More recently, however, Musk’s extracurricular activities have gone into hyperdrive. He’s been running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he has slashed tens of thousands of federal workers’ jobs, and his intense involvement in President Donald Trump’s administration has invited high-profile protests and boycotts against his car company. Between January and the end of April, Tesla’s share price fell more than 40%.
“Looking back on the earnings call from last week, we saw a dialed-in and ‘reading the room’ Musk we have rarely seen in the past,” Ives told Fortune. He added that Wedbush now further believes that the board “likely played a bigger role in the commentary at the beginning of the conference call than originally thought.”
Musk went on to say that Tesla’s current situation was not a crisis of the near-death sort that the company has survived many times before. Tesla shares rose 5% following Musk’s announcement.
“Musk understood well that [the] time for politics is over,” Ives said, and that it’s time now for Musk to “move onto a new chapter and lead Tesla into its autonomous and robotics future.”
