Serial Liar Elon Musk Promises “More Affordable” New Models Amidst Tesla’s Falling Profits

Tesla’s business has taken a hit lately, as its sales have slowed to the point where it is a legitimate question to ask whether the company (and Elon’s margin loans) are in trouble. The high-profile Cybertruck rollout has been such a disaster that you cannot even wash it in sunlight. Now Tesla is recalling every single Cybertruck as it has a teensy, tiny, little problem where the gas pedal can very easily get pinned down to the floor. Whoopsies! I guess this is why real car companies have production standards, huh?

Yesterday, Tesla held its earnings call, and Musk detailed new plans to try to reclaim the market share his company has lost.

We’ve updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models ahead, previously mentioned startup production in the second half of 2025, so we expect it to be more like the early 2025, if not late this year. These new vehicles, including more affordable models, will use aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms, and will be able to produce on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle lineup.

Mark early 2025 on your calendars, folks. Anyone who has paid attention to anything Elon has ever said knows that it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. The man has broken so many promises that assuming everything he says is a lie until proven otherwise is the only logical position to take. The perfect example of his lack of credibility came up in the earnings call, when Musk talked about Tesla’s eternal promise of self-driving cars, of which he once said Tesla would be worth “basically zero” if they don’t figure it out.

The way to think of Tesla is almost entirely in terms of solving autonomy and being able to turn on that autonomy for a gigantic fleet. And I think it might be the biggest asset value appreciation history when that day happens when you can do unsupervised full self-driving… It will be 7 million cars in a year or so and then 10 million and then eventually, we’re talking about tens of millions of cars. Not eventually, it’s like, yes, for the end of the decade, its several tens of millions of cars I think.

This is a familiar trope to anyone who has been following Elon’s bullshit for the last decade. He has promised something like this almost every single year. In 2015, Musk said his cars would reach “full autonomy” within three years. The next year, he claimed a Tesla would make an autonomous cross-country drive by the end of 2017. In 2019, he told investors he would have one million self-driving taxis on the road by 2020.

None of these things ever happened.

There’s a reason the California attorney general’s office opened an investigation into Tesla last year over its murderous self-driving feature and the endless amount of false advertising from Tesla’s CEO surrounding it. Just two weeks ago, two agencies in California who regulate self-driving taxis said they have not heard from Tesla about the plans for their robotaxis that Musk said on the earnings call were a big part of Tesla’s future. Brad Templeton, a consultant in the autonomous vehicle industry, told NBC that “Tesla’s a long way away from getting that approval.”

Anyone taking Musk’s claims at face value at this point deserves to get scammed.

And apparently the market likes getting scammed! Tesla stock was up twelve percent today (while the major indexes were flat), providing yet another data point in an endless line of them that Tesla’s valuation is fundamentally about hype, not fundamentals. Its CEO is a charlatan who has been caught lying countless times, but there are so many Tesla marks in the market that reality takes a backseat to perception with this stock. Tesla’s most enthusiastic stockholders are so sycophantic at this point that I’m shocked TSLA doesn’t jump one percent every time Elon fires off a tweet.

Elon Musk’s Tesla strategy has been to over-promise and under-deliver, and it is the only level of genius he has ever demonstrated in public. While this strategy may have ruined his reputation with regulators and normal humans, it earned him an army of suckers who bought his stock in droves and made it the most fundamentally overvalued equity of the 21^st century, and Elon the world’s richest man with it.