Elon Musk Can’t Stop Tesla’s Bleeding

Elon Musk has tried to dismiss the Tesla protests sweeping the country as the work of paid agitators backed by Democrats. But Tesla’s most recent earnings report—which revealed a 13% decline in vehicle deliveries since last year—shows that the backlash against the electric vehicle company is very, very real.

“We are not going to look at these numbers with rose-colored glasses,” one analyst wrote on X on Wednesday. “They were a disaster on every metric.”

The company’s stock price had already been in free fall over the last two months, as Wall Street speculated that maybe Musk’s role as the grim reaper of government agencies might not make his company the most popular. But Wednesday’s results were the first firm indicator of just how much of a hit Tesla is taking.

During the first quarter of this year, Tesla delivered 336,681 vehicles — about 50,000 fewer than at this time last year and at least 20,000 fewer than investors expected, according to CNBC. Tesla has reportedly had a particularly tough time offloading Cybertrucks. According to Electrek, the company is currently sitting on $200 million worth of beastly bro-mobile inventory.

Tesla’s earnings Wednesday prompted another brief dip in the company’s share price. But, in an indication of just how much Tesla’s fortunes are tied to Musk’s role in the Trump administration, the stock rallied slightly just after Politico reported that Musk’s time at the Department of Government Efficiency might soon be up. (A White House spokesperson told Politico that the president “would love to keep Elon around for as long as possible.”) Musk himself indicated in a recent interview with Fox News that he may be finished with the job when his allotted time as a “special government employee” runs out in a few months.

Still, if there’s anyone willing to withstand a prolonged financial blow, it’s Musk. In 2021, before he bought Twitter, it generated $4.51 billion in ad revenue, according to Reuters. This quarter, Reuters reports, analysts expect X’s global ad sales to be $2.26 billion, marking the first quarter of growth since Musk acquired the company in 2022.

Musk has proven not just willing to take a hit, of course. He’s also more than capable of absorbing it. Forbes’ recently published Billionaire List shows Musk taking the top spot with an estimated $342 billion net worth—the first person to ever cross the $300 billion mark. That represents a 75% jump in Musk’s wealth since last year, according to Forbes. Musk’s decision to hitch his wagon to Donald Trump may not be working out so great for Tesla, but it seems to be serving the tech billionaire just fine.