Despite a surge in lot-clearing deals for Q4, Tesla failed to sell as many cars in 2024 as it did the year before, sending the company’s stock down about 5% in midday trading Thursday. Even as Q4 marked a three-month sales record for Elon Musk’s EV company, interest-free financing deals and free Supercharging failed to lift sales enough to show an annual increase over 2023. The decline is Tesla’s first YOY drop in annual sales since 2011, even as global EV sales rose 15% globally in the first 11 months of the year.
In all, Tesla said it delivered 1.79 million cars worldwide, down about 1% from 2023, as rivals including China’s BYD have been eating away at Tesla’s share of the market. BYD reported a 12% growth in sales over 2023, moving 1.76 million cars across the globe. Some investors are wondering if Musk’s deep involvement in Donald Trump’s transition to the presidency has taken his eye off the company’s bottom line. Not including the Cybertruck, Tesla hasn’t delivered a new model in several years, which some analysts blamed for a decline in the key California market. In Q3, California EV sales rose 2% as Tesla sales dropped 3.5%, following drops of 7.8% in Q1 and 17% in Q2.
“Unfortunately for Elon, a certain amount of his consumer base is not a fan of what’s given him a high profile over the past year,” Karl Brauer, an auto market analyst at iSeeCars.com, told the Los Angeles Times in October.
Musk has promised to release a new, cheaper EV in the first half of this year, but so far details have been scant. Investors are also fretting over fears that Trump will carry through on his threat to end the federal government’s $7,500 EV credit.
But sales don’t seem to be the key to Tesla’s share price, up 50% in the past year. Instead, investors are looking at Tesla’s promises of autonomous vehicles and robots. Tesla is “not making nearly enough money to justify the share price,” Leonard Kostovetsky, an associate professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, told the New York Times. “People are justifying it based on things that will happen in the future.”
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Elon’s World
South African–born Elon Musk has been in talks with Cyril Ramaphosa, the country’s president, who wants his one-time compatriot to invest in the homeland. Musk says he might invest in a Tesla battery factory if Ramaphosa can get the country’s parliament to loosen its requirement that businesses getting government contracts be part-owned by local Black businessmen, an attempt to correct the economic imbalances of decades of apartheid. The rule change would let Starlink’s high-speed internet operate legally in the country without Musk having to take on a local joint-venture partner, Bloomberg reports, citing people “familiar” with the communications between the two men.
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The Usual Suspects
- Boeing’s Korea blues: The woes never seem to end for America’s biggest manufacturer. After a Jeju Air 737-800 crashed on landing Monday in South Korea, Boeing’s shares fell 2.3%. They were down more than 5% by Thursday, even as no evidence emerged of design flaws, and authorities are studying whether a bird strike or a maintenance fault caused the plane to lose control. It streaked down a runway on its belly and exploded when it hit a concrete building. Boeing’s shares are down almost 50% in the last five years. Boeing appears to be the biggest loser of 2024 in the Dow Jones Index, falling 32% as it bounced from crisis to crisis.
- The TikTok Don: As TikTok nears a Jan. 19 deadline for its Chinese owners to sell the platform to American owners or face a ban in the U.S., President-elect Donald Trump has filed a brief with the Supreme Court asking to pause the ban so he can “negotiate a resolution” to save the site. The move is a stark reversal for Trump, who was the first to order TikTok banned, apparently in anger over China’s supposed role in the Covid pandemic. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order to allow a stronger law to ban the app to pass Congress, which it did with bipartisan support. The fear is that TikTok’s ties to China’s Communist Party, and the data it collects on Americans, pose a national security risk and open users to Chinese propaganda campaigns. But Trump’s position has apparently evolved. “I’m now a big star on TikTok,” Trump said in a video posted to the platform in September. “We’re not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side’s going to close it up. So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump.”
- Private homes? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-chartered mortgage guarantors, could be for sale as they emerge from government conservatorship following the 2008–9 real-estate-linked Great Recession. At least that’s the thinking of investor Bill Ackman, whose X post on the topic sent shares in the two entities rising by about 18% each. Ackman posits that Trump will sell them off, raising about $300 million for the Treasury and taking $8 trillion in liabilities (most of America’s private home mortgages) off the government’s balance sheet.
- Big Lots is back: Big Lots, the discount retailer that filed for bankruptcy protection in September, says it’s reached a deal with an investor group, Gordon Brothers Retail Partners, that would save between 200 and 400 of its 869 locations, selling them to Variety Wholesalers, which would keep them open and keep Big Lots’ employees running the stores. The transaction price was not disclosed.
- Cars are back, too: With cars back on the lots of dealers across the country, after years of pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, the dealers now have to move those cars. That means discounts and low-interest-rate financing. According to a survey by JD Power, car buyers received an average of $3,400 in discounts and other incentives in December, up more than 25% from a year earlier. The best deals are available on electric vehicles, which expect to see a major sales slump if Trump ends the existing $7,500 EV rebate.
The Short Stack
- Treasury hacked by China: Chinese government hackers broke into computer workstations at the Treasury Department early last month, the department told Congress this week. The hackers accessed unclassified documents after obtaining a special key used by an outside IT security company, BeyondTrust. Over the past several months, the U.S. has learned that a sophisticated Chinese intelligence operation, Salt Typhoon, hacked deep into at least nine U.S. telecoms firms, getting access to commercial phone lines used by Trump and Vice President–elect JD Vance and a complete list of phone numbers tapped by the Justice Department, which could help identify which Chinese spies have been detected by the U.S. and which still have their cover.
- Mexico calls Trump’s bluff: Mexican businesses are betting that Donald Trump is bluffing when he threatens their country with 25% tariffs. Instead, as the New York Times reports, manufacturers south of the border are gambling that Trump is more likely to follow through on his threat to put 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, opening up Mexican plants for “nearshoring” to U.S. markets. Pandemic-era hikes in shipping prices and the Biden Administration’s tariffs on China showed the dangers of a long supply chain. That’s prompted more than $23 billion in promised investments last year for more than 100 projects in the state of Nuevo Leon, whose capital is Monterrey. “Trump hates China more than he hates Mexico,” one Mexican factory owner told The New York Times.
- The great H1-B debate: As first buddy Elon Musk and a raft of fellow tech chiefs split with the MAGA faithful over immigration, Trump has now weighed in, calling the H1-B visa that lets in skilled workers “a great program.” That’s putting Trump at odds with MAGA stalwarts such as Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon. They want all immigration banned, with no exception for low-paid tech workers. (The New York Times did some digging to note that in 2016, Trump said “we should end” the H1-B program, and noted that he’s actually employed more than 1,000 people using the H-2B visa program for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, and the H-2A program for agricultural workers.)
- Hollywood PR brawl: Actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are trading lawsuits over sexual harassment and libel, and The New York Times is in the mix, sued for $250 million by Baldoni. He disputes Lively’s allegations she was sexually harassed on the set of their 2024 film “It Ends With Us” and smeared by Baldoni’s PR reps after she complained about Baldoni, her co-star and the film’s director. Baldoni says the Times has libeled him, but the paper says he hasn’t shown them anything wrong with the article, which quotes from Lively’s suit, including her allegation that Baldoni and a producer agreed to end the “descriptions of their own genitalia.” The film, which has grossed $350 million since its August release, chronicles the relationship between Lively’s character, a florist, and Baldoni’s, a neurosurgeon who becomes abusive.
- Behind the decline in news site advertising: Advertisers have long been wary of letting their ads run next to news stories that are violent, politicized, or otherwise off-putting, and that’s been draining revenue from news sites that are already bleeding subscribers, fighting AI-generated news, and losing eyeballs to social doomscrolling. Now it turns out that a big piece of the problem may be automated “watch lists” created by internet giants like Microsoft that keep digital ads away from weather reports that use terms like “artillery of the atmosphere” to describe thunderclaps, and a ranking of brownie mixes because some are sold in drug stores. Publishers are fighting back, reports the Wall Street Journal, with algorithms that show when a “shot” refers to basketball and not a drive-by.
Peter S. Green is a veteran reporter and editor who has spent more than two decades covering business and finance from Eastern Europe to New York City, and has worked for Bloomberg News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Messenger. He lives in New York City and is always looking for the next big story.
