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I’ve been covering Elon Musk and Tesla for 13 years. Musk has tweeted hundreds of our articles, and I’ve talked with him multiple times. Clearly, he is not the same person with the same areas of focus as he was a decade ago. Yet, obviously, he is the same person. I think this is the conundrum many people find themselves in. And I don’t just mean people who used to think highly of him and used to be Tesla investors but have whipped the car around for a full 180. I think there are many current Tesla fans — and certainly investors — who wonder how much the current Elon Musk has in common with the Elon Musk who drove the Model 3 into existence and mass production several years ago.
Perhaps there is no moment in the history of the company that condenses this question more than the current moment, with the publishing of Tesla’s 4th “Master Plan.”
I started writing about potential consumer demand issues at Tesla approximately two years ago. It was an absurd thing to write about at the time according to many people, because Tesla sales had been growing, growing, and growing at a rapid pace and had reached enormous scales. Having covered that rise about as closely as anyone, I knew all about it — and the mindset of growth, with all of the inertia of the past decade, was so strong that it was wild to consider a potential shrinking period. To put it into better perspective visually, here’s what Tesla’s long-term quarterly sales trends looked like two years ago:
Despite the clear long-term trends, despite being loved and praised for more than a decade for covering the Tesla story correctly, despite the risk of changing the narrative, I noticed significant changes in Tesla’s incentives and marketing. For the first time that I saw since the very early days of the company, Tesla seemed to be facing challenges attracting enough buyers. That’s not to say it wasn’t selling a ton of cars or that it wasn’t a tremendously successful company — or that it isn’t still. However, trends were changing.
Tesla, it seemed to me, might be going from a rapid-growth company to a company struggling to grow, or to even maintain sales. So, I started putting that possibility out there and explaining why. Naturally, if you look at the chart above, you can imagine why people would think that I was being ridiculous, “hating on” Tesla, and baselessly scare mongering. But you don’t offer more and more incentives to consumers, and keep offering big incentives after saying you were only going to do so for one quarter, for no reason. As we now know, this is how Tesla quarterly sales trends look if you go all the way through Q2 2025 instead of stopping at Q2 2023:
That rapid, almost constant growth — to the moon — more or less leveled off … and then sales actually declined.
It’s okay. Things happen, the world changes, and it’s hard to achieve perpetual growth. Tesla can always restructure and rearrange itself if needed, and as long as sales are more or less where they were two years ago, the company can maintain its current level of operations. With more vehicle and product introductions, the company can presumably even return to some degree of growth again in coming years.
There’s a problem, though. Tesla stock is based around rapid growth, hypergrowth. It’s based around the company being a disruptive force, achieving sales and financial growth far beyond the normal auto industry. Executives at Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, and — well, pretty much all of them — must at times be scratching their heads and wondering, “Why in the heck is Tesla’s market cap dozens of times higher than ours when we are actually seeing growth and Tesla sales and profits are shrinking?!”
Perhaps they had that question in Q3 2023, perhaps in Q1 2024, but certainly by now in 2025.
As you surely recall, going into the 2020s and in the early part of the decade, it was repeated over and over that Tesla was supposed to see growth of about 50% a year, on average, through to 2030. As sales stagnated and even waned, there was repeatedly a short-term excuse and promise of growth again in the not too distant future. Of course, as time went on, the 50% CAGR was dropped and forgotten. Being the middle of 2025, Tesla needs a minor miracle to achieve those targets from 2–5 years ago. Nonetheless, the company’s stock price is about $100 higher today than it was then.
Sooner or later, surely, investors have to look at the stagnating and declining auto sales and wonder if it’s really smart to hold onto the stock. Promise after promise, hype after hype, can carry a brand for a long time. However, sooner or later, the trend has to sink in.
Of course, if the market accepted that Tesla’s growth story was effectively over, that would be disastrous for the stock. Why should Tesla have a market cap over $1 trillion when it doesn’t have a growth story. Ford’s sales were up 7% in the first half of 2025, and 14% in the second quarter. GM’s sales were up 12% in the first half of 2025. Ford and GM market caps equal $46.25 billion and $55 billion, respectively, nothing close to the $1,050 billion of Tesla’s.
But what do you do if effort after effort is not reviving the auto sales growth? What do you do if everything on the horizon tells you it’s not going to get much easier, and could even get harder for a while? What do you do if so much of your business and your life is built on Tesla’s stock price being where it is today or higher? Can Elon Musk go out there and say, “Hey, look, we actually don’t have a growth story any longer. We are doing fine, selling more than a million cars a year, making a profit, and transforming the world, but we no longer have a clear and viable growth path — and we’re definitely not seeing 50% growth again anytime in the foreseeable future.” Can he say that and just end with that?
That would be like an amusement park saying, “Okay, everyone, it’s time to close up for the day — everyone out.”
Tesla absolutely, fundamentally needs a huge growth story to uphold the current stock price.
So, even though Tesla has not accomplished Master Plan, Part Deux — and isn’t really in much of a different place from where the company was when it was published — we now have Master Plan Part 4. There needs to be a narrative and a plan for massive, unprecedented growth. Right? But I have to wonder, is all of this effort and hype around robots just an investment Hail Mary? Is it all just an effort to find another rapid growth train? Is it effectively just a delay tactic to justify and rationalize investments while the company’s auto business stagnates or declines?
That’s not to say Elon Musk hasn’t convinced himself this is the way forward, and it’s not to say Tesla isn’t working on these things.
However, think about it like this: Imagine you see these sales trends at your company; you see the hurdles to growth in the US, in China (where 50% of new car sales are plugin cars but your sales and your share keep declining in the face of rapidly innovating competition), in Europe; you see constant delays in robotaxi capability, going back 5–10 years now; and you know that your market-shattering company valuation is based on enormous growth. You’re managing a giant global corporation with a market cap of more than a trillion dollars, and you see no clear path forward for growth in your core business. What are you going to do? You’re more likely than not to throw a New-Disruptive-Tech Hail Mary. That’s what this robot master plan feels like.
Now, you might say that Musk and Tesla have been focused on this for a couple of years now. Yes, and perhaps it was a couple of years ago that Elon Musk started seeing big challenges to continued auto sales growth and started feeling the pressure to come up with another avenue for hypergrowth. Perhaps in the past two years he has continued to build up the narrative — in his own mind — that this is the best path forward for Tesla, because this is the only path forward for Tesla that would actually justify the stock price.
Some people claim he doesn’t care about the stock price or being the wealthiest man alive. Maybe that was true for a while, or at certain points in time. However, based on what has transpired with his CEO pay package in Delaware (now moved to courts in Texas), and how he has thrown his wealth and power around, I think it’s safe to say that Musk cares about Tesla’s stock price quite a bit and thinks about the company’s long-term trend in that regard. I think it’s obvious that Elon Musk’s identity is now extremely tied up with the idea that he is one of the most successful businessmen in history. If Tesla’s story changed and Tesla’s stock price collapsed, it’s not as if Musk would be homeless, but his reputation and influence would change dramatically. An ego hit that big is hard to imagine, perhaps impossible to try to understand, and if you were faced with the possibility — or probability — of that ego hit striking your heart and mind, would you not try to find a solution nearby? Would you not try to reach for the most obvious and most enticing tool on your virtual desk in order to keep the growth hype going? Perhaps the risk and fear of that would drive you somewhat mad and push you toward other topics entirely (politics, gender, procreating obsessively, culture wars, social media revolutions), but you’d also surely cling to whatever ideas for hypergrowth you see nearby.
I mean, is there any chance you could say “Our period of hypergrowth is over” and then just let the stock price go poof and pop like a bubble in the wind?
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