Dem
47
GOP
53
It is not a secret that Tesla stock is not doing well right now. There are the issues that would have manifested eventually, regardless of what happened in the world of politics—questions about safety and reliability (especially with Cybertrucks), a stock price not supported by the company's fundamentals, competition that is catching up (or has already caught up), etc. And then, Elon Musk effectively abandoned Tesla, depriving it of its alleged wunderkind, and took a Himmler-like turn. That is, to say the least, a bad fit for the demographic that buys Teslas. And finally, the trade war with China threatens to completely up-end production of Tesla cars, most obviously by cutting off or reducing the supply or dramatically increasing the cost of rare earths.
These things being the case, Tesla is taking a beating (and so is TSLA). The company's earnings report was released yesterday, and not only did it miss its target for Q1 by about 10%, its revenue compared to Q1 last year is down 20%. Although the share price didn't change much yesterday, the year 2025 as a whole has seen a decline of 41%. And we're still only in April.
In response to all of this bad news, Musk announced yesterday that his commitment to DOGE will soon "drop significantly," so he can go back to work at his day job. He said that he'd drop to a day or two of government work per week in May, and then might leave government work entirely in the months thereafter. Since Musk and Trump are both inveterate liars, you can't know if the South African will actually follow through on this promise. And if he does, you can't know if it's really because Tesla is having trouble, or if that's just a convenient "out." All of this said, we think it's considerably more likely than not that Musk is going to fade mostly into the background by the time summer rolls around.
Whatever he does, however, Musk is NOT going to fade in Democratic rhetoric or advertising. The Party thinks it has a winner in running against him and the "work" he's done, and they are going to ride that for all it's worth. A new piece from Politico reports that while Democratic bigwigs don't like to comment on their messaging plans this far in advance, there is an expectation that Musk will be appearing in a lot of blue-team ads in 2026. Those readers who live in purple states and districts, and who are already heartily sick of Musk's mug... sorry. (Z)