Elon Musk, executive director of Tesla, said Tuesday that it would spend less time at Washington working for President Trump after the car manufacturer reported a 71 percent earning drop in the first three months of the year.
Musk told Wall Street analysts at a telephone conference that he would continue to spend “one day or two per week” in Washington’s affairs, probably during Trump’s presidency. The billionaire executive is one of the closest confidants of Mr. Trump and has played a leading role in the president’s efforts to reduce government spending and reduce tens of thousands of federal government jobs.
He spoke less than two hours after Tesla said he had won $ 409 million, below $ 1.4 billion in the first quarter of 2024. The company previously reported a net gain of $ 1.1 billion last year, but reviewed the figure to reflect the changes in the way in which cryptocurrency assets are valued.
Tesla sales have collapsed due to the intense competition of Chinese car manufacturers such as Byd, the lack of new models and the support of Mr. Musk to extreme right causes, which has deactivated some liberals and centrist from buying Tesla vehicles.
Musk said recent protests in Tesla exhibition rooms worldwide had been carried out by people who were taken into account to lose government brochures due to their work with the Trump administration. “The real reason is that those who receive waste and fraud want it to continue,” he said.
Tesla remains the most valuable car manufacturer in the world measured by the price of its shares, and sells many more electric vehicles in the United States than any other company.
But their shares have lost approximately half of its value since mid -December, since investors have become more pessimistic about the company’s prospects and concerned about the role of Mr. Musk in the Trump administration. Some investors and analysts have recently asked Mr. Musk to spend more time managing Tesla and limit or finish their work for the Trump administration.
However, even if you spend less time in administration tasks, your attention will remain divided. This is because Mr. Musk also directs Spacex, the social media site X, an artificial intelligence company called XAI and other companies.
The profits were well below the expectations of Wall Street. Tesla would have lost hundreds of millions of dollars if I had not earned $ 400 million in cash and investments interests and $ 595 million by selling credits to other car manufacturers that did not comply with the emission regulations that Trump has pledged to eliminate.
Tesla shares increased approximately 5 percent in extended operations after the company published its quarterly profits.
“This is the worst performance I have seen in Tesla’s history,” said Ross Gerber, executive director of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm, in X.
Tesla refused to offer a prognosis for sales and profits for the rest of the year, as usual, saying that there was too much economic uncertainty.
“It is difficult to measure the impacts of global commercial policy change in automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure and the demand for durable goods and related services,” Tesla said in a report to the shareholders.
In what could have been an oblique recognition of the damage that Mr. Musk has made to Tesla’s reputation, the company referred to the “changing political feeling” that said “could have a significant impact on the demand for our products in the short term.”
Tesla has constantly lost market share of Chinese car manufacturers and more established car manufacturers, such as General Motors, Volkswagen and Hyundai, which have been offering a growing selection of electric vehicles.
Mr. Musk’s company once hoped to sell 20 million vehicles a year at the end of the decade, the double that Toyota. But sales have slipped after rising to 1.8 million in 2023. Last year, the company sold 1.7 million cars, and its global sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the previous year.
Tesla executives attributed much of the decline of sales to the deceleration of production on Tuesday as the company rework the assembly lines to build a new version of the model vehicle and Sport Utility.
Cybertruck, the newest vehicle of Tesla, which consumed many of the company’s resources while developing, is increasingly similar to a failure. Cybertruck sales in the first quarter fell approximately 50 percent since the last three months of the year, according to Cox Automotive, a research firm.
The Tesla website has recently offered discounts of up to $ 8,500 on Cybertrucks in the company’s inventory. The truck starts at $ 70,000 before federal and state incentives.
The automobile manufacturer reiterated that it would begin to produce a lower cost vehicle at the end of June that would make more people allow an electric vehicle and potentially revive sales. But the company has not shown a prototype or provided many details about the car.
Analysts doubt whether the new vehicle will be available in significant numbers in the short term. Nor is it clear if the car will be a new design or simply a stripped version of the Model 3 sedan of Tesla or Model Y.
Tesla said on Tuesday that the vehicle “will use aspects of the next -generation platform, as well as aspects of our current platforms and will occur in the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle line.”
The role of Musk in the federal office called the Government’s efficiency department, which has reduced the budgets of federal agencies and has reduced thousands of jobs, has made it a lightning rod. Activists have protested outside Tesla dealers around the world, and Tesla vehicles have been destroyed or even burned.
Tesla is probably less vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s tariffs on cars and parts than other car manufacturers because their factories in California and Texas manufacture all the vehicles it sells in the United States. The company also has car factories in Shanghai and near Berlin, which serve much of the rest of the world.
But Tesla will also suffer. Its US factories use imported pieces from Mexico and China that will be subject to tariffs, forcing the company to increase prices or take lower profits.
Musk said Tuesday that he had not been able to deter Trump to impose tariffs on cars that would also damage Tesla. “I will continue advocating lower tariffs instead of higher rates, but that’s all I can do,” he said.
When calling with analysts, Mr. Musk said, as he had done before, that Tesla’s future was in artificial intelligence technology that would allow the company’s vehicles to be promoted without human intervention, allowing “cyberbulk” fleets to win money by transporting customers.
But Tesla has not yet perfected technology and faces competition in that nascent business of several Chinese and Waymo companies, an Alphabet unit, the Google parent company.
Waymo’s autonomous cars have offered trips paid for several years in Phoenix and San Francisco and are expanding more places. Last month, Waymo said he was completing around 200,000 trips paid every week in four cities and announced plans to expand to Washington. He is also testing his cars in Tokyo.
Some analysts doubt whether Tesla’s autonomous vehicles will ever generate billions of dollars in income that Mr. Musk has said they would. Uber, who has been offering trips paid for 15 years and is working with Waymo in Phoenix and Austin, Texas, revenues of $ 44 billion in 2024 reported.
