Tesla (TSLA) stock surges on Elon’s lies despite disastrous earnings

Tesla’s stock (TSLA) surged by as much as 8% today following the company reporting disastrous earnings results – its worst in years and way below expectations.

The stock seems to surge based on people believing Elon Musk’s lies.

Yesterday, Tesla released its Q1 2025 financial results, confirming its worst performance in years.

The automaker is now operating at just 2% margins and would have lost money last quarter if it weren’t for the sales of regulatory credits.

The financial performance was worse than most analysts predicted, and yet, Tesla’s stock surged by as much as 8% today.

The reason for the surge appears to be shareholders overlooking Tesla’s degrading auto business in favor of Musk’s vision for the future of Tesla.

However, the problem is that Musk has been misleading people about his vision of Tesla’s future and lied several times on the earnings call that followed the release of its financial results.

I did a whole live stream to break down and fact-check Tesla’s earnings call:

Musk literally started out his comments on the Tesla call with a lie. He claimed that people protesting Tesla right now are “paid-for” and/or simply upset because they were receiving money that his DOGE team cut:

Now, the protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized, they’re paid for. They’re obviously not going to say, admit that the reason that they’re protesting is because they’re receiving fraudulent money or that they are the recipients of wasteful largesse, but they’re going to come up with some other reason. But that is – the real reason for the protests, the actual reason is that those receiving the waste and fraud wish to continue receiving it.

It’s not the first time Musk has claimed that despite having zero evidence. He uses the claims to distance himself from any responsibility for Tesla’s current brand damage.

Musk and the rest of Tesla’s management have tried their best during the call to attribute the 50,000 fewer deliveries last quarter to the Model Y changevoer, but they never explained the massive increase in inventory vehicles that also happened during the quarter and would point to a broader demand issue.

When asked about the brand damage’s impact on Tesla’s order flow, Musk didn’t want to admit any and instead tried to explain any slowdown in demand due to broader macroeconomic issues:

Tesla is not immune to the macro demand for cars. When there is economic uncertainty, people generally want to pause on buying —doing a major capital purchase like— a car. Absent of macro issues, we don’t see a reduction in demand.

That’s another clear lie. Firstly, it is impossible to attribute any specific demand issue to a broader macroeconomic issue rather than a particular issue with the Tesla brand. Secondly, Tesla’s sales have declined significantly in the last few months, while broader EV sales are surging. This would point to an issue with Tesla specifically rather than the broader market.

Instead of current demand issues, Musk focused on Tesla’s self-driving and humanoid robot efforts.

With the humanoid robots, Musk again claimed that he believes Tesla will make millions of robots by the end of the decade and become the world’s most valuable company because of it. The CEO said that he doesn’t see any competitor getting close to Tesla.

The problem is that it’s not clear why Tesla would dominate this market. On the robotics front, it looks like Tesla is already behind competitors like Unitree:

As for the AI that goes into humanoid robots, Tesla has also not shown any competitive advantage as all its demonstrations involved human teleoperations.

Tesla’s own AI effort has primarily focused on solving the self-driving problem, and that has also not yet been achieved. Musk has claimed that Tesla was on the verge of solving self-driving “next year” for every one of the past 6 years.

During Tesla’s earnings call, Musk again updated several self-driving timelines for Tesla, including “millions of robotaxis on the road in the second half of 2026” and “unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles by the end of the year.”

Again, Musk has been making similar claims for the last six years, and they have never come true. However, people are starting to give more credibility to his self-driving timeline because he reiterated that Tesla plans to launch its unsupervised self-driving pilot program in Austin as soon as June.

However, we noted that this represents a significant shift in Tesla’s self-driving efforts, as it will rely on an internal, geo-fenced fleet with human teleoperation assistance. It’s basically the same service that Waymo has been offering for years and Musk claimed isn’t scalable.

During the earnings call, Musk claimed that the fleet will initially consist of just 10-20 Model Y vehicles. Tesla’s head of self-driving admitted that Tesla is currently focused on optimizing FSD for driving in Austin to support the service. This explains why Tesla’s FSD in consumer vehicles, which buyers paid for with the promise that it will eventually become unsupervised, hasn’t been significantly updated in months.

Now, Musk will claim a win in self-driving with Tesla’s launch of its limited pilot program in Austin in June, but in fact, it is only delaying the delivery of what he promised for years: unsupervised self-driving in every consumer vehicle built by Tesla since 2016.

Electrek’s Take

Musk now claims this is going to happen by the end of the year, but let’s see if he still says that in a few months. Virtually every year for the last 6 years, he said early in the year that it would happen by the end of the year, and when the end of the year gets closer, he pushes the timeline to next year and repeats the cycle.

I would like to give more credibility to his prediction now, but it’s hard to do when the best data available still only points to FSD in consumer vehicles achieving about 500 miles between critical disengagement when it needs to be in the tens of thousands of miles for a geo-fenced ride-hailing service and in the hundreds of thousands of miles for generalized unsupervised driving solution in consumer vehicles, which is what Tesla has been promising for years.

It’s hard for me to believe that some people still take his claims seriously, but there’s a fool born every minute and most of them become Tesla shareholders, evidently.

It’s starting to sound like Tesla earnings calls are run by a Musk AI trained on Musk’s comments made over the last 10 years – with the addition of humanoid robots over the last few years.

As for the stock price, forget about earnings, forget about fundamentals, it’s simply an index to gauge the shareholders’ confidence in Musk’s claims. Right now, they seem pretty confident. They are still drinking the Kool-Aid.