosely coupled with the actual car business.

Honestly it's surprising that it's still so high. Compare it to any other car manufacturer and its valuation seems ludicrous. A lot of people are somehow still persuaded that the company is going to have some kind of amazing breakthrough Any Day Now.

>we haven't seen quarterly results showing the sales dip since.

Which are caused by the retooling of the Model Y production lines which took 3-5 weeks. Y represents 2/3 of the sales globally and all factories where down simultaneously.

Deliveries are back up in China and at current trends, they might achieve ~130,000 sales - just like Q1 2024, even though they had to close down their most production factory lines. China is the first to get back to speed but it says a lot about the "sales dip" which is actually a planned production dip.

>we haven't seen quarterly results showing the sales dip since.

Which are caused by the retooling of the Model Y production lines which took 3-5 weeks. Y represents 2/3 of the sales globally and all factories where down simultaneously. They started 2025 with only 12 days of inventory worldwide.

Deliveries are back up in China and at current trends, they might achieve ~130,000 sales - just like Q1 2024, even though they had to close down their most production factory lines. China is the first to get back to speed but it says a lot about the "sales dip" which is actually a planned production dip.

I have seen at least ten of the new model Teslas in Portland Oregon (one of or most liberal city in US) the last month. At least SOME people are still buying them.

People have been saying Tesla is wildly overvalued for a decade now. Which logically I can't really dispute but at some point you can't logically continue to ignore how the market values it either.

I'm rooting for Musk to fall on his face as much as the next guy. But I'm not delusional enough to substitute my desired reality for actual reality. By any measure Musk has had a remarkably successful year or so. He's much richer and wields more influence over the government than any non-president in history that I can think of.

the solution is obvious that Musk will introduce a gas powered Tesla this year

You can’t compare to the US since the US doesn’t have Chinese cars and Europe does.

"Free and equitable" - Yes, he's not a socialist. He's a Liberal.

He, and Trump, do not meet the definition of fascism. He is not pushing the supremacy of the State. He is not stating the State must control all aspects of society. He is not forcing businesses to close because they don't support the State. He is not banning other political parties. He is not Anti-Democracy. He is not Anti-Liberalism. They do not practice Hegelian Dialectic. These are the requirements for Fascism.

Musk and Trump - are well within the bounds of Liberalism. They may not be John Rawls. Trump is a Neo-Liberal protectionist. Musk tends to be more classical liberalism.

Before calling something authoritarian, ask: who’s actually in control?

If a regime can’t control education, is shrinking the size of government, and is expanding individual rights (e.g., gun rights), can it truly be called authoritarian?

The issue with much of the modern left is that it often misidentifies the problem. The left should be focused on advocating for the working class and the poor. After all, figures like Trump and Elon Musk clearly align more with the wealthy elite.

But the current left seems dominated by affluent, highly educated people, and instead of class-focused politics, it often resorts to dramatic labels that don’t reflect reality.

Step one in solving any problem is understanding it. And that starts with asking harder questions, not just repeating slogans.

Fascism explicitly includes an economic component.

> […] strong regimentation of society and the economy.

> "Fascist goals" – the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure […]

> Paxton argues: “fascism redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had once been untouchably private. […] It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest.

> The Fascist Manifesto supported the creation of an eight-hour work day for all workers, a minimum wage, worker representation in industrial management, equal confidence in labour unions as in industrial executives and public servants, reorganization of the transportation sector, revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance, reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55, a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions and abolishment of bishoprics, and revision of military contracts to allow the government to seize 85% of profits.

Etc.

All quotes taken from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism