Elon Musk posted two words on X, "Former trillionaire." Six weeks earlier, he'd been worth 1.45 trillion US dollars. As of this week, Forbes put him at roughly only 695 billion US dollars, a loss of approximately 750 billion dollars in a month and a half. I mean, to lose that much net worth that quickly, you'd have to leave a briefcase filled with a hundred million dollars on the roof of your car every four minutes for six straight weeks. 750 billion dollars is nearly the combined net worth of the next three richest people on this planet, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos. This guy didn't just lose money, he lost three Bezos-es, okay?

SpaceX, which went public on June 12th in the largest IPO in history, $75 billion raised, bigger than Saudi Aramco, has lost approximately $1.2 trillion in market capitalization since hitting a peak of $225.64 per share in mid-June. That $1.2 trillion is almost exactly equal to the entire current market value of Tesla. SpaceX has lost a Tesla. Okay, the stock has fallen for 13 of the last 16 sessions, crossed below its $135 IPO price for the first time last week, and is now trading at around $113.50. Anyone who bought shares after the first two trading days is now underwater.

Meanwhile, Tesla, the company reported Q2 2026 earnings on July 22nd, just days ago, and the results were, there is no gentle way to say this, bad. Revenue was a record $28.24 billion, up 26% year-on-year, and deliveries hit a record 480,000 plus vehicles. Those are the nice numbers. Everything else is the opposite of nice. Operating income fell 57% to $398 million. Operating margin collapsed to 1.4% down from 4.1% a year ago. I mean, that sounds more like the margin of a struggling bakery trying to break even on sourdough during an egg shortage. Adjusted earnings per share came in at 33 cents against a Wall Street expectation of 53 cents. And for the first time in years, free cash flow went negative $1.09 billion, while capital expenditure jumped 142% to $5.79 billion. The stock dropped over 13% in a single session, wiping out more than And you know that I promised a meeting conclusion, here it is. Combined, SpaceX and Tesla have shed roughly $1.5 trillion in market cap in July alone.

When Tesla reported its Q2 earnings, the company posted $1.1 billion in GAAP net income. GAAP, which is generally accepted accounting principles, is the standardized set of rules that every public company in the US has to follow when reporting its finances, basically. Think of it as the official language of corporate accounting, essentially. When a company reports GAAP net income, it just means this is the profit figure calculated according to those rules, not some super creative in-house metric designed to make things look rosier than they really are. So, $1.1 billion in GAAP net income sounds legitimate because it is by the rules, but roughly 68.5% of that number came from a single line item, the revaluation of Tesla SpaceX investment.

Tesla owns shares in SpaceX. Under accounting rules, it has to update the value of those shares every quarter to reflect the current market price. When SpaceX stock was riding high after the IPO, the value of Tesla SpaceX holdings went up on paper, and that paper gain was counted as income then. No cash changed hands, no car was sold, no product was delivered. This is basically stock prices we're talking about. Tesla's reported profit was mostly a reflection of SpaceX's stock price going up at the time. Now, standard accounting rules dictate that you must report paper gains like this as income. In corporate finance, we call this mark-to-market. In psychiatric circles, it is more commonly referred to as hallucinating. It means Tesla net income was functionally identical to claiming you're richer because your Pokémon card collection was appraised by this guy who was actively microdosing. And now SpaceX's stock price is crashing, which means next quarter the same accounting mechanism works in reverse. The paper gain becomes a paper loss. The thing that made Tesla look profitable this quarter will make it look worse next quarter. Two companies, one man, each one's headline numbers depending on the other, and both falling at the same time.

Now, I know some of you are familiar with the infinite wisdom of the crypto bros. I haven't lost anything because I haven't sold anything. That makes sense, of course. By that exact same reasoning, Elon hasn't gained anything because he hasn't sold anything. Musk's trillion-dollar net worth was measured in stock prices, volatile, illiquid, unrealized stock prices, right? Measuring wealth in shares you cannot sell during a lockup period is a bit like measuring your fitness by how fast you could run hypothetically if you ever got off the couch. I'll believe somebody is a trillionaire when the gains are realized and the taxes are paid. And if Musk wants to prove that he really is a trillionaire, the tax office would be absolutely delighted to hear from him. A company is not a person. Stock price is not wealth. Until it's in the bank account and the government has had its cut, nobody is a trillionaire, billionaire, or any other form of billionaire.

I'm really not the type of person to usually say I told you so, but while the stocks were collapsing, Bloomberg published a detailed comparison between Tesla's Cybertruck and Ford's 1957 Edsel, which is widely considered the greatest commercial failure in American automotive history. The Edsel story is very famous. Ford predicted 200,000 units in its first year. It sold less than a third of that. Its vertical grill was compared to a toilet seat. Time magazine said it looked like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon. Ford placed a new push-button gearshift in the center of the steering wheel exactly where the horn button normally sits, which confused drivers and frequently broke. The Edsel was discontinued after only 2 years. For nearly 27 years, it's been the benchmark for how badly a car launch can go.

Well, the Cybertruck, which some of my friends suggest looks like Elon Musk himself, is doing worse. Musk projected the Cybertruck would sell up to 250,000 units annually. In its first year, it sold 38,965. In 2025, that dropped to 20,237, a 48% decline, which is also close to the acceleration of a bowling ball dropped out of a third-story window. Q1 2026 hit a record low of 3,519 deliveries, down another 45% from the same quarter a year earlier. Through May 2026, only 7,133 Cybertrucks were registered in the US, according to S&P Global Mobility data. On its current trajectory, the Cybertruck posted the steepest sales decline of any EV nameplate in the US in 2025. And even those numbers are generous. In Q4 2025, approximately 19% of all Cybertruck sales went to Musk's own companies, with SpaceX building out a fleet of Cybertrucks at its Starbase facility. He was buying his own product to inflate the numbers. Jim Cramer called it the Edsel back in 2019 when the Cybertruck was first unveiled. Buy your own product using your other company's cash to artificially prop up sales metrics is an absolute masterclass in corporate synergy, right? It's the business equivalent of taking money out of your right pocket, putting it in your left pocket, and then paying yourself a management fee for completing this blessed transaction. CFRA research equity analyst Garrett Nelson told Bloomberg that the Cybertruck is unlikely to be formally discontinued, but will more likely just fade away, which is perhaps the saddest possible outcome for a product its creator once called Tesla's best product ever. Not even killed with drama. Not even canceled with a significantly good press release. No glorious, honorable death on the marketplace battlefield. Not even an acknowledgement. Just gradually kind of forgotten while everyone pretends that it didn't happen.

And there is a spiritual parallel between the Edsel and the Cybertruck that Bloomberg didn't quite spell out, but I think is definitely worth noting. The Edsel's Teletouch, which is that push button gear shift placed in the center of the steering wheel where the horn should be, confused drivers because it put an unfamiliar control where muscle memory expected something else. We all know muscle memory is king in driving, right? Tesla has done essentially the same thing with its obsession with hiding physical buttons behind a central touchscreen. You want to adjust the windscreen wipers? Touchscreen. Want to open the glove box? Touchscreen. You want to use the turn signal in some models? Well, good luck with that. Driving it feels less like operating a vehicle and a little bit more like trying to perform emergency surgery through an iPad menu while going 70 miles an hour on the highway. The design philosophy is essentially the same. Prioritize aesthetic novelty over the way humans actually interact with machines. The Edsel did it with a gearstick. Tesla does it with an entire dashboard. Both times people hated it.

Anyway, back to the things that don't work. The Economist published a 90-minute interview with Elon Musk recorded at Tesla's Gigafactory in Texas. It was billed as a wide-ranging look at the world's first trillionaire, his ownership of X, and his growing political influence. Instead, one of the most discussed exchanges turned into an argument about who the public hates more. Editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes asked Musk whether he understood why people loathe him, pointing to his political interventions, his amplification of far-right views on X, and his use of the platform to suggest that the UK was on the verge of civil war, and that Europe was allegedly overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants.

But you don't even live there. I think of it as the sort of the West collectively. But do you see why this makes people think that this man, who has all this power, he's the world's richest man, he thinks he has a right to influence our politics. It's why people loathe you. I mean, some people do loathe you. Yes, some people do. But do you understand why? Do you think what you're doing is helpful for Western democracy? Maybe some people do loathe me. I don't care. But the fact that as you pointed out a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don't. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.

If that's where the story ended, it would just be kind of an awkward interview moment between a billionaire and a journalist, but it didn't end there. Of course not. Over the following days, Musk went on X and called Beddoes a traitor to the west, plain and simple, a woke NPC with zero self-awareness and an unthinking NPC. Celebrity chef Jose Andres, who is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, weighed in, telling Musk to drink a glass of water before you tweet and saying that Beddoes was a great journalist who asked good questions. Musk called him an enemy to humanity. Calling a renowned humanitarian chef an enemy to humanity for suggesting you hydrate is certainly a choice. Usually, when somebody's primary defense mechanism against basic journalism is calling people woke NPCs and declaring war on the world-famous soup suppliers, it's a subtle sign that the investment thesis might be losing a bit of structural integrity. A journalist asked a good question, a billionaire couldn't handle it, and 4 days of name-calling followed. Without making any speculation about what is going on here, I'm just going to observe that when somebody is still talking about something 4 days later, it's usually not because it didn't affect them.

And then there was the earnings call itself, the holy grail. On the call, Musk apologized for being off, saying, "Pardon me, I'm a little bit under the weather here. I'm a bit ill, so if I sound a little off, I'm a little bit ill today." He was audibly struggling, starting sentences, stopping, restarting. I mean, I really hope that he feels better soon. The substance of the call was not reassuring at all. Musk spent it repeating promises about Optimus and robotaxis that are functionally identical to the promises he made last quarter and the quarter before that and the quarter before that. Optimus will be the biggest product ever. No humanoid robots today can do generalized tasks without programming, but Optimus will be the first. He didn't really elaborate beyond saying production is starting soon and that this is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we've ever made at Tesla because everything on the robot is new, which is sure, of course, but at some point, this is really hard stops being a reason to invest and kind of starts being a reason to worry a little bit. Soon, in Tesla's terms, has become a flexible temporal concept residing somewhere between next quarter and the heat death of the universe, no?

The robotaxi data was not encouraging, either. Tesla reported 380,000 unsupervised miles across six cities with zero notable incidents, but Tesla defines what counts as notable, by the way. Waymo logs that many miles in roughly a day. The active unsupervised fleet has actually been shrinking, not growing. And the stock, which was already falling after the earning sprint, dropped further during the call itself. Electric summary cut to the very core. They said, "Here's what today really is. Investors finding out that Elon Musk's word isn't worth what they've been paying for." And lurking in the background of the entire call was the question nobody really wanted to ask directly, the long-rumored merger of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk didn't rule it out. "We cannot talk about combining companies on an earnings call. It's got to be done with the appropriate process." Two companies, both bleeding value, both dependent on each other's stock price for their headline number, both run by one single man. Tying two sinking ships together doesn't make an aircraft carrier. It just ensures they both hit the ocean floor at roughly the same time. But it would solve the circular dependency problem, because if they're the same entity, the paper gain from one doesn't need to be accounted for as income in the other. It would also concentrate an extraordinary amount of risk in a single corporate structure, which is the kind of thing that makes regulators reach for their reading glasses.

So, the first human being in history to be worth a trillion dollars had his fortune cut in half in six weeks. His car company's operating margin is 1.4%. His truck is officially a bigger commercial failure than the Edsel. His rocket company's stock has lost an entire Tesla in value. He called a journalist a traitor and a chef an enemy to humanity. And his earnings call consisted of the same promises he's been making for 3 years, delivered while admitting he felt unwell. The highs and lows of Elon Musk's Q3 in a nutshell.