>The earnings report comes at a sensitive time for Tesla and Musk, as the CEO is seeking investor approval for that unprecedented $1tn pay package in a vote next month.
WTAF. I'm not sure who could think he deserves this much pay (other than himself), after tanking the brand.
It's almost entirely milestone/incentive based. Should Tesla continue on this trajectory, he won't see a dime. Tesla has to hit an $8 trillion market cap, deliver 20 million vehicles, and 1 million robotaxis, and $400 billion in adjusted earnings. Were Tesla to hit those numbers in the specified time frame, Musk's comp would be worth every penny to investors.
Yeah, I'd have no trouble voting for that $1T package. There are way too many conditions. There are lots of ways Musk doesn't get paid. The original $56B package was only revenue and stock price based. If it was like this one, it would also have been based on car deliveries, and solar installs, and stationary battery sales. He would have totally missed on the solar installs, despite being massively successful on everything else.
But if Musk left Tesla and the stock plummeted, Musk's wealth would also plummet (Tesla is ~1/3 of his publicly known wealth). So I don't think leaving Tesla is in his interest even if it were voted that he will never get any compensation. If Tesla's value increased, his wealth would also greatly increase, so he should be motivated anyway. With that in mind, other stockholders may vote against the package even if they want him to stay, because it's not in their interest to have their shares diluted to give even more shares to Musk.
Earn cool 19k on each of the 21 million cars sold? That is some hefty margins to get to those earnings... Especially when you have Chinese models to compete with.
From an outside perspective, it feels wrong that the goal isn't higher earnings but a higher stock price. They don't care about actually creating value, just keep inflating the bubble and you're golden.
Other private Musk companies (SpaceX and xAI) just bought fleets of Cybertrucks. One may wonder what exactly they would do with so many vehicles other than boost Tesla's share price.
Musk's companies buying hundreds or thousands of Cybertrucks is of course good for Tesla, but the impact on finances (and the stock price) should be minimal. Tesla has the capacity to make ~30k Cybertrucks/quarter, and it seems they sold only ~5k of them in Q3. So unless these companies would buy thousands of them per month, it's nothing.
Could TSLA be manipulated? With a priced earnings ratio of 300, the question is: how much more manipulated? How about all of the other fashy tech bros with ridiculous valuations in public and private companies?
I don't think so either because if we did, Elon Musk could just shut down Tesla, invest all the money in S&P 500 and collect is $1 Trillion at the end of 10 years!
Just guessing, but wouldn't surprise me if most luxury brands are struggling at the moment. I don't think this is the right time to buy a brand new, luxury car for most people. Considering the inflation, unemployment and uncertainty.
Why do things have to change constantly? Like the Model Y was insanely different to any other car I’d ever driven not long ago, and Tesla was first to market on actually good electric cars. Why do they have to operate using the same strategy as legacy auto makers? Like a design refresh every 3 years to drive excitement feels manipulative to me, not like something that is absolutely necessary. Are you saying that competitor electric cars are outcompeting them by a wide margin now? I’m not really aware of which ones if so, at least in the American market. AFAIK the electric car program for all of the legacy auto makers is still a money pit for them, is it not?
Cars (especially in the US) are an emotional and personal purchase. They are an extension and representation of your personality. It's fashion.
The entire history of the US car business has shown that the path to success is to produce different variants for different customer bases and refresh those variants to drive continual sales.
Some manufacturers take this to Nike-level extremes with rare variants, 1-of-1 models, etc (looking at you, Porsche). Other manufactures take it to the other extreme with base one platform being repurposed for 5+ different customer segments with wildly different body designs - for example the Toyota Tundra, Tacoma, Lexus LX, 4Runner, and Land Cruiser are all the same car with a different shell.
So the conventional wisdom in the industry is that Tesla is committing suicide by producing generic, stale cars without model variants. Tesla seems to have bet that the conventional wisdom is wrong and producing cheap, repeatable cars with less variation is a better business strategy. Time will tell.
There are plenty of very, very good EV out there, have been for years but those other automakers are already servicing shareholders with pretty reliable profits.
As a result they just treat ev and hybrids like any other model for the most part wrt marketing and so forth. It’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to cannibalize regular sales and service. Financially, they don’t need to. It does help their CAFE fleet standards.
It doesn’t make as much sense for Toyota since they have some of the segment (economical or environmental buyers) covered by Camry and Prius, which they’ve been making for like 30 years.
As for “why should cars change every 3 years”, well, they don’t.
Other automakers typically develop a platform and use it as a base for many models over several to many years.
Mercedes-Benz platforms have lasted over a decade, encompassing many badges. GM make Escalades and Yukons, they are the same platform with different options.
There is a sure benefit of Tesla: competition in the EV space, since they had no product to match GM.
Just an aside, electric cars aren’t even close to new, Tesla was not first to market. They were pretty popular 120 years ago, but clearly things change.
So maybe it’s just me, but I hate how the legacy auto makers, even the luxury ones, nickel and dime everything. You buy a $75k car and the frequently touched places are metal, but if you go looking at all you find cheap $15k car tier plastic. With Tesla, the entire car is made of a few middle of the road materials. I don’t want the cheap plastic, but I also don’t want a facade. I just want reasonable quality everywhere. I feel like cars that don’t do that are lying to me. Also Tesla basically succeeded at replicating an iPad as the screen, which to this day no one else has done. I think they actually poached part of the iPad team to do it.
Tesla makes their own fabrication machines in house, so their body panels don’t have to look like every other manufacturer that uses standard supplier machines. And I’m not referring to the cyber truck, the shape of the main line cars is not achievable with the standard equipment, which is why they are able to stand out visually.
Where are the competitor electrics beating out Tesla? Are the acceleration dynamics better? Is the handling better? Is the screen better?
I’m guessing the seats are more comfortable, and the interior is bifurcated into nicer and less nice parts with the average niceness being about the same. They might be dumping here though since they are still burning through cash on these cars AFAIK, so I think it remains to be seen whether whatever advantages they have in the comfort and materials areas are sustainable.
(For the record, the electric door openers and the self driving labeling are both moronic, but when you have a dictator you can’t really avoid getting some bad stuff where the individual guy turns out to be wrong about something).
Well it's nice that Tesla cars are uniquely made, but they are very ugly to the average consumer. More traditional cars produced by legacy makers just... look better. To most people.
Legacy makers are producing cars with things consumers actually want. Higher quality interiors, nice exteriors, good ride dynamics, Apple car play, and competitive price points.
I think the reality is that most people actually don't care about Teslas big screen or autopilot. They want a car thats somewhat normal that does car things and does them well. They want good range, comfy seats, and steering wheel stocks.
Kia provides that, Hyundai provide that, pretty much everyone provides that except Tesla. The extra acceleration points doesn't matter. It's never really mattered, that's just a spec sheet bragging point.
I am not talking about the size. Capacitive touch screen hardware and software seems to be really difficult to nail. The actual touch interface on Tesla is at the iPad level. Also the material quality is very good.
All other cars I’ve tried recently have all had a touch screen, it was just bad. If I have to have a screen, I want it to feel like a first class citizen and not some cost cut afterthought.
I don’t really get why people would want CarPlay instead of the native Tesla OS? I have another car with CarPlay which was more expensive than my Tesla (so apples to apples or better comparison), and I find CarPlay on the B tier screen to feel extremely clunky by comparison (though still much better than what came before in the legacy makers).
Have you daily driven a Tesla before? Have the other car makers released some crazy breakthrough? I might test drive some, I’m curious now.
It seems to me like the biggest difference is the media turned against Elon, and so we went from having positive coverage of Tesla to negative. I think that alone could explain the sentiment shift, based on how people all around me seem to be brain-led by the media.
one has to be out of their mind to prefer carplay over tesla’s native, literally out of their mind. tesla’s tech is far superior than any other car and it isn’t even close.
the problwm with tesla is that it is a dinosaur. I own 2014 Tesla S, my neighbour latest one - it is same f’ing car. tesla X was cool looking… in 2016, now it looks like it belongs in a museum. model 3 is chopped up S and Y is blown up 3. the cars are sooooo outdated it is nuts people still buy them
I get what you’re saying, but I feel like this is basically an immoral reason to judge a car. Immoral in the philosophical sense, not in a religious sense.
Like do we really need our cars to have random shapes added and removed from them every 3 years? Why? Sure, novelty feels good, but the impact of this behavior is pretty clearly not positive. A lot of waste is generated, both at a societal level but also at a personal and familial level, and also in terms of industrial production resource direction, basically in the name of fashion. The new BMW design isn’t any “better” than the old design, it’s just visual social memes.
So anyway it makes sense that Elon is being stubborn against this, and it also makes sense that he will probably fail at doing that because not everyone is a turbo autist.
> one has to be out of their mind to prefer carplay over tesla’s native, literally out of their mind.
Hi, it's me, I've driven Tesla's and yes - I prefer carplay and android auto, and I have good reasons for it.
The first being that touch displays, even if they are the best displays that could be manufactured on Earth, will always be inferior to physical controls for many functions.
Me swiping up and down or pushing plus or minus to turn up the heat does not compare to a rinky dink dial found in a 1999 Toyota Corolla.
So then, what's left? The software-only stuff: navigation, music, notifications.
I think CarPlay and Android Auto does all of those better. Navigation is best on Google Maps and Apple Maps. And, even if you disagree, just have ONE app to do it across the board and share the data is a superior experience.
But, even if you're still not convinced, consider: your phone is 500 - 1000 dollars, and your car is tens of thousands of dollars. Why are you tightly coupling these throw-away software functions to such an expensive thing?
What happens if, tomorrow, some service goes away and your Tesla doesn't update? Then you'd be like those bozos who bought a fancy SiriusXM subscription in their 2015 car.
The blower speed can be mapped to the steering wheel button. And it’s actually easy to map things because the software is made by a company with real software people, the software quality in terms of intuitiveness is night and day compared to the legacy companies. I find it easier to adjust the heat/cooling in my Tesla compared to the standard buttons. I don’t generally mess with the temperature though, and turning AC on and off is very slightly annoying through the screen, but that doesn’t happen much. Also the voice controls actually work well enough that I can use them reliably. You do have to figure out what to say (“my butt is cold” does not turn on the seat heater, unfortunately), but once you know that the system is very good at reliably picking up what you’re saying.
> What happens if, tomorrow, some service goes away and your Tesla doesn't update?
I would sell it at a greater loss due to it being nerfed and I would at that point buy a different car. I don’t generally drive cars that old anyway, just because random issues become a lot more frequent and I don’t want to deal with that.
Tesla is married to the designs because of the way that they’re manufactured.
For example Tesla uses a very large press to make the Y monocoque body in one or two pieces. They get a lot of their manufacturing capability this way, reducing assembly costs and weld time, but then they do weird stuff like bolting the control are inside the passenger wheel well interior under the carpet. This kind of stuff isn’t replicable , each vehicle is for the most part a siloed manufacturing process
This is fine for a one off model, but now the manufacturing process is bespoke across the board. Any other maker can switch out parts of the line and make a different vehicle, Tesla needs to redesign the process, supply new assemblies, get another Gigafactory Press from Idra Group, and then retrain everybody. So they don’t.
Instead you get Full Self Driving.
Pretty much every Tesla product has been seen more than a decade ago (cybertruck was first discussed in think 2014) except the Semi, which doesn’t exist, but had lots of press regardless.
The Model Y has been iteratively improved since its introduction like any other product, and remains the best selling car in its class in most western markets.
This argument makes about as much sense as saying Apple hasn’t released a new phone since 2007.
They lost a lot of the advantage they had on hardware, but if you want a non-chinese EV with really good software and well-thought and working UX they're still a perfectly valid all-rounder with a very good charging network, and they also refine their hardware over time.
They refreshed the M3 and MY looks recently and changed the shapes a bit, but I always understood their looks to be function over form for efficiency reasons, and they don't look bad at all if you ask me. Simple, effective, efficient and timeless designs.
I agree with the other comments here that changing shapes for the sake of changing shapes it's just marketing.
EDIT: to be honest, the only thing that really annoys me is they didn't release an EU A/B/C segment ~4m car with all the features of a standard Model 3/Y. Instead they took the existing models and made them cheaper.
Extremely relative. I escaped part of the US where any car that started reliably was luxury. New, or brand selection, was absolutely out of the question.
62k Euros gets a lifetime of used vehicles. I'll say the quiet thing: buying a new car and taking the depreciation is a form of luxury. More about status than getting to the destination.
Dan has a point. I could pay for half of a house right now, committing seems silly until things cool down. Two articles away from being relocated again, despite working remotely.
Tesla is not a luxury brand, but they ask for premium prices, compared to the value (worst in ADAC statistics on repairs)
“ In 1974, a new car cost an average of 5320 euros. The average income was 13,928 euros per year, so a buyer had to work for an average of 4.6 months for a new car. 20 years later, it was already 7.4 months per new car. Until 2019, this number remained stable, but then it skyrocketed. Today, a buyer has to spend all his income from 9.6 months of employment to buy a new car. For more expensive e-cars, it is even 11.4 months. The reason is stagnant incomes, but also high profit margins of the manufacturers.” https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/kosten-auto...
From my personal perspective, as an employed software engineer, all cars over 50k are luxury.
The value derived and average usage of a car has increased too...
Also the financing around cars have made it smoother to buy one.
Also Electric can demand a premium because they save on gas costs.
I live in Europe and drive a Tesla, so I occasionally chat with other Tesla owners. Many of them make a point of mentioning that they bought their car years ago and probably wouldn’t have made the same choice if they’d known about Musk’s activities in Europe. Some even seem worried about being judged.
I’m fairly certain that the overall decline in interest is mainly due to general economic uncertainty and the phasing out of EV incentives in various countries. But I’m trying to say that it’s clear that Musk’s reputation has taken a hit! ironically among some of the very demographic groups most likely to be Tesla customers.
But is this still more because of Musk, the car, or the subsidy? Many seemed to adore Tesla the vehicle (AOC famously had trouble giving hers up) and then turned against because of Musk. Other's turned away from EVs because of the removal of subsidies etc.
So which is it really, or is it a mix? Political, Personal, or Financial?
So much of their planned earnings was coupled with cozying up to the current political administration:
> The loss of EV credits as a result of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a factor in the public breakup between Musk and the president and has continued to influence the company’s sales forecasts.
> Musk has also insulted Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, this week in a series of posts that included calling him “Sean Dummy” and reposting calls for him to be removed from his post. Duffy, who is also acting head of Nasa, stated on Monday that he would reopen the bidding for contracts related to the space agency’s Artemis moon mission because Musk’s SpaceX rocket company had fallen behind on its timelines for the project.
Very hard to take this article seriously when they claim the Model Y was just released this month when it actually came out in 2020. "Tesla also debuted a long-promised, cheaper sedan called the Model Y earlier this month in a bid to increase slumping sales. The new line of sedans received criticism from some analysts over its starting prices of $39,990 and $36,990 – significantly higher than Chinese low-cost competitors." Also the claimed "Rush to buy electric vehicles" put revenue only 2% above expectations?
Blame Tesla for the branding. Wikipedia on the Model Y L[0]
In June 2025, Tesla introduced the three-row, six-seater version of the Model Y, marketed as the Model Y L.[84] Debuting in China and produced at Gigafactory Shanghai, the variant introduces a six-seat configuration with a lengthened cabin and upgraded interior features. It is equipped with 19-inch aero wheels in a new design and offers a new exterior colour option called Cosmic Silver. Deliveries in China commenced on September 2, 2025.[85]
But they did introduce a cheaper sedan this month. It happens to be called the Model Y as well. This is unambiguously true. I think your reading comprehension needs work. It's not saying this is the only Model Y or that there is no other Model Y.
WTAF. I'm not sure who could think he deserves this much pay (other than himself), after tanking the brand.