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It’s Electric

Tesla’s US sales were down 5% this year, while all EV sales rose 17%

Tesla faces steep competition and an aging lineup, in addition to protests aimed at CEO Elon Musk.

5/28/25 8:55AM

When Bloomberg asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk last week about declining sales in Europe, he responded, “Europe is our weakest market. We’re strong everywhere else.”

That wasn’t exactly true then and it’s not true now.

Data then showed that, in addition to plummeting European sales, China sales started off poorly in the second quarter. Analysts estimate that the quarter will end down, too, in China, Tesla’s second-biggest market.

Now we have registration from Tesla’s biggest market, the US, and sales appear down there as well.

New Tesla registrations in the US were down 5%, or -6,964 vehicles, in the first three months of 2025, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. Meanwhile, EV sales overall grew by 17%, or more than 40,000 vehicles over last year. S&P analyst Tom Libby noted that there’s a lot more competition in the EV space this year, with at least 70 EV models in the running. Tesla is also contending with an aging lineup of vehicles, having abandoned plans for its long-awaited low-cost car.

Musk’s forays into right-wing politics as the leader of a brand that sells left-wing cars is also likely not helping.

The confluence of poor sales data from around the world this year makes Musk’s claims that Tesla’s sales have turned around and demand has rebounded hard to swallow, though it’s possible that in the interim between when data becomes available publicly, things have flipped. We’ll wait for the data to believe it.

Jon Keegan1h

Google’s AI chip business could be a $900 billion boon for the company

Google may be sitting on a massive new business that it has yet to fully exploit.

Google’s custom tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips have been getting a lot of attention recently, making the tech world wonder if there are other ways to power its AI dreams rather than just by using Nvidia’s GPUs.

Bloomberg spoke with analysts who estimate that, if it does decide to sell its chips to others, Google could capture 20% of the AI market, making it a $900 billion business. For comparison, Google Cloud pulled in $43.2 billion of revenue last year.

Even if Google just sticks with renting access to its TPUs, it will continue to drive down costs and increase margins as it ekes out performance improvements, such as the 30x improvement in power efficiency that the latest generation of TPUs has delivered for the company.

Alphabet’s AI Chips Are a Potential $900 Billion ‘Secret Sauce’

Rani Molla2h

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has explored bringing his feud with Tesla’s Elon Musk to space

Billionaires, they’re just like us: they want to bring their terrestrial beefs to outer space.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explored buying or partnering with a rocket company to compete with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Wall Street Journal reports. The two billionaires have had numerous public feuds over the years that have played out in the courts and on social media. They also both lead AI companies that have insatiable needs for data centers and have publicly discussed building data centers in space.

Altman seems like he thinks this could be more than science fiction. He reportedly reached out to rocket maker Stoke Space to potentially make equity investments in the company to get a controlling stake, though the talks are no longer active, WSJ reports.

Or perhaps he just wanted a Sherwood bobblehead of himself.

Jon Keegan3h

Report: Meta to slash metaverse, VR spending by up to 30%

Four years after changing its name to reflect its focus on the loosely defined “metaverse,” Meta is planning deep cuts to the company’s money-losing virtual reality efforts, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Meta’s Reality Labs division, home to the teams working on metaverse products — which include Quest VR headsets, Horizon Worlds, and its Ray-Ban Meta glasses — has lost about $70 billion since the company started breaking out the unit in 2020.

The company has struggled to get consumers to buy into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of working and playing in virtual reality worlds, like the company’s Horizon Worlds platform.

Investors seem to love the news of the pivot, as shares shot up as much as 5% in early trading.

Meta’s recent hiring spree of AI superstars from competitors for its Meta Superintelligence Labs shows that the company’s attention is now all in on AI.

Meta’s Zuckerberg Plans Deep Cuts for Metaverse Efforts

The company has struggled to get consumers to buy into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of working and playing in virtual reality worlds, like the company’s Horizon Worlds platform.

Investors seem to love the news of the pivot, as shares shot up as much as 5% in early trading.

Meta’s recent hiring spree of AI superstars from competitors for its Meta Superintelligence Labs shows that the company’s attention is now all in on AI.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Kicks Off Dreamforce With Keynote Presentation

The best quotes from Salesforce’s earnings call

CEO Marc Benioff doesn’t disappoint.

Rani Molla3h

Rani Molla21h

Salesforce jumps as Q3 earnings top expectations

Salesforce jumped after-hours Wednesday as it posted earnings and guidance that beat analysts’ expectations. Its adjusted earnings per share came in at $3.25 for the third quarter of fiscal 2026, above the FactSet analyst consensus estimate of $2.86. Its revenue rose 9% to $10.3 billion, in line with expectations.

The software-as-a-service company issued fourth-quarter revenue guidance of $11.13 billion to $11.23 billion, well above the $10.9 billion analysts had predicted. It also forecast adjusted earnings of $3.02 to $3.04 per share, compared with analysts’ expectations of $3.04.

Shares were up 4.3% in recent trading.

“Our Agentforce and Data 360 products are the momentum drivers,” CEO Marc Benioff said in the press release.

Last quarter, Salesforce shares fell after the company issued disappointing third-quarter guidance. Coming into today’s report, the stock was down about 30% year to date.

Investors will be watching the earnings call closely for updates on the company’s AI strategy — particularly progress on Agentforce and broader adoption of its AI-driven cloud offerings.