Elon Musk’s personal fortune has also taken a huge hit.
Transcript:
Conway Gittens: It’s been a rough start of the year for Tesla shareholders. The stock is down roughly 25 percent of year-to-date and it’s only the end of February. The selling has been so intense that the company’s stock has been kicked out of the rarified club of companies with $1 trillion or more in stock market value.
As Tesla’s biggest individual shareholder, Elon Musk’s worth has taken a hit as well. He’s down $75 billion since the start of the year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Tesla shares make up more than half of all his wealth. Nevertheless, Musk is still the world’s richest man.
Tesla’s latest headaches are two-fold. Chinese customers are less than enthused with a limited self-driving function upgrade that they’ve been waiting for for a long time. Tesla drivers told Reuters that Musk’s latest upgrade isn’t living up to promises in moving the ball closer towards a fully autonomous driving system. That is a competitive problem for Tesla as China’s homegrown EV makers are offering partial self-driving functionality at a fraction of the cost – if any – when compared to Tesla.
The other headache is coming from a different part of the world. All across Europe, Tesla just doesn’t have the cache it used to. Sales on the continent were down 45 percent in January – hitting a two-year low., Compare that to total industrywide EV sales, which jumped 37 percent. In Germany Tesla registrations slumped to their lowest in 3-1/2 years, while in France they hit 2-1/2 year low. In the UK. China’s BYD outsold Tesla for the first time ever.
All of these are ominous signs for a company that posted disappointing global sales in the fourth quarter despite price cuts in some markets.
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