Elon Musk Bloomberg Qatar Economic Forum

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks via video call during Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forum on May 20, 2025 (Karim Jaafar/Getty Images)

Take a spin

Tesla’s Elon Musk doubles down on “a major rebound in demand” without giving evidence

Saying something aloud doesn’t make it true.

Rani Molla

5/21/25 11:39AM

Tesla CEO Elon Musk asserted in a second interview yesterday that his electric car company has turned a corner after producing dismal results last quarter, telling CNBC reporter David Faber, “We’ve seen a major rebound in demand.” Earlier in the day, he told Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain that vehicle sales had “already turned around.”

Both times Musk provided little in the way of evidence.

Here’s the CNBC exchange, which happened right after Musk shared his standard line that the true value of Tesla is in autonomy and robots, and right before had to leave the call for another appointment:

Musk: ...we’ve seen a major rebound in demand at this point. I feel comfortable with—
Faber: You have seen a major rebound in demand?
Musk: Oh yeah.
Faber: You really believe — you have seen that?
Musk: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look for most people, I mean, when you buy a product, I mean, how much do you care about the political views of the CEO? Or do even know what they are?

Musk came back for a second part of the interview, but the host didn’t pick up the same line of questioning. Musk didn’t provide any details about that demand rebound.

Of course there’s the possibility Musk has internal data that shows a bounce-back in demand, but it’s also worth noting that saying something doesn’t make it true — especially in the case of Musk.

What we do know for sure is that early indicators suggest demand is depressed.

Here are some:

Tesla told its workers it wouldn’t be running the production line next week at its Texas plant, where it produces its bestselling Model Y and its Cybertruck — typically not something you do when you’re trying to keep up with high demand. Business Insider reports that workers were told they could either show up for training and cleaning or use their PTO to take the time off.
When asked about lower sales, Musk continually cites a switch in production to the new Model Y in Q1 as the reason for the softness, as people held off buying it as they awaited the new one. However, demand for the new Model Y also looks soft, as the company is currently offering discounts on it.
April sales data, which represents the first month of Q2, is down in Europe and China, two of the company’s biggest markets besides the US.
While there’s no US data yet, analysts track VIN registrations and dealer inventory, among other data points, to come up with their estimates. The FactSet consensus analyst estimate for Q2 deliveries is 405,000 — 9% below what it delivered last year in Q2. Analysts expect the company to also deliver fewer vehicles in 2025 than it did in 2024, which was itself a disappointing year.
Tesla employees have confirmed the demand problem.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5