Elon Musk is not having a good year. Not only is his millionaire salary at Tesla being questioned, there are also problems with Neuralink and its implants and his management on Twitter leaves much to be desired. And to all this we must add Tesla's “nightmare” year: Musk admits that a new next-generation platform and a cheaper passenger vehicle will not arrive until at least next year. AND old unsold vehicles are constantly piling up.
With the decline in sales, production is significantly exceeding demand. And Tesla has apparently struggled to reduce production in time, with unsold stock piling up so much that it can literally be detected from space.
Satellite imagery, courtesy of SkyFi Watch Marketplace, reveals that lots at the company's sales centers across the country and its factory in Fremont, California, are really starting to fill up: a striking visualization of the continuing financial problems of Tesla.
There are likely several factors at play. For one thing, electric vehicle manufacturers have long noted a slowdown in demand for all-electric vehicles. Then there is an influx of cheaper alternatives, particularly from competitors in China that have caught up to Tesla's offerings.
Of course, the automaker's mercurial CEO has had a lot to do with this, too, scaring away potential buyers with his histrionic behavior and his work in his, many, other companies: Twitter, Space X, Neuralink and its role in OpenAI or The Boring Company, to name a few.
All this has made unsold inventory is really starting to pile up. Last month, images circulating online showed hundreds of unsold Teslas piling up in a dying shopping center outside Chesterfield, Missouri.
It's a turbulent time for Tesla, with shareholders set to vote on Musk's $56 billion pay package this week, which if a recent letter from Tesla president Robyn Denholm is anything to go by, could determine Musk's future at the company.
Meanwhile, Musk stated this week on Twitter that “public sentiment is unequivocally supportive,” without saying where he gets that information. The reality is that in the last quarter Tesla produced 433,371 vehicles, of which 47,000 remained in their deposits, more than double that of a year ago and its largest imbalance to date. And that can be seen from space.