Tesla is not doing well at its core business of selling new cars. as [Indranil Ghosh](notes), in 2025 their deliveries fell “8.6% to 1.6 million vehicles.” That’s the second year in a row that sales dropped. However, “The sales decline hasn’t affected Tesla’s stock price.”
What’s going on? Ghosh suggests that Wall Street investors are “… betting on Tesla’s autonomous driving and robotics ventures rather than its vehicle sales.” What’s weird about this is that those Tesla projects are mostly driven by rosy pronouncements by Elon Musk. Not by actual evidence that they can even build a functioning robot. Their robot demos so far have been less than convincing.
This feels very weird to me, I think because my metal image of “investors” is that they’re interested in data. Facts. Unswayed by glib snake oil salesmen. And yet… An argument could certainly be made that people in the US, regardless of their roles, have a tendency to be taken in by glib snake oil salesmen. In some sense, we love those guys. The Music Man is a hugely successful story about one, and it’s been a smash hit on broadway, as a movie, and there was even a TV adaptation (I don’t know how successful that one was). And the current president is nothing if not a glib snake oil salesman; its actual accomplishments in business (if any) are dwarfed by its ability to claim great success.
Maybe it’s just a cultural weakness, that we’re naive, trusting, and abandon facts in favor of nice stories. I don’t know. But Tesla stock reached $488 about a month ago, its all-time high, all while Tesla’s business seems to have peaked years ago.
