Not a single day goes by when Elon Musk isn’t in the news for something. More often than not, the news isn’t good. Or at least that’s the way it feels.

The same’s been true of Donald Trump at various intervals dating back to 2015. These days, the two men are almost synonymous, so much so that Trump felt compelled recently to insist on a distinction: Musk, he explained, during remarks for Turning Point’s “AmericaFest” event in Phoenix late last month, is a “smart person we can rely on,” whereas he (Trump) is president. (Never the two shall meet in a Trump administration.)

Count me skeptical about… well, about anything Trump says, and also about anything to do with the unholy alliance between America’s felonious president and the world’s richest man. As I’ve put it again and again over the past eight weeks (a period during which Musk’s net worth rose by nearly $200 billion), we’re witnessing the birth in America of a Putin-style, symbiotic oligarchy.

There it is, in all its garish glory: Musk was worth $485 billion on December 18. He started 2025 worth $432 billion.

But Musk seems to want a lot more out of his relationship with Trump than money. Indeed, Musk appears to want more out of the deal than Trump bargained for, as evidenced by Musk’s discomfiting usurpation of the government funding narrative in December, a coup that arguably caught Trump flat-footed. Far be it from me to suggest history’s greatest dealmaker was swindled, but Trump might’ve unwittingly got the short end of this particular Faustian bargain.

Anyway, Tesla shares blew up on the first trading day of the new year, falling 7% or so after Q4 deliveries came in short of estimates. 495,570 was nowhere near the 512,277 analysts collectively expected. Just as importantly, the readout meant Tesla delivered fewer vehicles in 2024 than it did in 2023, the first annual sales drop ever for the company.

As the figure above shows, the company’s struggling to grow quarterly sales versus the comparable prior-year period, a less-than-ideal setup for a stock trading so rich as to suggest investors don’t even care about the underlying business.

And see, that’s just it: They don’t. Investors don’t care about the underlying business. Not as it stands today, anyway. Notwithstanding Thursday’s swoon, investors are looking right through the “here and now” fundamentals for Musk’s car business to focus on what could be both for his companies and, more germane I’d argue, for Musk himself.

Tesla — the stock — is just Musk with intraday liquidity. Hence the insane melt-up that added half a trillion to its market cap post-election, despite what we now know was a lackluster quarter for sales relative to consensus and even relative to the company’s own guidance, which called for a “slight” increase in annual sales.

As the figure shows, this is a bit of a brake-slam for Tesla. Maybe “Robotaxi” (is that a proper noun?) and a more favorable regulatory environment (i.e., the quid pro quo Trump wittingly agreed; there’s no telling what he accidentally got himself into with Musk) will be enough to boost sales, but I frankly doubt it matters much as long as Tesla’s the only way to wager on Elon.

In other words: As long as Tesla’s the only publicly-traded Musk proxy, how many cars it sells is a secondary concern. “The market appears to be wagering on crony capitalism bolstering the prospects for Tesla… regardless of the slow growth and expensive valuations,” JonesTrading’s Mike O’Rourke remarked. (He mentioned Apple in the same breath, but I don’t think the two are comparable at all on the crony capitalism meter.)

In a separate note last month, O’Rourke pointed out the potential irony inherent in some of the juxtapositions posed by richly-valued mega-caps banking on cronyism and Musk’s inroads to government. “If there is a government shutdown that results in equity market volatility, it will be ironic that Musk was the catalyst,” he remarked, when the funding bill was stuck in limbo. “If investors are going to price stocks well beyond perfection, they better be careful what they wish for.”

As for exploding Cybertrucks in Vegas, terrorism in New Orleans and random acts of violence more generally (the prevalence of which in formerly “civilized” nations is increasing), I’d simply suggest we’re backsliding not just politically, but as a species. It’s almost as if we’re racing Mother Nature to see who can bring on oblivion first, having become impatient with the slow-burning suicide that began with the Industrial Revolution.