Elon Musk Speaks During A town Hall Event In Green Bay, Wisconsin

Elon Musk wears a cheese hat during a campaign event in Green Bay, Wisconsin (Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

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Tesla stock drops after Elon Musk says of DOGE: “It’s costing me a lot to be in this job”

Tesla has a lot of things going against it, including a distracted Elon Musk.

3/31/25 9:08AM

At a town hall yesterday in Wisconsin, Tesla CEO and head of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk rallied support for a conservative state Supreme Court judge. He also noted the toll the latter role has taken on his electric car company, whose stock is down about 6% premarket.

“It’s costing me a lot to be in this job,” Musk told the crowd regarding his extragovernmental position, where he’s slashing federal jobs that’s made him and his company broadly unpopular. “My Tesla stock and the stock of everyone who holds Tesla stock went roughly in half.” Back in December, the stock was trading at nearly $480; it’s currently down to about $248.

Musk indeed has a lot to lose. Every time Tesla shares go down $2.43, he loses another billion dollars. (That means he’s lost about $6 billion on paper this morning.)

Many other issues, from full self-driving problems to increased competition, are weighing on the stock as well. Most recently:

Over the weekend, protesters picketed at hundreds of Tesla locations around the country as part of the “Tesla Takedown” campaign.
Analysts keep lowering estimates for Tesla deliveries, blaming, among other headwinds, slowing demand and backlash against Musk’s political forays. Deutsche Bank and Stifel were the latest to lower their estimates for Tesla’s first-quarter deliveries, which will be released this week. A Tesla-compiled list of analyst estimates predicts 377,000 deliveries will be announced, representing a decline from last year’s 387,000 first-quarter deliveries, rather than the “return to growth” Tesla promised.
President Trump’s tariffs are expected to negatively affect Tesla, too. CEO Elon Musk, Tesla leadership, and the biggest Tesla bull out there, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, have all said tariffs will hurt the EV company.

In the premarket, Tesla shares were trading at $248.23 as of 9:07 a.m. ET, lower than they were on Election Day.

Rani Molla9h

Meta pushes deeper into AI robots with acquisition

Meta just bought robotics AI startup Assured Robot Intelligence, Bloomberg reports, doubling down on its push into humanoid tech. The team will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs to build models that let robots “understand, predict and adapt to human behaviors in complex environments.”

The goal, Bloomberg says, is to be the Android of robots: building the software and hardware foundation others can use.

The move comes right after China forced Meta to let go of its acquisition of agentic AI startup Manus.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in racing into AI-powered robots.

Meta Acquires Robotics AI Company to Help Build Humanoid Technology

CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in racing into AI-powered robots.

Rani Molla12h

Apple’s capital spending is heading the opposite direction of Big Tech

The big story in Big Tech has been just how much they’re spending on capex to furnish their AI futures. Not only are Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft spending more than ever, they’re also spending more than they said they would just a quarter earlier. In total, their 2026 capital expenditure bill is now slated to surge beyond $700 billion.

Apple, by contrast, continues to take a different approach. The company has lagged peers in developing its own frontier AI models and has leaned more on partnerships. The strategy certainly doesn’t seem to be hurting Apple yet. The company posted record revenue in the March quarter that beat analysts’ expectations this week, even without a robust AI offering.

Apple’s capex actually fell in the March quarter. Its payments for acquisition of property, plant, and equipment totaled about $1.9 billion in its fiscal second quarter, down 36% from roughly $3 billion a year earlier. So on a year-over-year basis, Apple’s capex declined while everyone else’s jumped sharply.

Tesla’s related party transactions in 2025

Elon Musk’s companies more than doubled their spending on each other last year

And that’s before Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI, which it has since converted to a stake in SpaceX.

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Jon Keegan13h

Tim Cook: Popular Mac mini and Mac Studio will be constrained for “several months”

Apple may have missed out on the first wave of generative AI when it comes to software, but its hardware is another story.

The current OpenClaw craze — where users run their own AI agents on a dedicated computer in their homes, and chat with it via messaging apps — has made the once sleepy Mac mini and pro-level Mac Studio an unlikely hit.

Reports of shortages are not lost on Apple.

During this week’s earnings call, outgoing CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the supply constraint of the popular desktops:

“On the Mac mini and the Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted. And so we saw higher-than-expected demand.”

Cook noted that the Mac mini was the top-selling desktop computer in China last quarter, where the DIY agentic AI boom is especially popular. In addition to strong customer demand, Cook cited supply chain constraints adding to the problem, which “may take several months to reach supply/demand balance.”

The Mac mini is one of the products that Apple will be making in the US starting later this year.

Apple Says Mac Studio and Mac Mini Will Be in Short Supply for Months

Reports of shortages are not lost on Apple.

During this week’s earnings call, outgoing CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the supply constraint of the popular desktops:

“On the Mac mini and the Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted. And so we saw higher-than-expected demand.”

The Mac mini is one of the products that Apple will be making in the US starting later this year.

Rani Molla15h

Apple’s iPhone is the top-selling smartphone in urban China

Apple’s second-quarter earnings beat expectations and underscore its growing strength in China, where it is closing in on the top spot in the smartphone market.

“We are thrilled with the performance in Greater China,” CEO Tim Cook said, noting that the iPhone was “the top-selling model in urban China.” Cook first called the iPhone the rather than a top-selling model there during the company’s first-quarter earnings earlier this year.

Data from IDC and Counterpoint Research shows Apple accounted for 19% of smartphone shipments in China in the first calendar quarter of 2026, just behind Huawei at 20%. Analysts say Apple is poised to take the lead soon, helped in part by rising memory chip costs, which are pushing up competitors’ prices.

Apple’s China revenue rose 28% in the March quarter, ahead of analyst estimates, and is up 33% in the first half of the year.

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China