Tesla Schadenfreude- Common Sense Skeptics delivers the goods

CSS does a huge public service with their breakdown of the latest (Q1-2025) earnings call, de-bullshitting the vomitous ejecta from Musk and his toadies

I have to come clean. My kink is all things negative about Elon Musk.

This kink is not new or even related to his takeover of Twitter and subsequent “enshittification” of that platform, or his anti-Trans screeds. No, from the moment I first became aware of this retromingent homunculi¹, I knew he was walking talking garbage.

As I have written before, when this shitbird entered my consciousness, I looked into him, and the first thing I found was his egregious behavior to his first wife, and their less-than-amicable divorce.

I knew then that he was king of the divorced dad energy, and a full-on shitty human being.

Thus, I goggle at the hype around Tesla, their cars, and the “story” of their exponential (TO THE MOON) growth tale.

Fact is, they are a middling car maker, whose stock masquerades as a meme-stock with a P/E ratio of near 200, and whose market value is more than all the other car manufacturers combined, whilst producing about a million of their cars a year.

They are still flogging their “Full Self Driving” (FSD) that is a SAE level two² driver assist package with tons of flaws, especially since Musk dictated that they were gonna rely solely on camera vision for their spatial and situational awareness. I guess he never drives in the rain, or fog, or snow, or at dusk when the glare kills your eyes.

But I digress. Below is part one of the quarterly ritual of public companies, the earnings report. The Youtube channel, Common Sense Skeptics is one of my favorite when it comes to debunking Musk’s asshattery, and they take the investor slide deck to task, highlighting where Tesla cherry-picks the metrics to put the least bad spin on the outcomes.

Because the performance is, in a word, bleak. As I noted in an earlier post, had the environmental credits that Tesla sells to other auto manufacturers been removed, they would have lost about $175M in the first quarter.

And guess what? Congress is on track to remove the tax incentives for BEV sales, and also curtail the concept of clean air credits, two programs that have funneled BILLIONS of US Taxpayer dollars into Tesla (and thus Musk’s) pockets.

Oops.

Then there is the 10,000 unsold Cybertrucks, an $800M inventory of mouldering vehicles that customers don’t want. Hell, they are even polishing off the “Founder’s Edition” etching on the former top tier variant (list price $109K) to sell them as standard for about $30K less.

Oops.

The stock is up post call for two reasons. First, the investors are hopeful that the coming release of the Cybercab fleet in Austin was going to be a rocket ship of growth for Tesla. Supposedly to be rolled out in early June, but with the FSD really being “supervised driver support” it is doubtful in my mind whether this is going to work.

Second, it was the acknowledgement that Musk was going to back away from his DC fuckery to pay more attention to Tesla. Since his fortune is largely tied up in his TSLA stock, and he is leveraged to the fucking hilt on said shares, this is a survival move for him.

Narrator’s note: It’s not going to work

No, Tesla is in trouble. Expect more fuckery from the house of Musk, more unkept promises, and strain. And tons of delicious schadenfreude.

But, as long as the cult of Musk worship continues, his rabid fans will keep the stock insanely valued.

I hope you enjoyed this brief rant as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Coda: I tried to get the Microsoft Copilot designer to create an image of Musk crying into his nitro cold brew, and it refused. I think they block using Elon Musk in the prompt. No matter how I rephrased the prompt it refused claiming I was violating a safety limitation.

Lame

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1. I have to credit Charlie Sykes for introducing those terms to me.

2. GM, Ford, Mercedes, and BMW are all far more advanced than Tesla.