Bulwark Takes - Tesla CRASHING Hard, and Elon Blames Everyone but Himself!

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger go over the disaster that was Tesla's latest earnings call. Cybertruck sales have tanked by 50%. The “affordable” Tesla is nowhere to be found. Profits are drying up. Carbon credit revenue is vanishing. And yet Elon Musk says he wants more control of the company. What could go wrong? We talk about the cult of Elon, the myth of the robo-taxi, the collapse of Tesla’s European sales, and the increasingly absurd PR spin Musk is trying to pull off.

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BenMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hello, everyone. I'm JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Andrew Egger. And normally this is a channel for doom and gloom and all the horrors which are afflicting America right now at this moment in time. But not today. Not today, Andrew.

Today, we have Schadenfreude. Are you ready? Let's do it, man. Let's get to it. Yesterday, Tesla held an earnings call with investors and it turns out Elon Musk's company not doing so good. And it turns out Elon Musk's company, not doing so good. Another earnings miss, lots of bad stuff happening.

For instance, the Cybertruck, you're aware of the Cybertruck, right? In the second quarter, they sold 4,300 of them. That is a 50% decline from last year. Now keep in mind, last year's Q2 number on Cybertrucks was disastrous. And so going down half from an already very, very bad sales number, unbelievably bad. All made worse by the fact that

they have scaled up production capacity for the Cybertruck so that they are prepared to be doing 250,000 of these a year, which means that their upfront costs and all that stuff's gonna have to be repurposed because they ain't never selling 20,000 of these things a year again, let alone 250,000. Can you imagine just the dystopia that we could have been living in if for some reason these happened to have caught some nerve in the public and be seen as really cool widely? Only 4,000 were sold.

I feel like half of those must've been sold in Northern Virginia, because I see them around now. I'm like, what is going on? They're, they uglify, not that this is like a car show, but they just make the whole environment worse. Like, any landscape that one of those is in, any parking lot that you see one, it's like everything around it suffers. And it's like, I've never seen a car quite like it.

It's really, it's really remarkable. Well, let me prepare you for something, Andrew, because again, this is a happy show with schadenfreude, but I do want us to be a little grounded. 20 years from now, the hipsters of America in 2025 will be driving cyber trucks, ironically. And I believe that eventually the cyber truck will become kind of a collector's item in the way that like certain unbelievably failed products

have become. And it will be adopted as a sort of ironic pose of, oh, I went and got a cyber truck, didn't even believe it. Look at this. That I got a cyber truck. Can you even believe it? Look at this. That's like a hopeful future. That's a future where we still have like, you know, luxury money to burn in America 20 years, 20 years down the line for conspicuous consumption

of oddities like the old cyber truck. Sure. So, okay, next item from the earnings call. Tesla had promised that it would have a new model on sale that would be its cheapest car, a brand new car by the end of June. You may have noticed, if you pay attention to the automotive press,

that that has not happened. There is no model. There are not even pictures of this model or details of what this model is or pricing for what this model will eventually be called. But Tesla did say that it plans to have them being sold soon. Is this how real car companies operate?

Does Toyota say we are gonna have a new subcompact out in June, and then June comes and goes, and nobody and like the Toyota people are just like, yeah, whatever. You get it when you get it, bitches. I don't think that's how it works in this industry. Well, and this is kind of the problem with Musk. I mean, even before all of the new problems with Musk is that kind of all along, he was never really the guy who was going to necessarily excel at running like a real car company,

right? Like being in a crowded market with a bunch of competitors at parity that he was going to need to like beat out by inches. I mean, like what he has always specialized in doing and had a lot of success in doing is creating new markets, right? Like going somewhere nobody else was thinking of going, getting there first, trying to corner that market. And that's why, you know, Tesla stock went to the moon and had this unbelievable valuation because this was the idea was kind of like, oh, I guess these are the electric

cars and electric cars are coming and pretty soon everybody's going to have one. So I guess that's going to be Tesla, right? But then everybody else started piling into the market, right? Everybody's got a hybrid or an electric car on the way. And so even before he went ketamine crazy and cooked his brain on Twitter and cooked his reputation in the White House, this was gonna be a problem for him, right?

And so I think like it would be interesting to be able to kind of hop in a time machine or you know, the your multiverse travel box head over to some comparable place where he just never got involved in politics at all. And Mike Hunch, and I think a lot of people much smarter than me about this stuff, Hunch, is that he would still be having a lot of these problems just maybe on a much less accelerated timeline and much less catastrophically. That's right. So but the other problem is that he might not have gotten the stock lift. Right. Because again, like so his valuation of Tesla shares,

which we're going to get to in a minute, has been buoyed by this cult of like weird incels around him. And he did have to keep those people on side, so maybe the dabble in politics is part of that. I don't know. And he did have to keep those people on sides. Maybe the dabble in politics is part of that. I don't know. We're gonna keep going. He did say yesterday that by the end of this year,

he would be having this new cheapy model, the Econo Tesla. It would be selling by the end of the year. I do have a question for you. If you are an investor and the CEO is saying, yes, we're going to have this thing on sale by June and then June comes and goes, and not only is it not on sale,

but you don't have pictures of it, you don't have pricing of it, you don't have any specs on what it is. He says, yes, it'll be on sale by the end of the year. What is the rationale for believing that? I mean, this is just where the kind of cult of personality comes into play, right? Because you were gesturing at it before, Elon Musk's sort of legion of fanboys are not just fan.

They're not just like people who follow him on Twitter. A lot of them are retail investors who have poured a good amount of money into Tesla themselves. It's not just, it's not like he just has to convince Vanguard and BlackRock and whoever else to big, big money managers and investment funds that he remains a good bet. He has this kind of baked in, I don't know what you'd call it, this life raft of people who are bought in on the Elon project.

And I don't have a good sense of where those people are. I mean, most of the suffering that Elon has undergone has been everybody else, right? It was not just those people who were purchasing Teslas back in the day. It was a lot of different kinds of people who were purchasing Teslas. So his problem is with the much broader band of society that has stopped purchasing them at a remarkable speed. But I don't have a good clock on kind of where the median Elon fanboy is on all this stuff. Do you?

I mean, are you plugged into that at all? Beats me. Beats me. So let me just tick through some more things from some more numbers from the presentation. From April to June, the company netted $1.2 billion. This is down from $1.4 billion a year ago. Sales fell from 25.5 billion to 22.5 billion. So that's a pretty precipitous fall.

Now, one of the things that's interesting in this is that Tesla has been really leaning heavily on incentives and discounting to try to move these things because people don't want to buy their cars anymore. And one of the things that the Trump administration is going to make a bunch of the things that they use to get people to buy cars go away. So the EV deduction of $7,500, federal deduction, that's going to be going away. And when you look at the breakdown from the numbers

yesterday, what you find is that Tesla's profit margin was due entirely to its resale of carbon credits. That's it. So when we say that they had a $1.2 billion profit, where did that money come from? That came from the sale of carbon credits, which is just free money that Tesla gets. One of the things Trump is doing is phasing those out. Huh. I wonder how that's going to affect the business.

What a perfect storm. I mean, like, this guy was is still is, right? He's the richest man in the world, right? I mean, like how far, but it's all it's all Tesla and SpaceX stock, right? And primarily Tesla, right? It's the richest man in the world, right? I mean, like how far, but it's all Tesla and SpaceX stock, right? And primarily Tesla, right? It's like, that's his cash cow. Can you imagine another like financial story like that? I mean, like the financial stories that come to my mind

are the ones that just turned out to be like totally fraudulent, like Theranos or something like that. Right, but in terms of like a product that basically works the way that it has always been pitched to work, that was totally right. The valuation was insane, right? I mean, because Tesla's stock valuation as a company was larger than every other automaker on earth put together. So Tesla was worth more than Toyota plus Honda plus Ford plus GM plus BMW plus Mercedes plus Stellantis. It was It was worth all of those things and more.

And it's coming back to earth. Some more things. So those carbon credits, revenues already declined. They're down by half from a year earlier, kind of a problem. They're gonna keep going away. So sales have collapsed in America, but nothing like they've collapsed in Europe. And in Europe, again, things are still good

for electric vehicles. In Europe, the total sales of electric vehicles keep increasing every quarter. People are buying more and more and more EVs. And yet, while that's happening, Tesla's sales in Europe are declining. And they were down 33% in the first half of this year in Europe by a third. Do you know how bad things have to be for you to sell fewer items in a market

where everybody's buying more of those items? That's bad. It isn't like, you know, like, well, it's been a tough quarter over in Europe and people are just cutting back on their purchases of electric cars. No, no. People are like, we want me some EVs. They just don't want Teslas. And it is now the case where Tesla is no longer the number one seller of EVs in Europe.

And just, just to put a fine point on that as well, again, like even if Tesla were only kind of flatlining here, like even if they were only significantly slowing in their growth and future sales, that would still be like catastrophic financial news for this company, which the entire valuation of and the entire pitch of was, we're gonna go to the moon forever because we have a quarter of a million.

And we'll be a monopoly. The only cars anybody buys will be Teslas. Yeah. Okay. And instead, we live in this world where not only was that never going to be true, but also he, you know, brought judgment day on him on down on himself much more quickly for all the reasons that we have discussed in terms of like just destroying the brand and all that stuff. You've got to bring the girls in. I know. I think put the

girls on camera. No, this is YouTube. I think I think the girls could stay off. I know we should keep them off camera. All right. So last thing. So this is an earnings call in which Musk is just laying out loads and loads of bad news. Everything is going sideways. The company is in trouble. He says that they could be in for probably could have a rough few quarters until the robo taxis begin generating profits next year. The robo taxis, which haven't even been proven safe yet. They've got like 10 of them running around in Austin. And anyway, unimportant,

but next year, the robo taxi money, boy, that's going to be making it rain. No, but Musk then said at the end of the call that he believes that Tesla and the board of directors should grant him more shares of the company above and beyond the 13% that he owned. I'm just going to read the quote. I hope that this is addressed in the next shareholders meeting. he said, I have so little control. I could easily be asked to buy a lot by activist shareholders. The guy who's running the company into the ground believes that the company should give him more shares so he can have more control so that nobody could stop him from running it into the ground.

Yay, capitalism. Because let me tell you, Andrew, the board of directors is gonna give it to him. Yeah, maybe. I mean, in a certain sense, couldn't you argue that the system works, right? I mean, like this is one of the most like insane, ludicrous, like out there blips in the whole market, right? I mean, like for all the reasons we discussed,

the weird cult of personality around the guy. And yet here comes the correction, right? I mean, unless something changes, this is not gonna be looking like one of the big success stories of the auto industry or US markets or something like that for the next five or 10 years. Unless, you know, maybe he's the smart one

and we're the idiots and we're gonna look back on this video and be like, oh man. But I kinda doubt it, you know what, JBL? I'm not, can I say one more thing on that Robotex thing? Because that's so funny to me. Like this is how you can tell he's really scraping the bottom of the barrel idea-wise, because this is not the kind of market that we were talking about before where he's like on the cutting edge of this and it's going to like make bank while everybody else rushes to catch up. He is already

chasing Google, chasing Waymo. He's behind. Yeah, he's way behind. Way behind. Waymo has been, what's the number? I mean, I read this a week or so ago. Like some astonishing number of total miles driven in their self-driving taxis that are

deployed in all kinds of cities. They will have problems scaling, but they're already, already the problems that are facing Waymo are like, all right, it works great in Phoenix. How are we going to get it working in Seattle where it's wetter? And like, you know, it's, you know, there's all kinds of these new problems. They're already getting to like, that stage where they just have to like triage for like individual location problems. Tesla's these robotaxes, they're not even they don't exist yet. They're not off the ground. And over Elon's shoulder, he's not even that far ahead of the other people who are trying to pile into the market. Uber just put in a massive

new investment. Uber, which obviously is way ahead of Tesla in the ride sharing game on its own because of its own whole thing that it's been doing for decades now. So it's just, if he is having to reach for that as like the silver bullet that's going to put all of this right, it is really bad and he knows it's really bad. Well, don't worry because once it becomes clear that the RoboTaxis aren't gonna succeed, everything will be a pivot to XAI

and then it will be actually the RoboTaxis don't matter. What really matters is XAI and that's where we're gonna, grok, grok, grok, grok! RoboTaxis out, Mecha is XAI. And that's where we're going to go grok, grok, grok, grok. Robo taxis out, Mecca Hitler in. That's the name. Mecca Hitler in. It couldn't happen to a nicer human being. But I will give him credit. One thing he was very right about this quarter was that the president of the United States seems to be involved in the Epstein list. And so you know what? I want to give Elon credit where it's due. Right on the money. Total vindication. He tweeted that like two weeks or something like that after

Pam Bondi apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, told Trump that he was in there. So yeah, I guess maybe he was a fly on the wall for that meeting. And I guess maybe they would have been glad to keep him out. If only the relationship had fallen apart a little sooner. I'm sure Donald Trump is thinking to himself. Good luck America! you