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Analysts’ estimates for Tesla deliveries this year keep dropping

Estimates bumped up and then took a nosedive after the inauguration, and they’ve gone even lower since.

3/6/25 2:14PM

Before Donald Trump was elected president, the average analyst estimate for the number of cars Tesla would sell in 2025 was just north of 2 million. That number jumped ahead of Trump’s victory and inauguration, when the fortunes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, one of the president’s biggest benefactors, suddenly looked like they were attached to a SpaceX rocket.

The estimates reached their highest point in the last six months just days after Trump’s inauguration, where Musk had a VIP seat on the dais.

Since then, though, it’s been a downward slide. Estimates reached their lowest point this week.

Of course, many other things have happened since then to change analysts’ outlooks, like Tesla posting declining Q4 earnings and changing its own outlook for 2025 from 20% to 30% vehicle sales growth to a less optimistic “return to growth.” Additionally, analysts now have the first two months of 2025 data, mostly showing sales declines around the world in January and February.

Then there’s Musk himself, who in his position at the Department of Government Efficiency has provoked the ire of many citizens, some of whom have called for Tesla boycotts.

While the latest consensus estimate of 1.9 million is much lower than the 2.4 million analysts had predicted a year ago, it’s still higher than 2024’s disappointing 1.79 million, and would in fact represent a return to growth — just a very small one.

Anthropic really doesn’t want the US to help China with AI

Anthropic made its case for freezing China out of the AI race as much as possible in a new policy paper. The company warned that letting China catch up to US AI companies could risk AI-powered mass surveillance and huge risks to monitoring AI safety.

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Tesla finally reported un-redacted information about its Robotaxi crashes

There have been a total of 17 crashes so far among its Texas Robotaxis. Read about them all here.

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Alphabet sold $3.6 billion in Japanese yen bonds — a record for a foreign company — likely to help its AI capex binge

We now have the value for Alphabet’s Japanese yen bond raise — 576.5 billion yen, or $3.6 billion — and it’s a record for a foreign issuer in Japan. The deal was spread across seven tranches with maturities ranging from 3 to 40 years, allowing the company to lock in rates as low as 1.965%.

The latest deal comes on the heels of Alphabet’s massive US and European bond deals, where the company has tapped global markets for nearly $60 billion in fresh capital over the last few months. In a filing earlier this week, the search giant said it would use the proceeds for “general corporate purposes.” That likely means fueling its AI infrastructure build-out, which has pushed its projected 2026 capex bill to a staggering $190 billion.

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Bloomberg: Relationship between OpenAI and Apple has deteriorated and legal action may be imminent

The two-year-old alliance between Apple and OpenAI has deteriorated, Bloomberg reports, with the AI giant now consulting legal counsel about issuing a potential breach of contract notice.

OpenAI executives allege that Apple failed to adequately integrate and promote ChatGPT on the iPhone, causing the AI firm to lose out on billions a year in subscriptions and hurt its brand, according to the report.

Meanwhile, Apple has expressed concerns over OpenAI’s privacy protection, and has been miffed that OpenAI has been working on its own hardware with former Apple design lead Jony Ive.

More recently, Apple, which has trailed its peers in developing AI, has decided to offer users their choice of AI models, rather than aligning exclusively with OpenAI’s.

Apple-OpenAI Relationship Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight