Elon Musk Sells More Tesla Stock Before Solving Self-Driving

Elon Musk’s Statement 

Elon Musk said it plainly: Tesla’s overwhelming focus is solving full self-driving technology. “That’s essential,” he told a Tesla owners club in June. “That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.”

Musk sometimes exaggerates during the same interview, and he described Tesla’s new plants in Germany and Texas as “gigantic money furnaces” that were losing billions of dollars, only for the carmaker to then post a better-than-expected quarterly profit. But if figuring out full autonomy really is as pivotal to Tesla’s valuation as Musk says, and there’s a risk Tesla could be worth much less than its almost $900 billion market capitalization, it isn’t stopping the world’s richest person from cashing out before a potential crash.

About Tesla’s New California Department 

Since November, Musk has offloaded about $32 billion of Tesla stock. His latest disposal, which he said was to avoid emergency sales in the event he’s forced to go through with his deal for Twitter, started on the same day the Los Angeles Times broke the news California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has accused Tesla of misleading consumers about features it’s marketed as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, or FSD.

The agency lodged its complaints in a pair of letters to the state’s Office of Administrative Hearings on July 28. The DMV said in a statement that it “seeks to require Tesla to provide more accurate terms and descriptions, and more and better consumer education of the product capabilities and limitations.” If the company fails to comply, the DMV could refile against Tesla and seek a greater penalty.

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Some Questions And Its Clear Answers

Does California want Tesla to drop the terms like Autopilot and FSD completely? Does it just want the company to change or add language to its website or the interface of its cars? And if Tesla, which has 15 days to respond, ignores the agency, what exactly is it prepared to do? The DMV declined to comment further Tuesday.

What is clear is Tesla has a lot at stake. The company may have its headquarters and newest factory in Austin, Texas, but it still makes most of its cars for North America at its plant in Fremont, California. The Golden State has long been Tesla’s largest market in the US, and the company continues to grow. Its registrations soared 82% in the first half to 90,895 vehicles, beating all brands other than Toyota.

If California’s issues with how Tesla promotes Autopilot and FSD escalates, it could raise the risk the Federal Trade Commission takes a closer look at its marketing practices, as two US Senators called for a year ago. That was prompted by the first of two investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into whether Autopilot is defective. NHTSA upgraded the first of those probes in June from a preliminary evaluation to a more in-depth engineering analysis.