Elon Musk says he wants to stay CEO of Tesla for at least the next five years and have more controlling shares in the company.
This will most likely seal Tesla’s fate with Musk’s, as shareholders will likely approve of this despite his toxicity and lies.
As I wrote in my recent article, ‘The Tesla (TSLA) dilemma,’ the company is done if it stays attached to Elon Musk’s toxicity, but the stock will undoubtedly crash if he leaves, as the current valuation is purely based on shareholders believing in his stock-pumping claims about self-driving cars and robots.
Musk created the current situation at Tesla, which he pushed to go all-in on autonomy despite his being wrong about Tesla solving autonomy for years. In the meantime, Tesla has released a single new vehicle over the last five years, the Cybertruck, and it’s a flop.
His backing of divisive politics, rapprochement with Russia, and constant promotion of proven misinformation on social media have resulted in Musk being despised by the majority of the population, especially Tesla’s customer base.
The toxicity of Musk’s brand has leaked to Tesla and the company has been in a clear decline. Tesla’s vehicle sales were down for the first time in 2024 and the decline is accelerating in 2025.
Tesla’s sales were down by about 50,000 units in the first quarter of 2025, and they are tracking similarly in the second quarter.
Today, at the Qatar Economic Forum hosted by Bloomberg, Musk denied the situation entirely.
He said (via AP):
When questioned about Tesla’s weakening sales in the first quarter and April sales thus far in Europe, Musk said the business has “already turned around,” adding that “Europe is our weakest market” and that Tesla was “strong everywhere else.”
This is a lie.
Tesla’s sales in China in Q2 2025 are tracking about 10,000 units below the same period in 2024, despite record incentives and the new Model Y being in volume production.
In the US, data is more opaque, but Tesla is estimated to be down in the market despite offering more discounts than ever.
Europe is indeed Tesla’s weakest market, but there’s no sign that it has “already turned around” as Musk claims.
Despite having the new Model Y available in Q2, sales are way down compared to last year, and it is tracking similarly to Q1 2025, which was a disaster and Tesla blamed it on the Model Y changeover:
It won’t be able to blame the Model Y in Q2 and will need another explanation for the poor sales performance in Europe. Tesla is also offering 0% financing at a high cost in most European markets to counter this clear decline in demand.
Instead of this hard data, Musk backed his lies by claiming that Tesla’s current high stock price proves that the business is good:
Musk said the market is the ultimate scorecard for Tesla’s state of business. “[Tesla] stock wouldn’t be trading near all-time highs” if the business was struggling, he said. While Tesla stock has recovered this year, it still down 13% year to date and off 30% from its all-time high.
The stock price is only up because more people are buying shares than selling them, and they could be buying them for many reasons that have nothing to do with Tesla’s business doing well.
Musk himself has previously said that Tesla’s stock is “worth nothing” if the company can’t solve autonomy, which attached a lot of Tesla’s valuation to autonomous driving. Many Tesla investors are simply holding on to Musk’s claims that Tesla is on the verge of solving autonomy – despite him saying it would happen by the end of every year since 2019.
The CEO was then asked if he was committed to staying as head of Tesla for the next five years, to which he answered ‘yes’.
But he said that he would need more shares in Tesla.
Musk claimed that it wasn’t about money but control over the company:
“I can’t be sitting there and wondering if I’m going to be tossed out. “Now let’s move on.”
Tesla shareholders are currently suing the CEO over threatening them not to build AI products at Tesla if he doesn’t get more control, through shares, in the company.
Electrek’s Take
Blatant lies. We have the data. We know Tesla’s sales are down in virtually all markets. To counter the declining demand, Tesla is offering record discounts and incentives in most markets.
We know Tesla doesn’t do that with strong demand. The automaker is currently throttling down production and offering discounts. Does that sound like the demand is good? No.
I say that he is sealing Tesla’s fate by saying that he will remain CEO because Tesla shareholders will most likely approve of this. They know the stock price will tumble without his “corporate puffery.” They are OK with letting Tesla’s EV business melt just for the hope that he might finally be right about autonomy and Tesla might see light at the end of the tunnel and justify its $1 trillion valuation.
That’s a fallacy.
Elon and Tesla were wrong about unsupervised autonomy working on HW2.5. They were wrong about it working on HW3.0. And they were more likely than not wrong about it working on HW4.
They have made some impressive progress, and they might eventually make it work at scale on HW5 in the next few years. However, by then, there will be plenty of competition, and Tesla is already behind competitors like Waymo, which is already available in several markets and provides hundreds of thousands of paid rides every week.
In addition to the competition, Tesla will also have a giant liability for promising unsupervised self-driving on millions of vehicles produced since 2016 and not being able to deliver on this promise.
All of that while its core EV business is declining.
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