Does Elon Musk still care about selling cars?
Elon Musk's role as President Donald Trump's cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appear to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.
Trump-Modi Meet
The mega MIGA, MAGA plans of India's Modi and US' Trump
Trump says India has more tariffs than others
Trump's 'golden rule' for imposing reciprocal tariffs
Tesla's car sales fell 1% last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25%. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.
And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Trump's home in Florida — far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.
In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling startup to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla's success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Musk the world's richest person.
But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could
