Is Elon Musk hurting Tesla? (Mod Note Post #1)

It's important to remember they're growing internationally at the moment but not within China. There's been a pretty fierce price war there to the point where many brands were probably selling at a loss

There's been some theories that the sales growth in the EU and US is dumping of excess production outside of China

Certainly the EU seems to think so with their round of fines on Chinese brands

Well there were a few that someone tried to smuggle into Russia, so I wouldn't be surprised if a few made it

Also wouldn't be surprised if a one was offered to King Kadyrov, lord of Chechnya as tribute

Not sure I'm ready to believe Musk was aware or facilitated it. I mean he can't be that stupid surely?

We only have the word of the TikTok warrior in chief, who probably isn't the most reliable narrator

I believe several Starlink terminals were obtained by the Russians and there were some question marks about whether Elon gave them to them. However I think he got mostly absolved

Hopefully it gets sent to the front in Kursk, we'll get to see how it fares against a HIMARS strike 😂

Wherever there's a trade barrier there'll always be enterprising souls willing to bypass them for money

I suppose to the likes of Kadyrov it'd be a status symbol to have the contacts and resources to be able to flout the law so blatantly

Regarding the Elon connection, I have a theory. I believe that strictly speaking you couldn't legally buy a Cybertruck in Russia because you can't make a transaction in dollars

It's kind of bizarre but in Putin's Russia you have to maintain some veneer of legality despite the blatant law breaking within his regime

So technically the only legal way you could get a Cybertruck in Russia is if you were gifted one

Anyway, it's just a theory and I'm sure Kadyrov wouldn't pass up an opportunity to stir up from sh!t

I also wouldn't be surprised if Elon responds soon with a "looks cool" to the CT with the gun on top without checking the poster 🤦🏻‍♂️

I'm going to say you both have a good point

It's pretty obvious that Tesla entered the price war and sales downturn with a very high profit margin and can afford to lose some customers. Even if Elon is hurting sales it'll take some time for that to become apparent

On the other hand, Tesla doesn't have an already profitable ICE car business to fall back on if EV sales dip. And it's becoming apparent that people are buying cars other than Tesla, causing them to lose market share

This comes at a time when Tesla was full throttle on expansion and has a lot of very expensive capital expenditure going on. It's pretty easy then to see why Elon pumped the brakes on several Gigafactory builds. Mexico and India I believe were being talked about and paused

So he probably did the right thing as a response to a drop in sales. Although his approach to surgical cost reduction seems to be to cut entire productive teams. Like I've said before this is most likely to just boost the share price and stop the shareholders from firing him

The more difficult question for him to answer is why market share is dropping when overall global EV sales are still increasing. Typically this is not the kind of news shareholders like hearing