Oh, Tesla Is Doing So Much Worse Than I Thought
The future for Tesla is bleak.
Everyone’s favourite outed Nazi, stock market manipulator, play-pretend gamerboy, and international conman, Elon Musk, recently announced Tesla’s 2024 Q4 earnings, and they are insane! I have already covered how Tesla is circling the drain here (read more), but this earnings report and the response to it paint Tesla’s future in even more vivid shades of despair. However, in spite of it all, Musk is still spouting weapons-grade copium, and thanks to his proximity to Trump’s very clearly heavily fascist-leaning administration, Tesla’s shares have entirely departed from reality, setting the EV giant up for a fall the likes of which humanity has never seen. So, let me walk you through just how bad things are for Tesla.
No one was expecting a good 2024 Q4 for Tesla. But not even the biggest Tesla sceptics expected it to be this bad. Tesla suffered an 8% year-on-year revenue decline and a whopping 71% plunge in profit! And in reality, it is actually worse than these numbers suggest. During Q4, operating income fell to just $1.6 billion, compared to $2.1 billion in Q4 2023, a massive decline of 25%. However, during Q1 of 2024, Tesla’s operational income had only declined 13% compared to Q1 2023. This shows that Tesla is on a slippery slope downward, and the annual figures for 2024 are actually boosted by more buoyant early quarters.
To say this is a bombshell is an understatement. It utterly destroys any vestige of fundamentals that could have held Tesla’s stock so high. It even casts serious doubts on the long-term viability of Tesla as a company. As we will get into in a minute, Tesla has some jaw-droppingly high overheads and could easily slip into operational losses in the near future if these trends continue. As such, many industry analysts have now turned on Tesla.
But you wouldn’t think anything was amiss if you just listened to the man who stated, “My heart goes out to you,” to a gaggle of white supremacists. Musk proudly claimed, without a single hint of irony, that “2025 is going to be a pivotal year for Tesla.”
How? Well, he points to Tesla’s non-existent self-driving cars and robots. Because, of course, he did.
During the earnings call, Musk claimed that Tesla robotaxis would be coming to Austin, Texas, by June this year, and then many other regions of the US by the end of the year — something that is impossible with Tesla’s current technology, as it fails to meet even the loosest of regulations and is also five years behind Google’s Waymo. He then went on to claim that the second version of their painfully crap humanoid robot would be coming out “sometime next year,” with a production line slated to produce 1,000 of them per month. He then continued that this robot will eventually make “north of $10 trillion in revenue” (despite the fact that all the robots Tesla has shown off so far are just electronic puppets obviously piloted by underpaid interns, and there were far more advanced robots available from Honda in the early 2000s).
Somehow, Musk took these demonstrably baseless claims and extrapolated to conclude that way behind-the-curve, incomplete robotaxis and fake robots will make Tesla “worth more than the next top five companies combined” in the near future.
How, Mr. Musk? Selling a few thousand Disney animatronics and trying to push unsafe self-driving cars isn’t going to keep the lights on at Tesla, let alone justify such a preposterous valuation.
Is he aware that he sounds like the pitiful kid who claims his dad is an astronaut one week, then a fighter jet pilot the next, all while snot dribbles down his lips? It just comes across as utterly pathetic and fabricated copium.
Mind you, fascists can only exist in a world based on demonstrably false hierarchies that are totally separated from reality. It’s why we normal people look back at Nazi propaganda and go, “Seriously, who believed this BS?”. So, with his current actions as context, maybe his and his fans’ divorce from reality makes sense?
Let me try and bring this back to reality. Not only will the robotaxis and robots not make Tesla a valuable company, but it seems like they will actually speed up its downfall.
Take Tesla’s vision-only approach to self-driving. I have covered this extensively before (read more here), but in effect, this lack of sensor redundancy means that the AI needs to be insanely accurate to even be able to drive partially competently — which it doesn’t at all right now. But we also know that as we improve AI, its costs increase exponentially (read more here), and Tesla already spent over $10 billion on AI training in 2024. As a result, for Tesla to even have a hope in hell of passing self-driving regulations, the company’s AI expenditure will need to balloon past this number! And even then, the lack of redundancy could stop it from passing even basic regulations. This is doubly so for the pedal-less and steering wheel-less Cybercab (how do you intervene if it goes wrong?).
Just to wrap that all up in a neat bow: Getting FSD or Cybercab to market in a form that is not wildly dangerous will likely cost so much that it will wipe out any profits for the foreseeable future and take Tesla firmly into the red. Also, FSD and the Cybercab won’t have a monopoly on autonomous driving, as others are far closer to achieving this goal than Tesla currently is, are far more cost-efficient systems to develop, and don’t have the surrounding negativity. So, getting these to market might not increase their income all that much despite the harrowing cost.
This is also true for the robots. Training a robot AI to be even half-useful for general tasks will cost the same again, if not more, as the robot will have to cope with far more variables. But this also negates the fact that humanoid robots are wildly inefficient. From an economic, pragmatic, and engineering point of view, it makes way more sense to use specialised robots. This is a non-starter product; any serious engineer or entrepreneur knows that. Hence why Honda only saw its Asimo robot as an engineering demonstration project and not a viable business, despite it being more capable than any robot Tesla has shown off. This is all just hype shite.
And Tesla’s profits are also set to tank absolutely over the coming year!
Not only are better and cheaper EVs now available in most of the world, but Musk’s recent actions have actively pushed his customer base away. A recent poll by Electrifying found that 60% of UK car buyers aren’t willing to buy Tesla expressly because of Musk. This poll isn’t alone; around the world, people are fleeing Tesla in droves as they don’t want to support a Nazi. On top of that, his cars are likely to get far more expensive to produce and export, thanks to Trump’s economic idiocracy. Tesla’s supply chain is vast, complicated, and intertwined with Canada, Mexico, China, and Europe. Moreover, Tesla relies on exporting many of its vehicles out of the US. As such, Tesla will have to pay extortionate import tariffs on their materials and then have to cut the price of their goods in many markets to make up for the retaliatory US import tariffs now being implemented.
So, Teslas are set to become more expensive to produce, their profit margins are being eroded away by tariffs, and their demand is falling like a lead balloon. No wonder Musk is slashing lease prices by 20%!
This is the truth of Tesla. They are being squeezed at both ends. Their operational costs are set to explode from paying for AI to servicing tariffs. Meanwhile, their income is set to shrink dramatically as demand for Tesla wanes, as they fail to address the now better and cheaper competition, and as people reject Musk’s swastikas.
When you actually look at reality, it seems Musk is piloting Tesla straight for corporate suicide.
Yet, Tesla stock prices continue to go up. Why? Is there something I have missed?
Sadly, no. No analyst believes Musk’s bullshit anymore. Even the once-ardent institutional Tesla bulls are calling BS and pointing out how egregiously overvalued Tesla is. Yet they are still leaving their money in…
Musk’s proximity to Trump has them all hoping he can deregulate these industries, allowing him to circumvent the safety regulations standing in his way, launch these AI-powered products, and keep Tesla buoyant. However, this logic is painfully flawed. Deregulation won’t make FSD or the Cybercab functionally safe! If anything, it will expose Musk’s fraud to the public even more and drive down demand even more. As such, Tesla’s increasing valuation is just proof it is in a bubble ready to pop at any time.
Trying to profit off a now openly fascist regime and its benefactors is a losing game. They are operating outside the bounds of reality, but reality will topple the house of cards. Sadly, it won’t be Musk, Trump, or even the banks backing Musk that will pay the price when this bubble pops. It will be the honest average American who just wanted to better their shitty lot in life.
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Sources: Clean Technica, Forbes, The Verge, Fortune, Bloomberg, FT, The Guardian, Reuters, The Register, Autocar, FT, TH