Tesla Consumed by Chaos Amid Stock Slide, Sales Drop and Job Cuts

Peter, never a dull moment at Tesla. I think his biographer described this as Elon Musk and demon mode. What’s going on? The great question. What is going on at Tesla? Even by Elon Musk standards, it’s been a pretty wild week. It started off last weekend with the announcement that they were going to cut 10% of their global workforce. That’s about 14,000 jobs. There’s reports that those cuts could be even deeper. Then during the week, we saw him go what he called balls to the wall on the autonomous taxi, which seems to have taken over as the company’s priority from a $25,000 mass market car, which he was talking up at the last earnings recall only three months ago. And investors have really been keen to see that move towards a mass market car to try and fill that hole in Tesla’s sales that we’re seeing. That was only the beginning of the week. In the rest of the week, we saw the company try to revive a shareholder vote on the $56 billion pay package for Elon that was struck down by a court in Delaware in January. They then had to recall all the cyber trucks that they’ve sold in the US for a faulty accelerator pedal that could lead to accidents. And then as you say, on the weekend, we saw price cuts in the US, China, Europe. It’s three key markets. And that really suggests that sales may still be getting worse than what we saw in the previous quarter. He called off that trip to India that was planned for this week, citing these heavy obligations, a test that we’ve got the earnings call coming up on Tuesday, US time. So I think a lot of focus now is on that to see if we can get some clarity on what Tesla’s strategy is. Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask about, Peter, because as you say that that chaos, those challenges very much reflected in the stock price at least, which is down more than 40% since the start of this year. But what are we looking to see and what would reassure investors from this set of earnings, do you think, if anything? Well, it looks like we’re going to. It looks like we’re going to see a pretty bad set of numbers from Tesla come Tuesday. We’ve already seen that drop in sales. It’s expected to report a 40% plunge in operating profit and its first revenue decline in four years. I think what investors want more than anything, though, is just some clarity on the strategy. As I said previously, it was only three months ago that on the earnings call Musk was talking up progress on this $25,000 mass market car. Last week, the whole thing seems to have swung towards this autonomous self driving taxi or robotaxi. And we already know that Tesla’s claims of full self driving does don’t really exist. Full self driving is not full self driving. It still needs constant driver supervision. So it’s going to take some time before we can get to the full self driving robotaxi. And we’ve seen that other companies from Uber to GM and and crews who have tried this have have had huge problems I getting these cars on the road and keeping them on the road safely. So I think that will be the main thing that investors want from this is some clarity on what is Teslas strategy going forward.