Musk told to focus on Tesla as electric car rivals close the global sales gap
Tesla chief executive and SpaceX owner Elon Musk: As Tesla’s profit margins shrink, some 67% of survey participants said the billionaire executive should focus more on the carmaker.
Right on cue, Tesla sceptics are pushing back after this year's sizzling $500bn (€445bn) rally.
Rival car makers pouncing on booming demand for electric vehicles pose the biggest challenge for Tesla over the next two years just as Elon Musk appears distracted by his high-profile ventures, from Twitter and space travel to artificial intelligence.
So say respondents to the latest Markets Live Pulse survey. Out of 630 global contributors, 54% flagged the heightened risk of industry competition while 26% picked the behaviour and decisions of its mercurial chief as a key concern for Tesla shareholders.
“Musk is just such an unpredictable person that I would count it among one of the top risks for Tesla,” Matthew Tuttle, chief executive of Tuttle Capital Management, said in an interview.
As Tesla’s profit margins shrink, some 67% of survey participants said the billionaire executive should focus more on the carmaker. Their warning comes in the wake of a seemingly improbable 128% rally for the shares this year, fuelled by renewed investor appetite for the tech megacaps and Musk’s prediction the era of fully autonomous vehicles is nigh.
Even though Tesla currently enjoys sizeable lead over other companies, be it an established carmaker or a startup, a big part of its remarkably high market valuation rests on the assumption it will be able to maintain this dominance in a future where electric vehicles are more commonplace.
Yet, Tesla rivals are picking up the pace. Just earlier this month, China’s BYD set a sales record for the second quarter, and delivered 352,163 fully electric vehicles. It has gained ground on Tesla, which handed over 466,140 electric vehicles to customers worldwide — also an all-time high.
At the same time, General Motors doubled the sales of its Bolt electric vehicle in the US, albeit from a much smaller number.
• Bloomberg
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