This July, Tesla sold fewer than a thousand cars in the UK. That's not an error. The company that once defined the electric vehicle revolution saw its British sales collapse by nearly 60% while its Chinese rival BYD surged ahead, quadrupling its sales and outselling Tesla 3 to 1 in the UK.

In the same week that this news broke, Tesla's board awarded Elon Musk a $29 billion pay package. Let's think about that for just one moment. Sales down, pay up. What kind of company does this?

This isn't just a story of one bad month or one big payday. It's a look inside Tesla's warped reality where the usual rules don't apply. fundamental spend and executive pay floats ever upward regardless of results.

Defenders will argue that Musk's latest award is partly retroactive, compensating him for a previous 56 billion package struck down by the Delaware courts. But the timing and the scale of this new payground raise questions about how Tesla's board defined success.

As competitors gain ground, lawsuits pile up, and executives flee, Tesla's stock remains surprisingly stable. That stability might suggest investor confidence, or at least indifference.

But if you look beneath the surface, there are growing signs of dissatisfaction, shareholder lawsuits, governance critiques, and growing scrutiny from regulators.

Let's examine the contradictions at the heart of Tesla's current moment. the Cybertruck debacle, the boardroom drama, the robo taxi fantasy, and the growing tension between Musk's ambitions and Tesla's realities.

We'll look at how Elon Musk's sprawling empire, now including a separate AI company that some are accusing of siphoning talent and resources away from Tesla, raises serious governance questions.

and will ask whether Tesla should still be considered a growth company or if it's just a cult stock with a fading product lineup and a CEO who's always on to the next hot thing.

First, we should look at the numbers. Tesla's sales are falling almost everywhere and not just slightly.

In the UK, July registrations dropped 60% year-over-year. In Germany, they fell 55%. In Sweden, a staggering 86%. And in Australia, they've reported the biggest sales decline of any mainstream brand in the country.

Across Europe, Tesla has posted five consecutive months of decline, and global sales for the full year of 2024 were also down.

BYD, meanwhile, is surging. It's now the world's top EV seller, having overtaken Tesla in both unit sales and revenue.

Its dominance is no longer confined to just China or Europe. It's global. And BYD has achieved this despite being effectively barred from the US market, where 100% tariffs imposed by both the Trump and Biden administrations make selling competitively priced cars nearly impossible.

In China, Tesla sold just under 70,000 vehicles in July, down 8.4% year-over-year and continuing a 9-month downward trend.

The Model Y, once Tesla's crown jewel, which they confusingly claim is an SUV for tax purposes when it's clearly a compact car, is losing ground to local competitors. Even a refreshed version hasn't reversed the slide.

In the United States, Tesla sales may be worse than they initially appear. While Cox Automotive estimated an 8.6% decline in the first quarter, more accurate registrationbased analysis done by Fred Lampard at Electric suggests that the real drop is closer to 15%.

In California, which accounts for nearly 40% of Tesla's US sales, second quarter deliveries fell 21% year-over-year, marking the seventh straight quarter of decline.

This means that sales in California were declining well before Elon Musk got involved in politics.

To top it off, Tesla is now facing a lawsuit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles over false advertising of its autopilot and full self-driving features, potentially threatening its ability to sell cars in the state.

Globally, Tesla reported almost 340,000 deliveries in the first quarter, but inventory levels are rising and demand appears to be softening.

Despite a recent faceelift, Tesla has no backlog for its new Model Y, and analysts are questioning whether Tesla can grow its sales at all this year or next.

The Cyber Truck, which was once hyped as Tesla's boldest innovation, has quickly become its weakest link. Sales plunged over 50% yearonear in the second quarter, and the truck has been plagued by recalls, breakdowns, and ridicule, with even loyal fans questioning its viability.

Earlier this week, Tesla's board awarded Elon Musk 96 million shares, which are worth around $29 billion. A package which the company framed as being a forward-looking incentive to retain and refocus Musk, who has threatened to leave the company unless he's given more control over it.

This package makes him the highest paid CEO in history. To put his pay in context, the second highest CEO pay package in history was awarded to Steven Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone, who received $1.39 billion in total compensation in 2008.

This payout was largely due to Blackstone's IPO that year and Schwarzman's equity stake. It happened during a year of strong performance despite the broader market turmoil.

Musk's $30 billion pay package is not only more than 20 times larger than Schwarzman's, but it comes at a time when Tesla's fundamentals are weakening, not improving.

Quartz put together a slideshow of the 11 other highest CEO payouts in history after Elon Musk's, and only two of these pay packages came to more than a billion dollars.

Amusingly, a number of the companies with the highest paid CEOs in history were either unprofitable or barely profitable.

Musk's high pay stands in stark contrast to other iconic founders. Figures like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have historically taken modest salaries, or none at all, and relied on their ownership stakes in the businesses that they founded for ongoing motivation.

Buffett famously paid himself $100,000 per year, while Zuckerberg has taken a $1 a year salary since 2013.

This compensation model reflects a broader norm among founders who are typically motivated by equity rather than paychecks. Venture capitalists often view modest salaries as being a signal of a founders's confidence in their business and commitment to long-term growth.

In contrast to this, Elon Musk, despite being Tesla's largest shareholder, has repeatedly demanded additional equity-based compensation, even threatening to leave the company if not granted more control.

His $29 billion pay package stands out not just for its size, but for its departure from founder norms.

Now, I'm not sure what the following steps will be, uh, but the award increases Musk's stake in Tesla from under 13% to about 16% of the company.

And the only requirement it puts on him is that he has to stay in a senior leadership role at Tesla for two more years. There's no requirement that he devote any more time to the company. He just can't quit.

Musk's overturn 2018 compensation package had entitled him to 20% of the company. And he has said that he needs to own at least 25% if he's going to advance Tesla's artificial intelligence and robotics capabilities. And those are the most important buzzwords of 2025.

He says that 25% would be enough control to prevent an activist investor from ousting him like he did to the management of Twitter a few years ago.

Despite his claim that he's not interested in wealth and only wants control of Tesla, which will allow him to save humanity, in recent years, Musk has sold billions of dollars worth of Tesla stock.

He managed to sell $7.5 billion dollars worth of Tesla shares near its all-time high in late 2022, right before a sales report that sent the price of the stock plunging.

His new pay package is being pitched to Tesla investors as a contingency plan if the $56 billion award from 2018, which was struck down by a Delaware court for being excessive and poorly disclosed, is reinstated upon appeal.

he'll forego the new shares. But if the court rejects Tesla's appeal, Musk will still walk away with the largest pay package in corporate history as a critical first step.

It's worth noting that Elon Musk's overturned $56 billion compensation package is worth more than Tesla's entire accumulated net income since inception.

As of early 2025, Tesla had earned approximately $38.66 billion in total net profit since going public, meaning that Musk's $58 billion pay package would have represented about 1.6 times the company's lifetime earnings.

The more modest $29 billion pay package is less than 80% of Tesla's total net profit since going public, meaning that something is left over for the other shareholders.

The logic behind Musk's award is unconventional. As The Economist puts it, under the Elon Musk theory of pay, the worse Tesla performs, the more its boss ought to earn.

Musk's control over Tesla is seen as essential. Not because of operational success. He did after all designed the Cybertruck, but because of the pixie dust he brings. promises of robo taxis, humanoid robots, and an AI powered future.

With Tesla's fundamentals weakening, its valuation increasingly depends on Musk's futurism. In this topsyturvy incentive structure, declining performance seems to justify greater rewards.

Tesla's board, reduced to a twoperson special committee, approved the pay deal amid falling sales, rising competition, and reputational damage from Musk's political entanglements and awkward waves.

Shareholders have largely gone along with this, even voting to reinccorporate the company in Texas, where investor lawsuits are harder to pursue.

Analysts and economists are divided on whether Musk's pay reflects a competitive market for rare talent or a case of rent extraction enabled by a weak board.

One thing is clear, however, Musk doesn't need to walk across the street to a competitor to negotiate a raise. He just needs to switch his focus from Tesla to SpaceX, XAI or Twitter, which he calls X, or that brain implant company that kills monkeys and a variety of other animals.

With Tesla's Nvidia chips having been diverted to XAI, the boundaries between his companies are blurring fast.

Tesla's decision to reinccorporate in Texas away from Delaware's more shareholder friendly courts underscores the board's willingness to reshape legal frameworks to accommodate Elon Musk's compensation demands.

As Matt Lavine pointed out earlier this week, this move was not just symbolic. It was strategic, designed to avoid the Delaware courts that invalidated Musk's 2018 pay package due to conflicts of interest on the board and inadequate shareholder disclosures.

Lavine points out that the funniest part of Tesla's filing is their section on accounting consequences. And let's be serious, it's rare to ever describe something labeled accounting consequences as being funny.

But according to Tesla, they don't have to recognize any compensation expense when they issue Elon Musk the largest pay package in history because there's a performance condition attached to receiving the award.

And they're claiming that there is essentially no chance of Musk ever getting the shares. Thus, they can value the compensation package at zero.

This is a bit of a weird claim as the new options are meant to replace the 2018 options and there are no operational or financial targets tied to the payout whatsoever. The stock price doesn't have to rise. No extra cars have to be sold. They don't have to get their robo taxis working or achieve AGI.

The only thing that Musk actually has to do to get the award is to serve continuously in a senior leadership role at Tesla during the 2-year vesting term.

There are no requirements other than that he can't quit. He doesn't have to devote any fixed portion of his time to the company. In fact, his presence can be entirely symbolic. He just can't announce that he's leaving.

So, do they really think that there's no chance that he'll stick around for two more years? Well, Lavine points out that the other condition tied to the award is that it'll be immediately forfeited and returned to the company if prior to vesting there's a final judgment order or decision of the Delaware courts with respect to Tornetta versus Elon Musk that results in Musk being able to exercise in full the performance-based stock option award he was granted in January 2018.

So they either think that there's no chance that the Delaware judgment is not going to be overturned upon appeal or they think that there's no chance that Musk stays on for two more years.

This accounting treatment of the world's largest corporate pay package in history has drawn sharp criticism from corporate governance specialists and accounting experts who argue that the company's assertion lacks independent accounting validation and may be misleading to shareholders.

A Colombia Business School paper from last year estimated that reinstating the original award or issuing a similar one should trigger an accounting charge of 25 to 51 billion.

These critiques suggest that Tesla's board may be downplaying the financial impact of Musk's compensation, which raises deeper concerns about the company's transparency and governance.

The behavior of Tesla's board is emblematic of a broader crisis in corporate governance, which The Economist recently described as the fecklessness of American boards.

They argue that directors are often either too beholden to imperial CEOs like Elon Musk or too disengaged to challenge them.

In the article, they say that Intel and Tesla represent two ways in which boards fail in their duty to represent investors and hold management to account.

At companies like Tesla, directors find themselves at the mercy of a doineering figure and have a powerful incentive to humor that person's whims, even if it might mean ignoring their fiduciary obligations to shareholders.

Equally, they say that at firms like Intel, thoroughly independent directors may lack enough of an incentive to care. Either way, the result looks like feckless pacivity.

Tesla's internal turbulence is not limited to its boardroom decisions. It's increasingly reflected in the exodus of top talent and insider stock sales.

According to Mint, over the last year, at least 15 senior executives across Musk's companies have resigned, including Tesla's head of battery architecture, the director of HR, and the leader of its humanoid robot program.

These departures suggest more than routine turnover. They point to a growing unease with Musk's leadership and the strategic direction of the company.

Meanwhile, Tesla board members have been quietly cashing out. Robin Denhomem, the board chair, has sold over $17 million worth of shares this year alone, while other insiders, including Musk's brother Kimble, and longtime ally James Murdoch have offloaded tens of millions more.

Though some of these sales were pre-arranged, their timing amid falling sales, lawsuits, and reputational damage sends a clear signal that those closest to Tesla's leadership are hedging their bets.

As University of Florida professor Jay Ritter put it, whenever insiders, including directors, are selling shares, it's not a positive signal.

Musk's simultaneous leadership of multiple ventures including Tesla, SpaceX, Neurolink, XC Corp, and now XAI raises serious questions about divided attention and resource allocation.

While Tesla has long marketed itself as an AI company, Musk's decision to launch XAI as a separate venture, reportedly diverting hard to acquire Nvidia chips and talent from Tesla, suggests a conflict of interests.

Investors who have been claiming for some time that Tesla is an AI company are left wondering whether Tesla's AI ambitions are being sidelined in favor of Musk's newer ventures.

By going along without setting any boundaries or being transparent, the board shows that it's not really in charge.

Tesla is facing a long list of headwinds that threaten its profitability, reputation, and long-term growth. Donald Trump's cancellation of EV and renewable energy incentives has stripped Tesla of billions in regulatory credit revenue.

He has also added hundreds of millions of dollars in tariff related costs to the company. Elon Musk warned of rough quarters ahead earlier this year as the company struggled to deliver vehicles before incentives expired and it faces uncertainty over future demand.

Tesla's aging model lineup and decision to abandon a lowerc cost Model 2 in favor of robo taxis which in no way appear to be functional and humanoid robots for which there's questionable demand have left it extremely vulnerable to competition from both traditional automakers and aggressive Chinese entrance.

As the economist notes, Tesla has become a reluctant car maker, relying heavily on just two models, while rivals offer broader portfolios.

Musk's political entanglements and erratic leadership have further alienated customers with protests, vandalism, and even anti-musk bumper stickers becoming symbols of discontent.

The company's valuation, once boyed by Musk's pixie dust, now looks increasingly detached from fundamentals. How many quarters of slowing growth are needed for investors to notice that it's not really a growth stock?

Tesla's troubles are not occurring in a vacuum. Around the world, governments are reassessing the cost and pace of their green transitions.

In Britain, soaring energy bills have shattered the one solid net zero consensus.

While gas prices remain a major driver, the costs of upgrading the electricity grid, new pylons, wires, and balancing mechanisms to accommodate renewables are increasingly showing up in household electricity bills.

According to the economist, these network and subsidy costs have contributed nearly twothirds as much to the rise in real electricity prices as wholesale energy costs have since 2019.

Across Europe, even centrist leaders are beginning to echo hardright net zero skepticism, questioning whether climate action is worth the economic pain.

For Tesla, this shift is deeply consequential. The company has long benefited from generous subsidies, regulatory credits, and a political environment that incentivized electrification.

But as the Financial Times reports, Donald Trump's roll back of EV incentives and emissions penalties has already slashed Tesla's revenue and added hundreds of millions in tariff related costs.

If the global mood continues to sour on green investment, Tesla may find itself not only battling competitors and internal dysfunction, but also a shrinking policy tailwind that once helped justify its lofty valuation.

According to the LA Times, at the heart of Tesla's current legal and reputational challenges lies a simple but consequential question. Can Elon Musk be trusted?

His tendency to exaggerate whether about autopilot, full self-driving, or the timeline for robo taxis has drawn increasing scrutiny from regulators, courts, and consumers. Some of his more ridiculous ideas, like the Hyperloop, have been quietly abandoned.

Simultaneously, in California, the state's Department of Motor Vehicles is arguing that Tesla misled consumers by branding its features as autopilot and full self-driving despite their limitations.

Musk has been warned by federal regulators to stop making public statements that overstate the capabilities of these systems. Yet, he continues to do so.

With Tesla's safety reputation under fire and punitive damages looming, the issue of Musk's credibility is no longer just a matter of style. It's a material risk to the company's future.

Tesla's robo taxi ambitions have long been a pillar of Elon Musk's growth narrative, but they now sit at the center of a deepening crisis of governance and investor trust.

Elon Musk first introduced the idea that Tesla vehicles could operate as autonomous robo taxis when not in use by their owners in 2016.

On what he dubbed autonomy day in 2019, he claimed that Tesla would have 1 million robo taxis on the road next year, enabled through an overthe-air update.

His 2019 claim that his cars would soon be able to earn more for their owners than they cost in a year and that they would be appreciating assets is what first set the stock price on fire.

The claim that full autonomous driving was coming next year was repeated annually, helping to sustain Tesla's tech stock-like valuation despite the technology never working as described.

Central to the robo taxi story was a 2016 promotional video set to the Rolling Stone song Painted Black, which purported to show a Tesla driving itself.

The video claimed that the person sitting in the driver's seat was only there for legal reasons, that he wasn't doing anything and that the car was driving itself.

It turns out that he might have been acting as a crash test dummy. as former employees have since testified that the video was faked. The route was pre-mapped. Drivers intervened repeatedly and the car crashed off camera.

Tesla is now facing a shareholder lawsuit alleging securities fraud, accusing Musk and the company of concealing testing data and overstating the safety of its autonomous technology.

The suit follows a failed public robo taxi test in Austin where vehicles were seen speeding, breaking erratically, and dropping passengers in unsafe locations.

This event wiped 68 billion off Tesla's market cap in just two days.

Regulators appear to be circling. Courts are weighing liability. And the gap between Musk's promises and Tesla's capabilities is no longer just a technical issue. It's a legal and financial reckoning.

For a board already criticized for its passivity and entanglements, the robo taxi saga is a case study in the cost of unchecked leadership and the erosion of shareholder confidence.

Tesla's pivot towards robo taxis is not just a technological gamble. It's a strategic lifeline. With their sales declining and their car lineup aging, Elon Musk has staked the company's future on autonomous ride hailing.

He once again is promising that thousands of cyber cabs devoid of steering wheels or pedals will be on US roads by next year.

The problem is that Tesla's full self-driving system remains a level two technology, requiring constant driver oversight. It has fallen far behind rivals like Whimo and Zuks, which operate level four vehicles.

Safety concerns are mounting. Tesla was recently ordered to pay $243 million in damages over a fatal crash involving autopilot. And federal data contradicts Musk's public claims that no self-driving Tesla has ever crashed.

Trials in Austin and San Francisco have faced regulatory hurdles, and Tesla has yet to apply for permits for a fully autonomous service.

Unlike competitors who have invested in costly sensor suites and purpose-built vehicles, Tesla relies solely on cameras and plans to crowdsource its fleet via an Airbnb style model from Tesla owners who presumably are happy to have their car return after a busy night out smelling like a phone booth.

Uber, who have flirted with the idea of robo taxis for years, is hedging its bets by partnering with multiple autonomous vehicle firms, including Whimo and Weride.

Tesla, on the other hand, is planning on going it alone. As the economist notes, the regulatory landscape for autonomous vehicles is fragmented, public trust is fragile, and profitability remains elusive.

Unless Tesla can quickly prove its technology is safe, scalable, and commercially viable, its robo taxi dream may remain just that, a dream.

Despite declining sales, legal setbacks, and governance concerns, Tesla's stock has shown surprising resilience.

While it's underperformed the stock market year to date, it remains one of the better performing Magnificent 7 stocks on a one-year basis.

As Robert Armstrong noted in a recent column about the Magnificent 7, the market's message has been quite simple. Grow sales and the stock goes up.

Tesla's problem, he points out, is that it hasn't. Revenue growth has stalled, deliveries are down, and its core lineup is aging.

Yet, the stock continues to trade at tech-like multiples, over 95 times estimated 2025 earnings because investors remain fixated on Elon Musk's promises of future growth, particularly around robo taxis, robo robots, and AI.

These narratives have helped sustain Tesla's valuation even as its fundamentals weaken.

The company's promotional tactics, including the painted black video that misrepresented full self-driving capabilities, have blurred the line between innovation and hype.

With lawsuits alleging securities fraud and regulators scrutinizing safety claims, the question is no longer just whether Tesla can grow, but whether it can be trusted at all.

For now, the market seems willing to suspend disbelief. But as Armstrong's analysis suggests, without real sales growth, even the most compelling story eventually loses its power.

Tesla's story is no longer just about the technology products that it insists are coming next year. It's about governance, trust, and the durability of belief.

Sales are declining, lawsuits are mounting, and the robo taxi dream remains elusive. Tesla's valuation doesn't respond to earnings or delivery numbers. It responds to Musk's spell over a group of passionate investors.

That spell has been reinforced by years of government support from Obama era loans to Trump era tax credits and it now faces real tests as political alliances fray and regulatory scrutiny intensifies.

The shareholder lawsuits and the recent verdict in Florida all point to a widening gap between promise and reality.

Tesla may still be considered a growth company by some, but the growth now lies in narrative, not numbers. Whether that narrative can survive further erosion of trust among regulators, investors, and the public is the question that will define Tesla's next chapter.