Tesla shareholders thankful to have Musk back after his time with DOGE
Americans should be thankful that Elon Musk devoted his time to DOGE and shining a spotlight on government waste.Tesla shareholders have less reason to cheer.I say this not as a Musk hater, but an admirer of his brilliance and patriotism to his adopted country.
Yet in announcing last week he’s totally done with the aforementioned Department of Government Efficiency, Musk did underscore a blind spot in his day job running Tesla, the world’s preeminent electric vehicle company.It is mostly Tesla that makes him the world’s richest man, with an estimated net worth of $425 billion, according to Forbes.It is Tesla and the stock he holds that made him an opinion leader, using the currency to buy Twitter, rename it X and establish the platform as maybe the most important news operation in the world.
SpaceX is revolutionary, as is Starlink, and maybe soon, his AI application, xAI, but Tesla is at the heart of Musk Inc.for now and maybe forever.And there’s good evidence that Musk has taken Tesla for granted, including disregarding its many critics, the short sellers who have been warning for years about holes in the company’s business model and his erratic management style.Musk outlasted most of the shorts, many of whom (like the renowned James Chanos) long ago threw in the proverbial towel on their bet the stock would plummet to reflect their version — maybe the most accurate version — of Tesla’s operating reality and the weirdish ways Musk has at times run things.This is a company with a stock that is tremendously overvalued by traditional metrics, yet its CEO took a sabbatical to hang out in the White House while things were starting to go sideways back at the office.Tesla has so-so profits of just around $7 billion in 2024, but eked out just $400 million in the first quarter of 2025, a significant two-year low.Investors are the ultimate herd animal.
The Musk is brilliant meme (and forget everything else like Tesla’s sometimes weak operating performa...