Elon Musk during a news conference with President Donald Trump on May 30, 2025, inside the Oval Office (Tom Brenner/Getty Images)

black eye

Tesla’s sales are down 30% in China, and it’s not because of Elon Musk

Tesla’s problems in China have more to do with competition than controversy surrounding Musk.

Rani Molla

6/9/25 12:08PM

Tesla’s sales in China were down 30% to 38,588 vehicles in May compared with the same month a year earlier, according to new data from China Passenger Car Association reported by China EV blog CnEVPost. Out of the five months reported this year, four saw year-on-year declines. From January through May, Tesla sales were down about 8% in China compared with the same period in 2024. Analysts expect sales in China to decline for the full year, which would be its first year-over-year decline there.

As JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman said on a webinar about the state of the auto industry late last month, CEO Elon Musk isn’t facing the same level of political blowback in China as he is in the US and Europe.

“We know [sales are] down in North America, we know they’re down in Europe because he’s upset half the population in the US and 95% of the population in Europe,” Brinkman said. “Musk remains a popular person in China.”

Rather, the company’s problems in China have more to do with competition from rivals like BYD.

“They’re down in China because the competition is ferocious,” Brinkman said. “They’re competing on price, but they’re also competing on design and technology and refresh rates because they’re coming out with new models every two years, whereas Tesla has never introduced a new model in China.”

Brinkman added that autonomous driving is table stakes in China: “They’re giving away autonomy for free.”

However, even without Musk’s political machinations it’s possible Tesla is facing a political branding problem in China, too.

As an independent analyst who goes by Troy Teslike recently wrote, Tesla, like all American brands in China, is facing “political tensions following U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s remarks, which many in China saw as disrespectful.” In April, Vance went on Fox News to talk about tariffs and said, “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5