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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is still up compared to where it was a year ago.

If you look at their chart, there was a massive election bump. An investor trying to be savvy maybe would have assumed his businesses would benefit from proximity to power. Now that it's pretty clear he is thoroughly disinterested and distracted from his businesses.

Does Musk even want to be CEO anymore? He hasn't seemed to care about Tesla ever since he had to settle with the SEC. He got his massive payout that he will be unlikely to repeat. Ostensibly he is only CEO on paper because the magic affect his name had on stocks in the past.

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> Tesla is still up compared to where it was a year ago.

Sure, you're right, but for context we have:

  2024-03-10: 177.77 (a year ago)
  2024-11-04: 242.84 (election day)
  2024-12-17: 479.86 (peak)
  2025-03-10: 221.60 (currently)

It's rapidly decreasing. It's now only 24.5% up from a year ago. Just yesterday it was over 50% up from a year ago. It's now one of the most volatile stocks you can own. Not to mention the massive revenue hits its taking throughout Europe and even parts of the US. Sales last month were down 72% in Germany, 48% in Norway, and 42% in Sweden. Even though it's set to gain in the US (relative to competitors) because of US tariffs and gov't contracts it doesn't seem to be enough when its failing in every other market

It opened down from four years ago:

    2021-03-11: 233.13 (4 years ago)
    2025-03-11: 225.27

It's still overpriced.

In November of 2021 it was actually at 407.36. If we're picking cherries

Tesla is still "worth" more than all other auto makers combined. This is on robotaxi vaporware. There's still a long way to fall. It's going to be glorious!

They lost about 1.5x the value of Volkswagen today (so far). Crazy how (over)valued this company was/is.

Tesla has been the most heavily subsidized automaker in the US. Biden's historic investments in EV subsidies only increased that. It was leading the EV industry and it seemed impossible for it to fail even with the safety scandals that plagued it for nearly a decade

It's truly incredible that someone could fuck up such a favorable position

> most heavily subsidized automaker

The federal government literally purchased all of GM & Chrysler in 2009.

Tesla has also received $466,500,000 in bailouts. But bailouts are NOT the same thing as subsidies

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

The enterprise value of VW is 200B. Tesla is down ~100B today.

I was referring to market cap.

Publicly traded equity is only part of the value of a company though, especially when you are talking about a company that might have significant capital assets.

You know, right now, I sort of want to be an investor just so I could get on the investor/analyst call and have Elon Musk answer one question for investors: "Name 5 things you did in the past week for Tesla." Partially, just to throw his stupid stunts back at him, and partially out of the honest question of what exactly he is doing as CEO, given he's also CEO of like 5 other companies and shadow CEO of Twitter and DOGE and apparently spending all of his time on social media.

“I’m helping a coup of the US government and slashing spending so so we can get access to all the money I’ve “saved” and then I plan to award Tesla a bunch of grants and contracts we don’t deserve all while making sure tariffs don’t apply to us”?

Yeah, the idea that Trump won't try to make him whole somehow if the trends continue their downward trajectory seems hard to believe. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump mandates Tesla purchase quotas for GSA gov, which seems to manage the portal for vehicle purchases for fed agencies and/or employees. And then as the cherry on top mandate that the USPS use Cybertrucks to deliver mail. Or make up the difference by giving Starlink and SpaceX additional contracts to make up the difference.

I think Musk is going to be thrown under the bus soon. Perfect scapegoat. Committed crimes Already has a reputation for being crazy. Isn't really well liked and is labeled a Nazi.

Would be so easy for Trump to say he's done a bunch of evil, "corrupt" shit and "didn't tell me", maybe even take some of his money.

He has put himself in a stupidly precarious situation.

...oh an he's an immigrant, illegal.

> Tesla is still up compared to where it was a year ago.

$TSLA was $222 on 2020-12-29. Since Tesla does not pay a dividend, one could have made a lot more money investing in Treasuries over that time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/history/?period1=160678...

He still has his hooks into a wildly corrupt administration with all sorts of opportunities for graft, but he's going about it in a surprisingly incompetent and spiteful way. At least that's my best read of the recent stock movements. If/when he falls out with Trump there won't be much keeping the stock this overvalued given his recently shredded reputation. Of course the reverse could be true and if he quiets down and focuses on looting in the background Tesla might make out pretty well.

I don’t think he can afford to fall out with Trump. Every company he has is exposed to multiple serious regulatory questions, he has personally made serious false claims to investors (e.g. FSD), the DOGE stuff exceeds his authority as a SGE so he’s dependent on Trump saying he had approval, and if they wanted to give him the same treatment Trump has promised activists they could even try to revoke his citizenship on the grounds that he’d violated his earlier student visa by working.

I don’t know that Musk fully recognizes this. Trump was addicted to X but he doesn’t need it to get elected any more and has been boosting Truth Social enough that I don’t think it has the same hold it once did. Similarly, while he has put a lot of money into elections it’s not clear that this will work for crossing Trump if the FEC, SEC, and DOJ are a lot less concerned with scrupulously appearing non-partisan, and nobody else in Republican politics is going to thank him for making them less powerful.

I agree with all of that, Elon's downside risk is massive. Putting himself at Trump's mercy might turn out to be one of the biggest blunders ever. Trump seems happy with using Elon for now but he's the ultimate bully who loves to make powerful people grovel, and Elon won't like it if that focus turns to him.

Elon has been masterful at evading consequences for years so I won't be surprised to see him worm his way through this situation, although he does seem to be losing a step to say the least.

>Does Musk even want to be CEO anymore? He hasn't seemed to care about Tesla ever since he had to settle with the SEC

He recently got a contract with the State Department for 400 million to make armored Cybertrucks so he is still involved with Tesla. Musk wants to do whatever he wants without other people saying whether he can or can't. Every agency on his DOGE hit list was an agency that was investigating him. I'm sure he wants to be involved with SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla but these pesky things called regulations and investigations keep getting in his way so he has decided to tear it all down.

> He recently got a contract with the State Department for 400 million to make armored Cybertrucks

That doesn't appear to be the case - there (was) an entry on a spreadsheet about 'Armored Teslas' but Musk claims to know nothing about it, the State Department has stated it was just an estimate for a proposal they are no longer pursuing, and the ledger entry has been removed.

So no, not a "contract for armored Cybertrucks"

[0]https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5305269/tesla-state-dep...

Tesla has gotten more than $13 billion in government contracts in the past five years. There's no reason to think this rate will decrease. At least not in the next 4 years

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