Activists Vandalize Tesla Dealership As Tesla Protests Continue

A Tesla car dealership doused in blue paint following vandalism by activists in Germany (Omer Messinger/Getty Images)

In the DOGE house

“Unprecedented brand damage” and the many problems weighing on Tesla’s stock

Elon Musk’s end date at DOGE and Tesla’s tariff resistance aren’t enough to keep the stock from falling.

4/4/25 9:14AM

Tesla’s stock is falling again today after it dropped more than 5% yesterday — and there are plenty of factors bringing it down.

This morning, JPMorgan Chase analyst Ryan Brinkman wrote that Tesla’s Q1 delivery miss confirmed the “unprecedented brand damage we had earlier feared.” He added that it “causes us to think that — if anything — we may have underestimated the degree of consumer reaction.”

Shares were recently down 4% in premarket trading.

Earlier this week, Tesla reported that it sold 50,000 fewer vehicles than it had a year earlier and than analysts had expected, a record miss on both counts. That suggests Tesla’s plummeting public perception and nationwide protests, thanks in part to CEO Elon Musk’s work at the Department of Government Efficiency, are effectively weighing on its top line.

Soon after the dismal delivery report, the stock rallied on a report Musk might be leaving his position at DOGE and would presumably spend more time running his electric vehicle company. But even confirmation of that news yesterday doesn’t seem to be helping Tesla’s stock.

Of course, now there’s a tariff-driven global rout roiling the markets, so that’s obviously an issue, but Mexico and Canada, where many of its parts are made, are so far exempt from the latest “reciprocal tariffs.”

The auto tariffs that went into effect yesterday shouldn’t affect Tesla as much as other carmakers, since it assembles its US-sold vehicles in the US. (Tesla is definitely not immune, though, and tariffs on its parts, many of which are made in Canada and Mexico, will begin in May.)

But at least some of Tesla’s many other issues — increased competition, an aging lineup, delayed technology rollouts — seem to be affecting it, too.

Rani Molla

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

Jon Keegan3h

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla4h

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

Jon Keegan4h

Tom Jones & Millie Giles6/4/26

ChatGPT hit 1 billion users nearly twice as fast as TikTok did

It took Facebook and Instagram around eight years; it took YouTube just over six; even TikTok, which at the time felt like it was a global sensation almost as soon as it arrived, took more than half a decade.

Now, though, the mobile version of ChatGPT has positively left the biggest platforms (and all of your other favorite apps) in the dust, hitting 1 billion monthly active users in just three years, per new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, as more users turn to OpenAI’s chatbot each month.

ChatGPT 1 billion users chart — Sherwood News

While rival Anthropic might be pulling ahead in terms of annualized recurring revenue, enterprise customer adoption, and valuation, the app version of Claude, a market-leading chatbot on several counts, has clocked only 56 million monthly active users in the quarter to date.

In fact, according to Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, ChatGPT’s monthly active user count for the quarter to date outweighs the figures for Claude, Gemini (472 million), Doubao (106 million), Dola (78 million), DeepSeek (68 million), Meta AI (61 million), Grok (50 million), Perplexity (44 million), and Copilot (31 million)... combined.

ChatGPT made a pretty big splash in the tech world when it landed toward the end of 2022, but there’s no question that the mobile versions — which launched on iOS in May 2023, then on Android a couple months later — helped to catapult the chatbot into the mainstream proper.