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Like a superball on steroids bouncing from one shiny object to another, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has left the hot mess of Cybertruck behind to launch a new line of in-house solar panels. Doesn’t he have a business to run? The company’s EV sales are circling the drain month after month, and now signs have emerged that the company’s popular Tesla Powerwall home energy storage product is following close behind.
Powerwall Is Losing Its Grip
To be clear, Powerwall is a well-regarded home energy storage system, and Tesla has the numbers to prove it. The company celebrated its 1 millionth Powerwall sale globally on September 8, 2025, a figure that covers markets in 30 countries, including the US, of course.
“Since its launch in 2015, Powerwall has transformed how households generate, store and use clean energy. A decade later, the impact is global and measurable,” Tesla enthused in a self-published announcement.
That’s all well and good, but a snapshot of sales does not indicate any direction, up or down. Down it is according the investment bank ROTH Capital Partners. In an industry note cited by PV Magazine’s Energy Storage branch on April 1, 2025, Roth stated that it “sees downside risks for the Powerwall 3 home battery and Tesla inverter, based on discussions with its residential solar installer contacts.”
“One installer told Roth they were, ‘expecting Tesla to fall to 20% of battery sales in [the] next six months. We are getting all types of nasty feedback if we even put pics of Powerwalls online. So we scrubbed all references and pics from all ads and online presence,’” Energy Storage elaborated.
Nasty feedback? Gosh, nobody would have ever expected nasty feedback when a Tesla product goes on sale. Is there something wrong with the brand? Like, maybe a brand reputation crisis?
Roth’s analysis is quite a turnaround from two years ago. One indication of Tesla’s former dominance is offered by the online solar and storage marketplace Energy Sage. They ran the numbers for 2024 in a recent report and calculated that requests for Powerwall quotes took 63% share, with seemingly nowhere to go but up.
That’s seemingly as in maybe, maybe not. Energy Sage released its 2024 calculations in April of 2025, and clouds were already on the horizon. “Tesla’s emerging dominance in both storage and inverter quotes reflects the market’s appetite for integrated, all-in-one solutions,” explained Energy Sage President and COO Charlie Hadlow. “But as concerns around availability and brand sentiment surface, we’re watching closely to see whether this momentum holds or if consumer backlash will begin to shift installer and homeowner preferences.”
SpaceX Finally Limits Russian Ability to Kill Ukrainians
Tesla is not the only one of Musk’s ventures that has raised eyebrows, to say the least. The latest eye-brow raising took place earlier this week, when reports surfaced that the Starlink satellite branch of his SpaceX business has “cut off” Russia from its terminals in Ukraine. As reported by CNN and others, the process is ongoing and laborious, which raises questions. Number one question: why’d it take so long?
Ukrainian cities have been withering under a murderous barrage of Russian drone attacks for months, aided by drone-mounted Starlink systems enabling them to bypass Ukraine’s jamming systems. Such use is unauthorized, but that’s no excuse. Russia has obtained Starlink terminals and is using them to murder people, unauthorized or not. Perhaps Starlink’s considerable cornucopia of talent could have applied a more responsive kill switch while the terminals were in development, but that’s water under the bridge now.
Birds Of A Feather
Musk’s role as a leading aider and abettor of US President Trump’s authoritarian fantasy has been widely reported here elsewhere, so never mind all that. Somewhat lesser known outside of media circles is his role in transforming the social media platform Twitter into the digital poop-flinging hate machine X, prompting millions of users to flee to newcomer BlueSky and elsewhere.
The X taint has also crept into Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence venture, now infamous for creating Grok, the chatbot that gleefully allows X users to undress non-consenting people — mainly women, but along with thousands of children.
Let’s not personalize Grok, though. The fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the owner of X, who is not a chatbot. Elon Musk, an actual person with actual human agency, could choose decency over a moral free-for-all, but chooses not.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Last week, BBC News was among those reporting that the cyber-crime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office raided the offices of X, “as part of an investigation into suspected offences including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child sexual abuse material.” It’s the latest and most dramatic step in an effort that began last summer. The prosecutor has summoned Musk and former X chief Linda Yaccarino to appear in court in April.
Good luck with that. Neither one is likely to show up in the UK either, if and when a similar investigation launched by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office leads to the same conclusion.
Has Tesla Become Boring? Right Answers Only
The Boring Company is another one of Musk’s ventures that offered the promise of a cutting edge solution to the age-old problem of how to dig a tunnel underground. Musk launched The Boring Company in 2016, at a time when advanced drilling rigs were emerging into widespread use, so it’s not clear why transportation planners in need of a tunnel would tap an untried startup instead of a reliable tunnel-digging expert. Perhaps the offer of a free tunnel had something to do with it.
Be that as it may, regrets are beginning to surface. Ten years after The Boring Company launched, the only project in use is a “tourist attraction” in Las Vegas. With that in its pocket, the company somehow convinced Nashville transportation planners to let it build a much more ambitious project linking its airport to the city center, at Boring’s own expense.
On brand for Musk, the new “Music City Loop” is not a transit corridor as in something that will get people out of their cars and into busses, trains, or vans. It will simply sell more Tesla EVs. As reported by Bloomberg News last April, the idea is to send chauffeured passenger cars through the tunnel, presumably exclusive to Tesla. The company certainly has plenty of Cybertrucks lying around, waiting to be put into good use.
The “Music City Loop” project already has some local officials breaking out in hives, and tunneling experts are beside themselves with alarm over the prospect of tunneling through the “tricky, sinkhole-prone limestone bedrock of middle Tennessee,” as Bloomberg describes it.
“The construction risks range from collapsing the ground beneath a heavily traveled state highway, to knocking out utility connections, to flooding the tunnel with groundwater,” Bloomberg elaborates.
What else could possibly go wrong? If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread.
Photo: Tesla Cybertruck at Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California (credit: Kyle Field).
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