Remember Tesla?

That’s the car company Elon Musk runs when he’s not… well, when he’s not doing Elon stuff. Stuff like blowing up rockets and Twitter-feuding with former bestie and current President of the United States, Donald Trump.

Tesla was the biggest beneficiary of Musk’s proximity to the US presidency, but the stock suffered greatly as Musk presided over slapdash cuts to government programs before ultimately crashing out of the Trump administration in a blaze of ignominious “glory.”

In May, he promised to refocus on his businesses, but it wasn’t long before he plunged back into politics with the launch of a third party which he says will field candidates for the 2026 midterms.

At the same time, Musk’s engaged in a somewhat convoluted effort to finance enormous capex outlays at xAI through transfers from SpaceX, debt and equity raises and now a $12 billion, private equity-backed funding vehicle. The end goal, apparently, is for xAI to access one million advanced Nvidia chips to power Grok. The company’s Memphis data center already houses 200,000 of the GPUs.

Tesla almost seems like a side show in all this, and indeed it’s fair to suggest the 90% run-up in the shares from Election Day to the highs in early December was mostly a play on Musk’s meteoric political rise and very little to do with the underlying car business. At the worst levels in early April, the shares were down 55% from those December highs. They’ve since recovered, but the stock’s still off sharply on the year, and it’s underperforming the Nasdaq 100 by — wait for it — 25ppt.

That’s the backdrop for Q2 results, which unsurprisingly showed revenue declined for a second consecutive quarter. Sales of $22.5 billion were just short of consensus and fell 11.8% YoY.

Deliveries, you’ll recall, were down 13.5% during the period. Based on the slide deck, it looks like Cybertruck deliveries were off by more than half. The “other models” line showed a 52% YoY decline.

Gross margin was better than expected at 17.2% and the key “automotive margin excluding-regulatory credits” metric was 15%. Tesla recognized $439 million of regulatory credits during the quarter, down 26% from Q1. EPS of 40 cents was a miss. Free cash flow fell by 89% to just $146 million. If I’m looking at consensus correctly, analysts expected $750 million.

With the caveat that I’m not a “Tesla expert” (whatever that means), I didn’t see much, if anything, in the deck that counted as truly new. The company said plans for a cheaper model are “on track” for 2025 but… well, we’re already halfway through 2025. Tesla said initial production (“first builds”) of that model started in June, but given that no one’s even seen the thing, one has to think it’s just a cheaper version of a Model 3. I can’t imagine anyone getting excited about that.

As far as the Robotaxi, Tesla talked up a pilot program in Austin and said the cybercabs are “scheduled for volume production starting in 2026.” On the call, Musk suggested Robotaxis may reach half of all Americans this year. I don’t know what to say about that.

It’s hard for me to understand how anyone can take this seriously. Sales and deliveries are falling. If “volume production” of the new models is still several quarters away, then overall volumes will be lower for the year. So, this is a car company that’s selling fewer and fewer cars.

Or maybe it’s not a car company. Maybe it’s a robotics company. Or an energy company. Or something else entirely. If that’s the case, it’d be nice to know which at some point.