Elon Musk Bloomberg Qatar Economic Forum

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks via video call during Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forum on May 20, 2025 (Karim Jaafar/Getty Images)

Take a spin

Tesla’s Elon Musk doubles down on “a major rebound in demand” without giving evidence

Saying something aloud doesn’t make it true.

Rani Molla

5/21/25 11:39AM

Tesla CEO Elon Musk asserted in a second interview yesterday that his electric car company has turned a corner after producing dismal results last quarter, telling CNBC reporter David Faber, “We’ve seen a major rebound in demand.” Earlier in the day, he told Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain that vehicle sales had “already turned around.”

Both times Musk provided little in the way of evidence.

Here’s the CNBC exchange, which happened right after Musk shared his standard line that the true value of Tesla is in autonomy and robots, and right before had to leave the call for another appointment:

Musk: ...we’ve seen a major rebound in demand at this point. I feel comfortable with—
Faber: You have seen a major rebound in demand?
Musk: Oh yeah.
Faber: You really believe — you have seen that?
Musk: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look for most people, I mean, when you buy a product, I mean, how much do you care about the political views of the CEO? Or do even know what they are?

Musk came back for a second part of the interview, but the host didn’t pick up the same line of questioning. Musk didn’t provide any details about that demand rebound.

Of course there’s the possibility Musk has internal data that shows a bounce-back in demand, but it’s also worth noting that saying something doesn’t make it true — especially in the case of Musk.

What we do know for sure is that early indicators suggest demand is depressed.

Here are some:

Tesla told its workers it wouldn’t be running the production line next week at its Texas plant, where it produces its bestselling Model Y and its Cybertruck — typically not something you do when you’re trying to keep up with high demand. Business Insider reports that workers were told they could either show up for training and cleaning or use their PTO to take the time off.
When asked about lower sales, Musk continually cites a switch in production to the new Model Y in Q1 as the reason for the softness, as people held off buying it as they awaited the new one. However, demand for the new Model Y also looks soft, as the company is currently offering discounts on it.
April sales data, which represents the first month of Q2, is down in Europe and China, two of the company’s biggest markets besides the US.
While there’s no US data yet, analysts track VIN registrations and dealer inventory, among other data points, to come up with their estimates. The FactSet consensus analyst estimate for Q2 deliveries is 405,000 — 9% below what it delivered last year in Q2. Analysts expect the company to also deliver fewer vehicles in 2025 than it did in 2024, which was itself a disappointing year.
Tesla employees have confirmed the demand problem.

Jon Keegan14h

DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

$28.5T

Rani Molla15h

SpaceX thinks its total addressable market (TAM) is a whopping $28.5 trillion for its businesses, according to an S-1 filing for its upcoming IPO reviewed by Reuters. And most of that market isn’t rockets. The company says roughly 90% could come from AI — largely selling artificial intelligence tools to businesses.

“We believe that our enterprise strategy, which is focused on serving the digital needs of the world’s largest industries with Al solutions, positions us competitively to pursue this rapidly ⁠growing opportunity,” SpaceX said in the filing. “We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history.”

TAM, of course, assumes capturing every possible customer. But even a small slice of a $28.5 trillion market would be enormous.

Rani Molla16h

Tesla Cybercab production has begun

On Tesla’s earnings call earlier this week, CEO Elon Musk said production of the company’s steering-wheel-less Cybercab had begun. Since then, Musk and Tesla have posted videos showing the gold two-seater rolling off the line at its Texas Gigafactory and onto the road.

Cybercab has started production pic.twitter.com/MAeswanf96
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 24, 2026

The Cybercab — meant both for consumers and Tesla’s Robotaxi network — is widely seen as central to the company’s future. “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large scale and large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots,” Musk said last year.

Whether these cars actually make it to consumers is another question. For now, regulations generally require steering wheels, and Tesla still has to prove the vehicles can reliably drive themselves.

In formation pic.twitter.com/7qA0SluL8J
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) April 24, 2026

On the earnings call, Musk said production would be “very slow” but would ramp up and go “kind of exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year.”

Rani Molla16h

Meta signs deal to use Amazon Graviton chips

Meta said it will deploy “tens of millions” of Amazon Web Services Graviton CPU cores to power so-called “agentic” AI systems — tools that can reason, plan, and act on their own. The move makes Meta one of the largest customers of Amazon’s in-house chips.

The deal also underscores a broader shift in AI infrastructure, as companies move beyond Nvidia GPUs and use different chips for different tasks.

Meta, which is working on its own custom inference chips, also has chip deals with Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

Meta Partners With AWS on Graviton Chips to Power Agentic AI

The deal also underscores a broader shift in AI infrastructure, as companies move beyond Nvidia GPUs and use different chips for different tasks.

Meta, which is working on its own custom inference chips, also has chip deals with Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

Rani Molla17h

Oracle rises after Wedbush’s Dan Ives calls the stock a buy with 25% upside

Oracle extended its premarket gains Friday after Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives initiated coverage with an “outperform” rating and a $225 price target — about 25% upside to its pre-initiation level — calling the enterprise software and cloud infrastructure company a “foundational infrastructure provider for the AI revolution.”

Ives argues investors are misreading Oracle’s heavy capital spending and negative free cash flow as risky, despite being backed by a massive $553 billion backlog of contracted demand. He says the company’s “secret sauce” is a two-part strategy: building high-performance cloud infrastructure for AI workloads while connecting those models directly to companies’ own data.

“We believe Oracle is in the early innings of a significant repositioning as it executes on this generational opportunity,” Ives wrote.