Tesla profits drop 71% amid anti-Musk backlash
www.yahoo.com
Tesla's profits fell 71% over the first three months of this year, a company earnings release on Tuesday showed. The new financial details arrive as some shareholders have called on Musk -- whose temporary status as a government employee expires next month -- to step down from his White House role and return full-time to the helm of Tesla. Opening his company's earnings call on Tuesday, Musk defended the work he was doing with the Department of Government Efficiency and commented on the Tesla protests, saying, without evidence, that the protesters were demonstrating because they were “receiving fraudulent money.”

He then called the DOGE work necessary but said that “working for the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done.”

“I think starting probably next month in May, my time allocation to those will drop significantly,” he said.

He added that he expected to keep working for the government one or two days a week for the remainder of President Donald Trump’s presidency to “make sure that the waste and fraud that we stopped does not come roaring back.” DOGE has not yet proved the fraud it alleges.

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    49·
    1 day ago

    At one point he was just the typical tech oligarch failson who was sort of just quietly awful behind the scenes while collecting accolades for other people’s work and getting fluffed up by credulous tech “journalists”. He managed to grift some successful contracts using that publicity and his PR team leveraged it into more and more bullshit hype for businesses he owned and he just failed upwards over and over.

    Even after he had a midlife crisis and started just doing lots of drugs and showing his whole ass on twitter all day every day he still had all that inertia and machinery of hype and graft behind him to feed him more and more wealth and power despite anything he actually did. He had to actively piss off enough people that that system started clogging and breaking down to even suffer the most mild of consequences. Hopefully it keeps going and everything he had and has falls apart so he can’t just go back to a quietly parasitic existence like most other tech oligarchs.