Earlier this week, one of Tesla’s most bullish supporters in the financial space broke the glass and pulled the alarm. “Let’s call it like it is,” Wedbush managing director Dan Ives wrote in a note to investors. “Tesla is going through a crisis and there is one person who can fix it… [CEO Elon] Musk.”
That’s because, in Ives’ view, “Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla… they are synonymous and attached together and cannot be separated.” But if that’s true—and it may well be—then only one person is responsible for the global protests at Tesla stores, mass sell-offs of its cars and its sinking stock price. “Tornado crisis moment” is how Ives put it, and it’s hard to be more direct than that.
That situation helps to explain why Musk called a surprise all-hands at Tesla last night at the Texas Gigafactory in Austin, an event that started at almost 9 p.m. local time. That’s an unusual event at Tesla; it’s notorious for its newsmaking quarterly earnings calls with investors or its big debut events, like the release of the Cybertruck in 2023 or last year’s We, Robot showcase in Hollywood. But a big all-hands with a public employee question-and-answer session is a bit out of left-field for the automaker.
However, employees and the general public didn’t seem to be the real audience for Musk’s hour-long stump speech and softball Q&A. Investors did. The people who have been wondering where Musk’s focus really is these days as he makes headlines for dismantling the federal government with his Department of Government Efficiency initiative or, reportedly, meeting with Pentagon officials to map out a potential war with China. (Update: Apparently not, now.)
All told, it was an odd moment in a year full of odd moments for Musk, who has never seemed as on the ropes as he is right now. Not even when he was sleeping on the factory floor to ramp up the Model 3, or dealing with what could’ve been the company’s collapse when COVID restrictions threatened to upend the release of the Model Y.
Yet Musk’s current predicament—risking the loss of his traditional buyer base as he allies with the Trump administration and guts federal spending, potentially unlawfully—feels unique in how self-inflicted it all is. Making big promises around a new product that he then has to deliver on is Musk’s usual M.O. This moment is so strange because all of it feels so unnecessary, at least to the core businesses he’s supposed to be running.
Or perhaps it’s a case of a big bet backfiring. After all, this was supposed to be the year that Musk’s relationship with the White House would supercharge Tesla’s self-driving vehicle dreams by, presumably, tearing down any regulatory obstacles in that path. And at the all-hands, Musk more or less affirmed that this is part of the plan: “I think in five years, probably, we’ll have regulatory approval, I think globally. So you’ll have autonomous Teslas on every continent, taking people on trips.”
Yet all of these dreams—long-promised as they are—depend on people buying Tesla’s cars right now, and supplying the company with the profits it needs to power these supposed AI and autonomy goals. That isn’t happening. And the answer to this conundrum at that all-hands was… more of the same.
For Musk and Tesla, it’s big promises, scant details and always something big around the corner. That felt kind of magical, once. But now the company is so firmly in put-up-or-shut-up mode, and its chief executive is in such hot water with his own base, that it strikes a different tone today.
Photo by: Tesla
Tesla Optimus humanoid robots
Here are some highlights:
“Imagine… a future where you can have any good or service you want at will, a future of abundance.”
“What’s key to that is robotics and AI, so once you have self-driving cars and you have autonomous humanoid robots, where everyone can have their own personal C3PO and R2-D2—but even better.”
“Optimus has gone from being an idea to the most sophisticated humanoid robot on Earth. There’s nothing even close.”
“The Model Y is… going to be the best-selling car on Earth again this year.”
“Optimus is maybe the biggest product ever.”
“I think ultimately, we’ll make over a million—millions, probably—of the Tesla Semi. This is really going to be something that you’ll see all over the place.”
One day, you could have “not a conventional train but the sort of Hyperloop, essentially. Vacuum tunnels… that would allow you to go from city center to city center much faster than any airplane could possibly go.”
And so on. It’s beginning to feel a bit like the eighth season of a popular TV show. The same storylines, the same beats, just sometimes said in a different way—or a not-so-different way. This wasn’t exactly a silver bullet for Tesla’s worried shareholders, though it may have calmed a few; the automaker’s cratering share price crept up a couple of percentage points on Friday morning. “What I’m saying is, hang on to your stock,” Musk said during the meeting, which may have been his most important message.
In his note to investors earlier this week, Ives implored Musk to do two things: announce a formal plan to split his time between Tesla and DOGE, or leave DOGE entirely to avoid “permanent brand damage;” and to elaborate on the timeline for lower-cost EV models and the planned launch of the unsupervised Full Self-Driving program in Texas this summer.
He got neither of those things. But in a new note, he said he’s been won over anyway: “This was a key moment for Musk and Tesla to show leadership and he did. We applaud Musk for ‘reading the room’ and showing important hand-holding at this key time for employees and investors,” Ives wrote.
The new Model Y is on sale right now. We’ll see who else stands up to clap soon enough.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
