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Tesla Troubles Continue to Mount as Stock Price Tanks [1]

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Date: 2025-02-28

Earlier this month I had written about the multiplying problems facing Elon’s EV car company Tesla, most of which could be traced to Musk’s increasingly toxic personal brand. For connoisseurs of pure unadulterated schadenfreude, it’s been a banner couple of weeks.

Back in December, at the height of the “Trump bump” when TSLA briefly touched $480 a share and the company’s total market capitalization reached an absurd $1.5 trillion, Elon’s ownership of 20% of the company stock was worth a bloated $300 billion. Less than two months later when I last checked in, the stock had already shed a quarter of its peak value, and now it’s lost another 20% on top of that, including a precipitous plunge of 15% over just the past three days!

So what was once briefly a $1.5 trillion company is now barely a $900 billion company, and Elon’s personal net worth has taken a roughly $120 billion hit. The increasingly panicked selling has now erased all of the post-election gains at this point, and it’s difficult see where the bottom might be — particularly since the news is just getting worse. From Raw Story today:

Now the New York Times reports that the American Federation of Teachers is putting pressure on major stockholders to sell off their shares of the company in a bid that would likely drive its value down even further. AFT leader Randi Weingarten has written to the CEOs of major asset management firms and asked them to scrutinize the risks involved with holding onto Tesla stock, whose price-earnings ratio of 142 is more than five times higher than the average of S&P 500 stocks and is thus potentially overvalued.

“Potentially” overvalued? Given the continuing collapse in sales across Europe, North America, and even China now, the ridiculously inflated PE number is more indicative of a highly speculative meme stock than that of a company that actually makes a product customers actually want to buy.

“This is about safeguarding workers’ retirements,” Weingarten told the Times. “Just this week we saw Tesla stock continue to sink faster than a Cybertruck in quicksand as European sales fell off a cliff. So, we knew we needed to act.” The Times notes that Weingarten has long ties to the Democratic Party and that labor unions as a whole have long been antagonistic toward Musk. That said, the report adds that Weingarten does raise some legitimate concerns about worker pensions being exposed to Tesla, including "falling quarterly earnings and profit margins, which the union said implied that Tesla was losing its pricing power; tumbling sales in California, a major market, and in Europe; greater competition in electric vehicle charging, a business Tesla has long dominated." Progressive groups have also recently targeted Tesla dealerships for protests and have been urging people to boycott the company all together.

This seems borne out by the results of the poll I ran in the last diary. While only 6% of the more than 3200 respondents actually own a Tesla, by a 5-1 margin they are evidently having second thoughts about continuing to do so. Even more astounding, 12% had been considering buying a Tesla before Musk’s insanely self-sabotaging behaviors convinced them otherwise, 14% already own a non-Tesla EV, and a clear majority (54%) were interested in eventually buying an EV — as long as it’s not a Tesla! Likewise, while 14% weren’t really interested in EVs at all, apparently not a single respondent who currently doesn’t already own an EV was willing to admit they were still interested in buying a Tesla now.

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