These individuals have pushed boundaries, taken risks, and used their influence to address global challenges, leaving a significant (and positive) mark on history. Their success is not just measured by their wealth but by the legacy they leave behind, whether it’s in the form of technological innovation, leadership, or philanthropy.

Making a top entrepreneurs list is tricky because none of these people followed a clean path. Most of them messed up, got lucky, took huge risks, or just refused to quit when they probably should have.

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)

Jobs was not known for being easy to work with, but he cared deeply about how things felt to the user. He turned computers, phones, and even packaging into emotional products. Apple blended tech with the changing culture.

Bill Gates (October 28, 1955 – Present)

Gates saw software as the future before most people understood what software even meant. Microsoft didn’t just build programmes; it shaped how businesses and homes used computers for decades.

Warren Buffett (August 30, 1930 – Present)

Buffett proves you do not need flashy ideas to win big. He focused on patience, discipline, and long-term thinking. Slow, boring decisions, done consistently, made him one of the most successful investors ever.

Elon Musk (June 28, 1971 – Present)

Musk bets on things that sound unrealistic at first. Electric cars, reusable rockets, brain chips. Some ideas work, some do not, but he keeps pushing industries forward, whether people are ready or not.

Oprah Winfrey (January 29, 1954 – Present)

Oprah turned her voice and authenticity into an empire. Media, publishing, television, she built trust first, business second. That trust is why her influence lasted so long.

Jeff Bezos (January 12, 1964 – Present)

Bezos was obsessed with customers while everyone else chased short-term profits. Amazon started with books and quietly became part of everyday life. Convenience won.

Larry Ellison (August 17, 1944 – Present)

Ellison built Oracle with pure competitiveness. He was not shy about ambition. Databases are not glamorous, but they run the world behind the scenes.

Mark Zuckerberg (May 14, 1984 – Present)

Zuckerberg changed how people communicate fast. Facebook grew faster than anyone expected, and with that growth came huge responsibility and plenty of controversy.

Richard Branson (July 18, 1950 – Present)

Branson made business look fun. Airlines, music, space, he jumped industries without losing personality. Branding and boldness were his biggest tools.

Larry Page (March 26, 1973 – Present) and Sergey Brin (August 21, 1973 – Present)

These two organised the internet. Google made information usable, searchable, and instantly available, and changed how humans think.

The post Entrepreneurship: Top 10 individuals who made the concept impactful appeared first on International Finance.

The metal gets used in activities like electrification, construction of solar power panels, electric vehicles and data centres, all areas in which demand has been rising, eating into inventories. Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG, said a “generational bubble” was playing out in silver, as more capital was drawn into the precious metals market.

“The rally in precious metals has been supported by expectations of multiple Fed rate cuts in 2026, alongside robust central bank and private investor buying. However, the dominant driver of late has been a severe structural supply-demand imbalance in silver, sparking a scramble for physical metal,” Sycamore said.

Commenting on the silver price rise, media outlet Bloomberg stated, “Much of the world’s readily available silver is sitting in New York awaiting the outcome of a US Commerce Department investigation into whether imports of critical minerals pose a national security risk. The review could pave the way for tariffs or other trade curbs on the metal.”

On December 29, it seemed like gold and silver were on track for their best years since 1979. Gold rose by more than 70% in 2025 to more than USD 4,500 an ounce, up from USD 2,623 at the start of the year. Spot platinum rose 5.3% on December 26 to USD 2,338.20 an ounce, in its strongest weekly rise on record. Both platinum and palladium, which are key components in automotive catalytic converters, have surged due to tight supply, tariff uncertainty, and rotation from gold investment demand, with platinum up roughly 170% in 2025.

Silver also has a role as a monetary metal – a store of value. However, Elon Musk’s warning looks more on the manufacturing side, as a price surge may end up with manufacturers suffering the consequences.

As per the industry estimates, battery electric vehicles (BEVs), like Teslas, typically use about 25–50 grams of silver per car. This is roughly 0.8–1.6 troy ounces per vehicle in electrical contacts, power electronics, and control systems.

The metal has risen sharply during December, part of a rally that also pushed gold and platinum to record levels on Boxing Day. Analysts have attributed the price jump to expectations of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve in 2026, leading to increased demand for hard assets that protect against inflation and currency debasement.

Also, China has imposed new restrictions on silver exports, which will begin on 1st January. The move has further created supply-related fears, while geopolitical worries have lifted demand for safe-haven assets. Under the new rules, companies must secure licenses from the Xi Jinping government to export the metal, with eligibility limited to state-approved firms producing at least 80 tonnes annually, apart from holding USD 30 million in credit lines.

This move, as per the analysts, effectively blocks small and mid-sized exporters, reducing international supply almost overnight. According to Statista, global silver supply stands at around 1 billion ounces. Analysts estimate that supply deficits of 115 million to 120 million ounces in 2025 are straining global inventories, as mine production fails to meet consumption for a fifth consecutive year. Silver’s total market capitalisation has now crossed USD 4 trillion, fuelled by a short squeeze in October and renewed safe-haven demand amid global rate cuts and geopolitical tensions.

The post Rising silver prices: Elon Musk issues warning as Beijing eyes export controls appeared first on International Finance.

In reference to a well-known quote about Julius Caesar and his unyielding desire for power, Zuckerberg’s t-shirt said, “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “Zuck or nothing.” In contrast, the phrase “Mundus sine Caesaribus”—”a world without Caesars”—was printed on Graber’s shirt. The shirt served as a scathing indictment of Zuckerberg’s centralised vision.

In contrast to Zuckerberg’s centralised approach to building Meta, Graber aims to manage and develop Bluesky, a dominant social media platform that went live in early 2024, she tells TIME. She claims these digital firms have established virtual kingdoms where their CEOs present themselves as self-made kings.

In the hyper-centralised world of social media, where internet giants like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg make decisions on their own regarding privacy, censorship, and data harvesting for artificial intelligence, this message is becoming more and more relevant. While Bluesky’s daily usage increased by 500%, X lost 115,000 users the day after the election as consumers sought a haven from right-wing trolls, sponsored posts, and disinformation bots. However, X’s daily active user count in the United States was still ten times higher than that of Bluesky. Among the 35 million users of Bluesky today are Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, George Takei, and Stephen King. It’s the world’s biggest decentralised social network by far.

Beyond its sizable liberal fan base, Bluesky still has a way to go before becoming profitable and widely used. However, Graber asserts that her goal is not to overtake Musk or Zuckerberg as the dominant figure on social media. She declares, “We oppose centralised authority prescribing the rules for everybody else. We would rather not establish a future in which I am a more benevolent emperor. We envision a society in which monarchs are completely unnecessary.”

Bluesky’s interface visually resembles Twitter, with an endless scroll of text posts that are no longer than 300 characters. New users can quickly engage in discussions by using “starter packs,” which are user-generated collections of accounts centred around common interests. Topics such as memes, pop culture, politics, and sports are especially popular among users.

The primary distinction between Twitter and Bluesky is that the latter’s open-source protocol enables users to personalise their content feeds and algorithms. Like Reddit, Bluesky has seen the emergence of close-knit communities that have established censorship guidelines and communication methods. Additionally, because of Bluesky’s architecture, users can move their posts and follows to another platform as long as it uses the same protocol.

It wasn’t Graber who came up with Bluesky. In 2019, Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, funded a small group of academics and announced Bluesky as a decentralised version of Twitter. Graber, who had formerly worked on bitcoin projects and had a long-standing interest in decentralised technology, offered to lead the company in 2021. Graber was living in a large communal home with other entrepreneurs during the lockdown in San Francisco.

According to Rose Wang, Graber’s former roommate and current COO of Bluesky, the company’s growth was influenced by the particulars of COVID-19. “How do you get people to feel safe together in this time? There were a lot of community challenges. I believe that our perspectives on creating communities online are greatly influenced by Jay’s and my experiences creating communities offline,” she said.

As per PitchBook, female-led companies in Silicon Valley remain rare, securing only 6% of venture capital deals. Graber says that her and Wang’s identities have shaped their approach to leadership. “As women with extensive online experience,” she explains, “we’ve made moderation a top priority—because we believe it’s essential to building a healthy social platform.”

Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022. He initially argued in favour of making its algorithm open-source, which could be derived from Bluesky’s technology and research, but he swiftly stopped supporting Bluesky instead. After searching elsewhere, Graber and her team eventually raised $8 million and then $15 million in investment rounds. They also decided to turn Bluesky into a public benefit corporation, which means that they must work for the public and social good in addition to making money.

Demand surged in 2023 as Bluesky prepared to launch its invite-only system, with many potential users pleading with them to remove the platform’s limitations. However, Graber decided to keep Bluesky small until the decentralised tools were developed because they weren’t yet ready.

Currently, Graber oversees more than 100 content moderator contractors and 24 staff members who strive to eliminate harmful posts such as aggressive threats and child sexual abuse information. Dorsey was upset with Bluesky’s content moderation strategy and quit the board last spring, claiming that Bluesky was centralising and that its moderating tools were becoming overly intrusive.

To determine what people see and what they don’t, Graber contends that users should largely design their own moderation systems. She explains, “You have this open right to leave—where you can build your own thing if you disagree with the services, moderation actions, or design choices.”

According to Rudy Fraser, a technologist who started the feed, popular feeds on Bluesky include Science and Blacksky, for Black community building, with 370,000 monthly active users. “Some of the feeds are centred around people who are discovering shared affinity in gender or their identities. I want to create an open network so that communities and individuals who feel excluded from the current social media platforms and power structures can create their own spaces,” Graber noted.

Bluesky continues to lean far to the left politically, and conservatives have complained about being harassed or censored on the site. Additionally, Bluesky’s user growth has slowed considerably since its post-election surge. Furthermore, its 35 million users are insignificant compared to the hundreds of millions on X and Meta’s Threads, not to mention the billions on Instagram and TikTok.

Graber acknowledges that the platform has experienced several ups and downs, but remains unconcerned about the slow growth. To avoid the mistakes of previous social media platforms that prioritised growth over user experience, she feels comfortable taking her time. “Social networks can degrade the main experience of the feed because they have become too accustomed to believing that users are trapped because of the network effects. This monetisation model is likely to reach some natural limits where people grow weary of it, so it won’t last forever,” she explained.

Graber and Wang must now come up with a new revenue strategy that goes beyond using user data to build AI models or running constant advertisements. Graber says she is considering monetising Bluesky’s marketplaces through custom tools or subscription models, despite not having specific plans in place.

Graber and Wang are more than happy to let independent business owners create other platforms on top of Bluesky’s AT protocol, which are likewise open-sourced and compatible with one another, as Bluesky scuttles toward monetisation. Remember how standard email protocols served as the foundation for Gmail, Yahoo, and other inboxes. These new initiatives include Sky-light, a TikTok clone supported by Mark Cuban, and Flashes, an Instagram substitute that has received over 100,000 downloads.

The duo won’t stop anyone from constructing a Bluesky clone on top of the infrastructure. According to Wang, “Greensky can appear the following morning if Bluesky, the server, shuts down overnight. We are frequently asked, ‘How can we trust you?’ Don’t trust us, is our response. Have faith in the infrastructure.”

Only good days ahead

In April 2025, Bluesky rolled out a new verification system, taking the competition with X to the next level. The social platform formerly relied on an unconventional self-verification system, where users could “authenticate” themselves by including custom domains in their web handles. Now it’s adopting a more proactive and traditional verification strategy, with the Bluesky team reportedly identifying notable accounts and bestowing blue check marks.

“It’ll be a rolling process as the feature stabilises, and then we’ll launch a public form that people can use to request verification,” Graber said, adding that the highest-priority accounts right now are government officials, news organisations, journalists, and celebrities. A 2024 study from the MIT Technology Review reveals that Bluesky has grown, and so has the uptick in impersonators posing as public figures. To meet growing demand for ways to confirm that accounts are legit, some Bluesky power users have taken it upon themselves to create their own verification systems. As the app continues to attract celebrity users (former US President Barack Obama joined the platform earlier this spring), a more formal verification process will help reassure public figures that Bluesky is a safe digital hangout space.

In addition to this traditional, top-down verification approach, Bluesky offers “trusted verifier” status to a select group of vetted organisations. These organisations will be given a scalloped blue check mark on their Bluesky accounts. The initial batch of publications selected as trusted verifiers includes The New York Times and WIRED, with more in the works. This same system was initially followed by Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, where the rule was: you had to actually be famous and verifiable in the public eye.

While users cannot request verification directly, more importantly, Bluesky will not “sell” verification checkmarks like X and now Instagram and Facebook.

The post Can Bluesky stay small and win? appeared first on International Finance.

According to a public database the agency maintains that despite Musk’s status as a “special government employee” under the Trump administration, OSHA has opened more than 50 ongoing occupational health and safety charges against SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company in the last five years. DOGE employees have been employed by the Department of Labour, where OSHA is located, since at least March 18.

The American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), which is suing the Trump administration over DOGE’s access to Department of Labour records, expressed their belief that the news reports and OSHA cases in its memo purport to show “gross mistreatment and even abuse of workers” at Musk companies in five different states in an exclusive memo provided to WIRED.

The union federation claims in the memo that “every worker in America should be of concern to Musk’s record as a boss” as he tries to use DOGE to exercise “unilateral control” over the federal government.

The Department of Labour, OSHA, SpaceX, Tesla, Musk, and The Boring Company haven’t responded publicly about this ongoing issue.

A dangerous conflict of interest

Not only bureaucratic excess, but also a fundamental breakdown of the firewall separating authorities from the companies they oversee drives the key issue in the continuous debate between Elon Musk, DOGE, and OSHA. Under OSHA’s purview, the Department of Labour is currently housing DOGE employees, some of whom have been connected both personally and professionally with Musk. That by itself would set off enough sirens. The true anxiety comes from OSHA’s current investigations into Musk’s businesses: SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company.

This conflict of interest targets the fundamental centre of democratic responsibility. Allowing a billionaire under investigation for multiple worker safety violations to access whistleblower material is not just a procedural breach; it undermines the principle that no one is above the law.

Former OSHA officials such as Jordan Barab and David Michaels have been clear-cut: internal OSHA records have to stay sealed from individuals under investigation. Anything less than that not only compromises the judicial system but also erodes public confidence.

The structural vulnerability is confirmed by DOGE operative Marko Elez’s read-access to several Labour Department databases, even if they are not used. Add to that his installation of Python and code-altering tools, and you are toying with illegal spying or backdoor manipulation rather than looking at naive oversight.

Whistleblowers in crosshairs

This is not theoretical if it sounds so. Not in a vacuum, but in response to hundreds of safety infractions across Musk’s operations, some leading to severe injuries, amputations, or even death, are the AFL-CIO and former OSHA officials delivering their concerns.

In 2020, OSHA fined Tesla 46 times, and there were nine violations combined for SpaceX and The Boring Company. These figures are based on accounts from actual people who sacrificed their livelihoods to speak out; they are not hypothetical.

Consider the instance of Victor Joe Gomez Sr, a certified electrician who was electrocuted to death at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin from incorrect electrical disconnection, a hazard OSHA had already noted as violating. Another case involved a SpaceX worker who sustained a skull fracture following an automated machinery malfunction and went into a coma.

Under such circumstances, the mere idea that Musk or his associates could follow back whistleblower identities is not only ethically repugnant; it is life-threatening. David Michaels claims that although theoretically unlawful, enforcement is weak and usually slow when reprisal against whistleblowers is taken. Once a worker’s identity is revealed, career-wise, emotionally, and perhaps physically, damage already exists.

Emphasising this threat in no less terms, Liz Shuler, President of the AFL-CIO, referred to the circumstances as an “abomination.”

Shuler has good reason for concern. Whistleblowers provide the last line of protection for worker safety in a system that already favours companies greatly.

Bureaucracy as a weapon

The Department of Government Efficiency has not openly acknowledged any active meddling in OSHA’s internal affairs. But its subdued impact is being felt in institutional silence, inexplicable inaction, and office closings. Without explanation on whether they are being combined, shrunk, or closed completely, DOGE claims to have lately revoked 17 local OSHA leases.

Meanwhile, OSHA’s National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health has not convened once this year despite scheduling two crucial meetings to address problems including heat-related occupational injuries.

These silences follow no random pattern. They are strategically important. Rebecca Reindel of the AFL-CIO claims that the Trump administration’s handling of OSHA, especially through DOGE, appears to be crippling the same mechanism supposed to safeguard workers. It is quite alarming to consider how slowing, disabling, or redirecting safety monitoring could turn bureaucracy into a weapon.

Regulatory sabotage does not necessarily show up as public firings or extensive deregulation. Sometimes it’s more subtle: closing regional offices, calling off committee meetings, or arming operators with unclear tasks and access to private networks. These sluggish poisons piecemeal destroy institutional integrity.

We enter a serious legal grey area when DOGE operator Marko Elez installs tools to change software code but claims to have never accessed important systems. The chain of command is not clear, and monitoring appears to be absent. Such uncertainty generates not only corruption but also impunity.

Protecting employees and rebuilding institutional trust

Given the stakes, the AFL-CIO’s lawsuit against the Trump administration is simply a starting point. Congressional supervision and court investigation of the reach and authority of DOGE and any related administrative agencies is absolutely needed. The curtain has to be removed on who has access to what data, how decisions are taken, and whether actual firewalls exist to guard public interest cases and whistleblowers.

This event also calls for a more general discussion on how regulatory authorities might keep their independence in the face of billionaire influence. Elon Musk is a cultural force, a policy influencer, and now, via DOGE, a quasi-government actor; he is not only a corporate billionaire. Anyone who supports democratic checks and balances should find that degree of access and leverage horrifying.

From the Boeing 737 MAX disasters, where engineers raised red flags that were disregarded, to the 2008 financial crisis, driven by lax oversight and insider immunity, history is full of cases when corporate overreach resulted in calamity. If anything, Musk’s hostile treatment of whistleblowers, threatening litigation and vowing prosecution, is a red flag that cannot be overlooked. We have seen how rapidly openness falls when the norm is reprisals.

The position of the AFL-CIO goes beyond mere union grievances. On the moral sand, it is a line. Should Musk or DOGE be let to run wild, we could find ourselves in a world where millionaires rewrite the rules in real time, whistleblowing is suicidal, and regulation is optional.

Protecting workers’ rights and safety is not a luxury; rather, it is the absolute least a society has to maintain to be civilised. As of right now, there is no proof available to the public that DOGE or Musk have obtained private OSHA documents.

However, the AFL-CIO and former OSHA managers are concerned about DOGE’s attempts to obtain access to other potentially sensitive databases at the Department of Labour and many other federal agencies.

Former OSHA deputy assistant secretary Jordan Barab, who served under President Barack Obama, said, “No company that is being cited by OSHA or investigated by OSHA should be granted access to the agency’s internal and confidential files.”

DOGE operative Marko Elez currently has read access to four record systems at the Department of Labour, including a database for tracking unemployment benefit claims and another for managing employee access to federal buildings and systems, according to a March 29 court filing by attorneys for the Trump administration in the AFL-CIO lawsuit. Elez “has not accessed any of the systems,” according to the petition, but he has installed Python and a program for altering software code at the agency.

According to the public database, OSHA has one ongoing investigation against Tesla, which means the agency has not yet issued a citation or dismissed the case. An unidentified “safety” complaint regarding a Tesla factory in Lathrop, California, prompted the opening of the case recently.

OSHA has issued 46 penalties against Tesla since April 2020 for a range of reasons, including allegedly failing workplace inspections, breaching OSHA safety laws, or causing an injury to a worker at the business. Over half of these violations are now being contested by Tesla. In the same time frame, OSHA conducted six investigations that led to violations against SpaceX and three against Musk’s tunnel construction company, the Boring Company.

According to the document, the AFL-CIO’s worry is based on almost two dozen mishaps and claimed safety issues that have been recorded at Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company since 2016. Some of these incidents were the focus of recent OSHA investigations.

A qualified electrician called Victor Joe Gomez Sr was electrocuted and murdered in one instance that was reported to OSHA in 2024 after he was told to check electrical panels at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, which OSHA found had not been correctly disconnected previously. Also, Tesla is actively contesting the case, so it is still open.

Fingertip amputations were the subject of two different OSHA citations at other Tesla operations. According to the final OSHA accident report, an employee at a SpaceX plant in 2022 “suffered a skull fracture and head trauma and was hospitalised in a coma for months” following what the agency described as a technical issue with a recently automated piece of machinery. SpaceX did not dispute the $18,475 fee and OSHA citation.

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler stated that several Tesla employees have told the federation on multiple occasions that the automaker doesn’t put safety first. The AFL-CIO does not represent workers at SpaceX or Tesla, but it does collaborate with the United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW).

Debbie Berkowitz, a former chief of staff and senior adviser at OSHA under Obama, accuses Tesla of having “some serious safety hazards in their facilities.”

According to OSHA’s public database, businesses have the authority to contest a citation after it is issued, and Tesla frequently does so. As per the email, OSHA has issued violations in 46 Tesla cases over the last five years, but 27 of those cases are still pending because the automaker is aggressively contesting them with the agency.

For the same reason, one Boring Company case and two SpaceX cases are still pending. Until OSHA and the employers agree on the terms of the citation, which may include related fines and certain adjustments the company must make to improve worker safety, the cases cannot be closed.

Obama’s assistant secretary of labour for OSHA, David Michaels, told WIRED that large corporations generally don’t have a financial incentive to contest OSHA penalties because the penalties associated with them are normally only a few thousand dollars.

However, until a lawsuit is closed, a corporation is not obligated to address the precise hazard that caused an accident.

“In general, some companies may be motivated to keep cases open in order to avoid addressing these alleged problems,” Michaels said.

According to Michaels, “Some employers decide they don’t want to abate the hazard, they disagree with the citation, and they will argue the case for many, many thousands of dollars, and it will cost them far more than simply paying a small fine and abating the hazard.”

Right now, there is no proof that Musk has access to any private databases at the Department of Labour that would hold whistleblowers’ personal data. However, past administrators of OSHA claim that the agency does have records that would make whistleblowers and workers who took part in anonymous interviews with agency investigators anonymous.

According to Berkowitz, she is concerned that an individual with this kind of access could be able to identify each whistleblower who has assisted with an OSHA investigation against one of his businesses.

As stated by Michaels, there is “a very significant concern” that whistleblowers who have their identities made public will face intimidation or retaliation.

Whistleblowers expose their firms to considerable personal danger, and Shuler says that she is deeply worried that their safety and identity may be compromised.

“Regarding the checks and balances we’ve incorporated into these systems,” Shuler claims, “It’s an abomination to me. Being aware that our government enjoys trust and that we have successfully persuaded employees that their government will protect them, and now we have an unelected billionaire essentially upsetting that feeling of security.”

In recent years, Elon Musk has at least twice talked of taking revenge on those who have leaked secrets. After the material was leaked to the media in March 2025, Musk declared that he would “look forward to the prosecutions” of Pentagon employees. Musk threatened to bring legal action against staff members at X who broke their non-disclosure agreements.

It’s still uncertain what OSHA’s overall future under the Trump administration would hold. According to Rebecca Reindel, the AFL-CIO’s director of occupational safety and health and a member of OSHA’s National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety & Health since 2022, the committee should have met twice by now, but none have, she stated. Her committee was drafting regulations to stop occupational heat-related illnesses and injuries.

On a website where the organisation details the amount of money it says it has saved the federal government, DOGE says it has cancelled the leases of 17 OSHA local offices in recent weeks. OSHA and DOGE have not stated if these offices will merge with other regional offices, reduce, or completely close.

Unlike many other government agencies, DOGE does not currently appear to have planned mass terminations at OSHA.

“Massive cuts have not yet been observed. We anticipate their arrival,” Reindel concluded.

The post DOGE access sparks worker safety fears appeared first on International Finance.

“Positioned itself as a refuge from X, the site formerly known as Twitter. For nearly two decades, Twitter had been considered the internet’s town square, chaotic and often rancorous but informative and diversely discursive. Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals began fleeing, and Bluesky in turn accumulated more than ten million users by the fall of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks. But the post-election influx proved to be of a different order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger compared to a Macy’s at the start of Black Friday sales,” The New Yorker summed up things with these words.

The platform has been grappling with a notable challenge: a unique problem with detecting humour, something that has personally affected internet personality Amy Brown.

What are we talking about?

Amy Brown was not yelling. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t vomiting. However, on Bluesky, she claimed to be doing all three at once. What was the reason? During a February business trip to Ohio, Brown’s husband stopped by a Walgreens (American pharmacy store chain). He told her that the prices here were lower than in California, where they live.

Because of the price difference, she posted that she was crying, screaming, and throwing up. However, the “joke problem” kicked in, as she was told by several Bluesky users that she was exaggerating and that no one could possibly care that much. While the replies were accurate (as they tried to invoke the basic laws of human body functions), they all missed the point: she was referring to one of the most popular sayings on the internet: one that is so widely used that it has its own Spotify compilation name.

Brown faced a unique challenge with humour detection that anyone familiar with Twitter/X and now navigating the younger, more serious social network Bluesky would recognise. Some users struggle to understand jokes, while others seem to deliberately miss the point in order to make a different statement.

Many Bluesky users transitioned from X, a platform where controversial figures were livetweeting the degradation of US infrastructure. This shift represents a much larger issue. However, for those new to Bluesky, the perceived ignorance or self-seriousness of many users can be quite frustrating.

In 2023, Brown, who had previously worked as Wendy’s social media manager, joined Bluesky. After nearly two hours of impersonating Elon Musk on November 4, 2022, her X account was banned. The “incident” occurred soon after X made the paid verification announcement.

Brown changed her display name to “Elon Musk (real)” and her profile picture changed to a picture of a balding business entrepreneur. While she knew her actions on the microblogging website might result in her ban, she accepted the possibility.

Now she believes that there is still a lot of “popular sayings on the internet” kind of humour on Bluesky, but surprisingly many people are perplexed by it. There are factors behind it. Let’s start with the conflict between former Facebook and X users.

Brooklyn-based freelance writer Ashwin Rodrigues said, “Anyone who has spent time on the Everything App is familiar with Twitter’s idiom, which consists of ironic posts, in-group allusions, and platform-specific history. All of that inside jokes and sarcasm were with them when they left X. Former heavy users of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, on the other hand, are used to their own standards of humour. Facebook, at least before it turned into Click FarmVille for engagement bait and ads for strangely specific custom novelty tees, was the opposite of Twitter, which felt like a purposeful way to interact with mostly strangers and that a familiar face might make the user feel horrified. Broadcast media also helped Bluesky gain a lot of users.”

“MSNBC featured several segments about the social network, including appearances on Morning Joe, The Weekend, All In With Chris Hayes, and The Rachel Maddow Show. Regular MSNBC viewers who made the leap may not be as accustomed to the tone and manner of online discourse on the shrewd social web,” he remarked.

Then comes the tendency of the technology to display random posts to random users through algorithmically curated content, similar to Bluesky’s Discover feed, which, in Ashwin’s opinion, is worsening the platform’s ability to detect humour.

“When an ex-Twitter user describes in detail what they would do to the Hamburglar if they saw him in person, a Maddow referral on Bluesky may react with real horror and bewilderment. There is an issue between the keyboard and chair, which is also a PEBKAC issue,” he added.

Make humour great again

“A person cannot be made to understand a joke. Anger is the only more pointless reaction. If there is one thing that these diverse groups have in common, it is a distaste for large tech companies run by unpleasant CEOs and a desire to post in the language of their once-favourite platforms. Each person has a unique form of brain damage. I understand people who find the joke hard to understand. However, my sympathies are more with those who are attempting to make them,” Ashwin observed.

A 2024 story from Axios claimed that America is experiencing a gullibility crisis. Nobody can tell if a screenshot is a joke, a lie, AI, or a manipulated image.

Comedian Josh Gondelman, who previously worked as a writer and producer on Desus and Mero and wrote for “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” claims that the political environment has made the problem worse.

According to Gondelman’s memory, at some point during the previous six months, Bluesky reached a user base that was sufficiently active to be entertaining and helpful.

He laughs and adds, “But that also means it hit the tipping point where it’s populated enough to be annoying.”

Ignatz Award-winning cartoonist, author, and illustrator Mattie Lubchansky says she is “mainly a joke-posting kind of person.”

Bluesky’s humour-detection problem is a component of a larger phenomenon she has noticed, which she refers to as “riff collapse.”

The day after the 2025 Oscars, Lubchansky posted, “I haven’t seen any of the Oscar movies this year, nor have I seen any movie ever made. I’m afraid that the people trapped inside the screen will be angry at me for not helping them escape; and once they are out, I will be punished. Anyway, here’s how the awards validated an opinion I already had.”

The ensuing responses were sincere disagreements and opinions regarding Oscar-nominated movies. A few people wanted suggestions for movies. It was suggested, without irony, that she read “The Purple Rose of Cairo”. It appears that only a small number of people realised she was kidding.

According to Lubchansky, she witnesses this kind of “riff collapse” every day and believes it is caused by the surge of new users from Meta and X.

However, there has long been an annoyance with new social media sites. Longtime users will continue to be irritated by newcomers, and networks will hopefully continue to appear.

When people first started using the internet in the early to mid-1990s, it was frequently when they started college. Several new users would sign up for their university’s network in September each year and begin exploring the discussion groups and forums.

Technologist and writer Anil Dash said, “The internet old timers would be very frustrated, because the new people didn’t know the social norms. The exact phenomenon that we are currently witnessing. The majority of internet users dreaded September more than any other month. Everyone can now access the internet at any time thanks to AOL. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the telecom sector and connected homes and businesses nationwide to the internet, coincided with AOL’s rise to prominence. This period was called the Eternal September, with wave after wave of newbies getting online.”

LiveJournal and even Twitter have shown the same pattern. Ashton Kutcher, an investor and actor, challenged CNN in 2009 to see whose account could reach one million Twitter followers first. Kutcher emerged victorious. Due to the stunt, the microblogging platform experienced a surge in users.

As per Lubchansky, people have a chance to consider their response manners at this time.

“Read the whole post before you respond. Take a moment to respond. And if you’re going to respond with a joke, and we’re not friends already, go look and see if somebody’s made it already. Because there’s a really good chance they have,” Lubchansky said.

Meanwhile, Brown considers the block function on Bluesky to be a favour to its recipient.

“If someone comes into my comments and they just really, really don’t understand, usually I just block them so we don’t run into each other again. No hard feelings. I’m not trying to repeat the part of Twitter where the internet makes me mad every day,” she noted.

It’s a different approach than the norm on X, where quote-tweets viciously insulting the original post are part of the platform’s noxious fabric.

Satirical site “The Onion” has the fifth-largest Bluesky account, with over 1.2 million followers. Onion CEO Ben Collins doesn’t mind people replying to jokes in earnest. On the contrary, he says it’s “the funniest part of the internet.”

“It means more people are seeing your jokes. If everyone is immediately breaking out into uproarious applause at your joke, your audience is too small. As someone who regularly used and posted on Twitter for years, I share the frustration when one of my jokey posts is misread or taken as fact. But it also strikes me as unfair to shame someone because they haven’t been slamming their head on the same wall of the internet that I have. Not everyone crawled here from the radioactive sewer of X. As we all get settled along with our new neighbours, it might be helpful to remember that. If not, at least Bluesky has very robust blocking features,” Ashwin concluded.

The post Is Bluesky having a humour block? appeared first on International Finance.

Tesla had initially planned to cover the extra expenses brought on by the 34% tariff, but the subsequent hike to 125% made it impossible to import the required parts, which is why it was suspended. The Semi truck is expected to be produced in Nevada, and the Cybercab is expected to be produced in Texas.

“In response to the imposed tariffs, Tesla has pursued a strategy of enhancing the percentage of sourced components from North America over the past two years. However, this strategic adjustment has not alleviated the challenges posed by the global complexities inherent in Tesla’s supply chain. In a reported plea to President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has underscored the pivotal role of a global supply chain in the manufacturing process, emphasising its importance,” Reuters reported.

Not only Tesla but other automakers also have voiced concerns about the higher expenses and possible operational disruptions, including Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. The tariffs have also had an impact on industry-wide production schedules and consumer prices.

Donald Trump recently said that he was considering a modification to the 25% tariffs imposed on foreign auto and auto parts imports from Mexico, Canada, and other places. Those tariffs could raise the costs of a car by thousands of dollars, and Trump said car companies “need a little bit of time because they’re going to make ’em here.”

The long-term impacts on the US automotive industry and its competitiveness in the global market will be closely monitored by stakeholders as the situation evolves in the coming days.

Experts see the disruptions resulting from the 25% tariffs hindering innovation, apart from affecting the uptake of electric vehicles and, most importantly, forcing businesses to look into alternate sourcing and manufacturing markets.

Tesla is also seeking approvals from the American state governments as it plans to roll out a robotaxi service with a fleet of Cybercabs. In October 2024, it unveiled a robotaxi concept that had no steering wheel or control pedals and promised to start building the two-door model by 2026 at a price of less than USD 30,000. Tesla also plans to ramp up production of the Semi electric trucks in 2026 and accelerate deliveries of long-overdue orders to customers including Pepsi.

The impact on the key business plans for Tesla reflected how Donald Trump’s tariffs, which were meant to boost US local manufacturing, have hurt his ally Elon Musk, who has repeatedly said on his social media posts on X (formerly Twitter) that he supported free trade and objected to tariffs.

Tesla has also stopped taking new orders for Model S and Model X as China imposed a retaliatory 125% tariff on American goods. To make matters worse, the electric vehicle giant’s long-awaited plans for an affordable car, including a US-made, stripped-down version of its best-selling electric SUV, the Model Y, have suffered a setback as the production launch has reportedly been delayed.

Tesla promised affordable vehicles beginning in the first half of 2025, providing a potential boost to flagging sales. Global production of the lower-cost Model Y, internally codenamed E41, is expected to begin in the United States.

However, that would occur at least a few months later than outlined in Tesla’s public plan, Reuters stated, quoting its sources, who also offered a range of revised targets from the third quarter to early 2026.

Two of the people said Tesla aimed to produce 250,000 of the cheaper Model Ys in the United States in 2026. The new vehicle is also planned for eventual production in China and Europe.

“The less expensive mass-market vehicles have been widely anticipated by Tesla fans and investors who hope they will attract a fresh group of customers and reverse the EV maker’s falling sales and eroding market share. Tesla also has refreshed its original Model Y with exterior and interior changes. The Long-Range All-Wheel Drive version in the United States costs about USD 49,000, before a USD 7,500 federal tax credit,” Reuters reported further.

There were reports about the China launch of the E41 occurring in 2026. The E41 will be smaller and cost 20% less to produce than the refreshed Model Y. The timing of the rollout in Europe is not clear. Tesla is also planning to launch a bare-bones version of its Model 3 compact sedan.

The EV maker on January 2 reported its first decline in annual deliveries in 2024, and analysts expect sales to fall again in 2025 for several reasons, including damage to the brand reputation by Elon Musk’s close work with Donald Trump and support of far-right European politicians.

Elon Musk earlier promised a new, cheaper EV platform with cars expected to be priced as low as USD 25,000, but dropped that to prioritise robotaxi development. Tesla has increased North American sourcing for parts of many models over the last two years, which would reportedly decrease tariff exposure for the E41.

The post IF Insights: Trade war, auto tariffs disrupt Tesla’s US production plans appeared first on International Finance.

Musk, who, apart from owning Tesla and SpaceX, possesses a private pilot’s certificate, has locked horns with the American aviation watchdog.

“In a moment charged with peculiarity, Musk shared his bewilderment on social media over the non-linear flight path of a commercial jet. The post ignited conversations about the intricate calculus that governs flight paths, highlighting Musk’s missteps in understanding a system he aims to revamp,” a report from Science Magazine summed up the whole thing in these following words.

Elon Musk vs FAA

Conversations on X (formerly Twitter and also owned by the Tesla and SpaceX chief) show Elon Musk and his allies are overlooking variables like weather conditions, air traffic nuances, and federally dictated air highways—factors that dictate the journeys of commercial aircraft, aspects that prioritise safety and efficiency above speed.

SpaceX engineers have already entered the scene to “help” the FAA modernise its air traffic control under the Trump administration. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in an X post that the deadly January 29 crash between a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines flight landing at Reagan Airport in Washington served as “a heartbreaking wake-up call that improvements must be made.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation reportedly told Reuters that SpaceX engineers tapped as part of Musk’s DOGE team at the FAA are serving as special government employees and will be kept separate from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which handles regulations for the company, to avoid any conflicts of interest.

In an email to the employees, Acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau said that the DOGE team would be visiting more FAA facilities, including FAA headquarters, after stops at the Air Traffic Control Command Centre and Potomac TRACON in Warrenton, Virginia.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (whom Trump defeated in the 2016 Presidential Election) was among critics to claim Musk’s team was inappropriately gaining special access to the FAA. Duffy told Fox News that the SpaceX engineers had gone to the FAA on February 24 to “just observe and would craft a phased approach on how we might be able to fix the American system.”

He added, “It’s not just SpaceX. We’re going to ask everyone else to come in that’s smart and bright and loves America to think through the process. We’re like using a rotary phone. We’re spending 90% of our money to keep the rotary phone working from back in the 1980s as opposed to thinking, well, we use cell phones today. We have such antiquated, old equipment that no one has fixed. Donald Trump has said, fix this system, make it work, keep people safe.”

As part of his outreach effort, Duffy will visit Air Traffic Control Command Centres across the United States to talk with FAA employees about “the critical need to upgrade the existing air traffic systems.”

The DC crash, which killed all 67 people aboard both craft, happened nine days after President Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president. It was the deadliest American aviation disaster since 9/11.

In another X post, Duffy rejected what he described as the “growing media narrative that there are more aeroplane crashes now in Trump’s presidency than under Biden.”

He asserted that there were 57 aviation incidents in the United States during President Joe Biden’s first month in office, “compared to 35 under Trump,” while stating, “the need for immediate improvement to our safety infrastructure is long overdue.”

Criticisms galore

Elon Musk did qualify for a private pilot certificate in 2002. However, as mentioned in the article’s beginning, the tech billionaire and his allies have been overlooking the crucial variables that control the safety and efficiency of commercial aviation.

One very good example to validate this was the supply chain company CEO Ryan Petersen sharing a screenshot of the projected flight path of a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Houston on X, which hewed close to the southern US border with Mexico.

“Why is this plane not flying in a straight line?” Petersen wondered. Musk replied, “It should be.”

“While both men appeared to suggest there was something irregular or suspicious about the flight plan, this was not the case. Planes may take certain less direct routes due to weather, air traffic, or any number of factors. Indeed, Musk’s own private jet has flown on curved trajectories, as captured in screenshots of flight records shared on X by Jack Sweeney, a software engineer who has worked for American Airlines and the aviation consultant UberJets, and famously aroused Musk’s ire by tracking the movements of his private jet with ElonJet, a network of social accounts. Sweeney posted the flight path that Trump’s plane took from Southern Florida to Texas in November ahead of a SpaceX launch, which for a while hugged the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico instead of tracing a straight line over the body of water,” reported Rolling Stone magazine.

“There are countless reasons why a flight might not follow a straight path — weather, [Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards] regulations, or optimising fuel efficiency by following favourable winds,” Sweeney stated on X.

Sweeney told the magazine that Petersen and Musk appeared to be “jumping to conclusions” to “push a point that our system is outdated, which, there’s definitely things that can be updated.”

However, he added, “It’s a complex system currently in place, and there are reasons things were designed the way they were, including with established routes in the sky that function as aerial highways. It takes time for things to get updated properly.”

The software engineer also felt that Musk’s DOGE has not taken into account these technicalities, while it seeks to slash away at vital federal agencies, including the FAA.

“That predicted line that is on that picture is usually [navigational] points picked by the dispatchers or the pilot,” Sweeney mentioned, while referring to Petersen’s screenshot.

He found further flight data that showed the flight route was initially straight but adjusted to avoid turbulence. Scott Manley, a science educator, physicist, and licensed private pilot, offered another potential reason for the curved route between the two cities, which he said adds about 50 miles, or 12 minutes to the trip.

“The US military has a huge chunk of airspace it randomly closes to let their pilots train or to test new weapons,” he wrote in a post on X, sharing a map screenshot with a circle drawn around an area west of Bakersfield, California.

According to reports, Musk’s DOGE project directed the firing of hundreds of FAA employees. The White House has claimed that none of the workers who were fired were performing safety-critical functions. Musk backed it with his X post, which stated, “To the best of our knowledge, no one affecting safety has been fired.”

However, when Rolling Stone spoke with several current and former FAA workers, the latter mentioned that the vital jobs the fired employees were doing included air traffic control support, obstacle impact that studies and identifies hazardous obstacles (like new buildings and cranes) to inform flight paths around the country, keeping drunk or reckless pilots out of the skies, and airman certification that decides whether pilots are medically fit enough to fly their aircraft. Are SpaceX employees, who are going to replace these professionals in the FAA, are aware of the complexities associated with these roles?

FAA in complete mess

On January 20 (the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration), Michael Whitaker stepped down as FAA administrator after clashing with Elon Musk. The SpaceX CEO publicly called on Whitaker to resign after the FAA fined the company for failing to get approval for launch changes.

Whitaker was only a year into the top job and had several years left in his term. While Trump appointed Chris Rocheleau, a top executive for an aviation business association, as acting FAA administrator, there is no clarity yet on when the aviation watchdog will get its new full-time boss.

Elon Musk has been a bitter critic of Whitaker. The SpaceX boss has complained many times about the FAA, including a September 2024 outrage after the agency levied a $633,000 fine for launching missions with unapproved changes. The FAA also fined Starlink after the SpaceX subsidiary failed to submit safety data before launching satellites in 2022.

However, the biggest issue here is the FAA suffering from underfunding and outdated technology. In 2023, an expert panel’s report found that the watchdog’s increasing reliance on overtime to staff air traffic control facilities was putting air safety at risk. The agency has fielded hundreds of complaints from air traffic workers describing dangerous conditions from staff shortages to dilapidated buildings.

Now Musk wants retired air traffic controllers to consider returning to work amid staffing shortages, but to ensure that, a federal law needs to be reformed. The law requires air traffic controllers to retire by “the last day of the month” in which they turn 56.

The Transportation Secretary can exempt controllers “having exceptional skills and experience” from automatic separation, but only until that person is 61. The retired air traffic controllers, before they rejoin, also must pass annual medical examinations with strict physical requirements, like having 20/20 vision, sufficient hearing, and proper blood pressure levels.

While Duffy has announced a plan to “supercharge” controller hiring (by simplifying the existing hiring process and increasing starting salaries), the newly-appointed Transportation Secretary also plans to “make an offer” to air traffic controllers to let them stay longer, past the mandatory retirement age of 56.

However, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union that represents the country’s air traffic controllers, told Flying Magazine that Duffy’s suggestion was not the answer to filling thousands of shortages.

“The solution to the ATC staffing crisis is a long-term commitment to hiring and training and the retention of the experience of all the highly skilled, highly trained air traffic controllers,” the union said, noting that in 2026, just dozens of air traffic controllers across 35 facilities will reach 56.

While the FAA has tried to boost recruitment efforts amid ongoing staffing and retention issues, the process of recruiting air traffic controllers is a long and strenuous one. Including training, it takes three years, while the attrition level constantly remains on the higher side.

Conflict of interest to haunt Musk?

According to reports, Starlink may secure a multibillion-dollar contract to overhaul the US air traffic control communication system, potentially displacing the long-standing contractor Verizon. The FAA is preparing to cancel its $2.4 billion deal with Verizon and shift the work to the SpaceX subsidiary, according to The Washington Post. The news got further corroborated by both Bloomberg and The Associated Press.

And if things pan out as claimed by the media outlets, there will be serious accusations of favouritism, cronyism, and conflicts of interest against Elon Musk. Why so? The SpaceX boss has raised concerns over the Verizon system, claiming without evidence that it is “not working and putting air travellers at serious risk.” In one of his X posts, the tech billionaire argued that the Verizon communication system was “breaking down very rapidly,” adding that the “FAA assessment is single digit months to catastrophic failure, putting air traveller safety at serious risk.”

“The FAA had been scheduled to begin disbursing funds for the Verizon contract next month (March 2025), but SpaceX’s team reportedly recommended that Starlink be awarded the deal instead,” reported The Washington Post.

However, the process of shifting the contract from one contractor to another needs a proper procedure, and while senior FAA officials are said to have refused to approve the proposal, Elon Musk’s team is now looking to seek assistance from a Trump-appointed official within the agency.

As per Bloomberg, Musk has reportedly approved a shipment of 4,000 Starlink terminals to the FAA, and one such terminal has already been installed at the FAA’s ATC technology lab in New Jersey. There will be a new programme “TDM X,” with the goal being to have the upgrades fully functional in 12–18 months.

Speaking to Bloomberg, an FAA spokesperson confirmed that testing has been completed for one Starlink terminal in Atlantic City (New Jersey) and two other terminals at non-safety-critical sites in Alaska.

“The FAA has been considering the use of Starlink to fix telecommunication connections to provide more reliable weather information at remote sites, including in Alaska,” the spokesperson added.

Hitting back at the DOGE chief, Verizon said that “the FAA systems currently in place are run by L3Harris and not Verizon.”

Musk later corrected himself and said that L3Harris is responsible for the “rapidly declining” system.

“Our company is working on building the next-generation system for the FAA which will support the agency’s mission for safe and secure air travel. We are at the beginning of a multi-year contract to replace antiquated, legacy systems. Our teams have been working with the FAA’s technology teams, and our solution stands ready to be deployed. We continue to partner with the FAA on achieving its modernisation objectives,” Verizon stated.

Elon Musk and DOGE will be under some scrutiny in the coming days. While they need to find a quick fix to the problem of recruiting a massive number of air traffic controllers in a short period, apart from making sure that FAA gets its house in order, any increased participation from SpaceX and Starlink in this process will be seen as a potential “Conflict of Interest.”

It’s a tightrope situation and DOGE has already entered into it proactively through its decision of downsizing the FAA workforce. There is no backing out from here.

The post DOGE’s ‘reform plans’ for FAA: What is Musk up to? appeared first on International Finance.

One of the main reasons for Tesla’s 13% quarterly delivery decline on April 2nd—the lowest in almost three years—was that. Analysts and investors are now preparing for another decline in Tesla sales this year.

“This is our first look at the impact of recent brand damage—and it appears to be the primary driver behind this quarter’s delivery decline. These growth rates will likely deteriorate further this quarter,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said on X.

According to Munster, deliveries in 2025 will be 9% less than the USD 1.79 million Tesla reported the previous year. Politics is not the only factor. Even as competitors, such as BYD in China—where competition is particularly fierce—have launched EVs that rival the well-liked Tesla Model Y SUV, fans have long lamented the automaker’s ageing lineup.

Additionally, Tesla is losing ground in Europe. Investors are keeping an eye on whether the company’s decision to update the Model Y will have an impact on sales in the upcoming quarters. Deliveries of the model will begin in China in late February. However, assuming a phased rollout of Tesla’s expected lower-priced vehicle, analysts at Deutsche Bank predict a 5% decline in sales this year.

They stated that with additional incentives and profitable financial agreements, Tesla is anticipated to prioritise delivery volumes at the expense of margins once more this year. When and how much a less expensive model will cost has not been disclosed by Tesla.

Gary Black, managing partner of Tesla shareholder The Future Fund, claimed that Tesla’s 2025 delivery and profit “will go much lower” if the less expensive car is just a stripped-down version of an existing model rather than a new product that appeals to more consumers.

According to Barclays analysts the first-quarter delivery figure “sets a challenging path for even flat year-on-year volume in 2025.”

Musk said in 2024 that he would increase production volume by 20 to 30% in 2025. In January this year, he did not restate this, instead stating that Tesla was “working hard” to increase its yearly volumes. According to the carmaker, several weeks of production were lost during the first quarter as a result of retooling production lines for the updated Model Y at all four of its factories.

Poor Sales Numbers Galore

As Trump went all “Hulk Smash” in his tariff warfare against America’s allies and adversaries alike, to complicate matters, he announced steep 25% tariffs on imported cars entering US shores, resulting in automakers scrambling for options like layoffs, pauses in car shipments, and delayed price hikes. While Tesla will be less affected than rivals, the EV giant imports parts, and Musk has said the cost impact from tariffs will not be trivial.

“Musk’s role in spearheading federal cost-cutting in the United States and support of far-right parties in Germany and other nations have produced a sharp response around the world. Protests against Musk outside Tesla showrooms have spiked, and the EV maker’s cars and charging stations globally have become targets for vandalism. Some Tesla owners have been looking to disassociate themselves from Musk, and data has shown many are trading in their vehicles,” Reuters reported.

What is mind-boggling about Tesla’s poor sales numbers in Europe and China is that the overall demand for EVs has not slowed down. In the January–March period, the company globally recorded a bigger-than-expected drop in sales to 336,681 vehicles, down from 386,810 units a year ago. The expectation was for a 3.7% drop to 372,410 vehicles delivered, according to an average estimate of 15 analysts from Visible Alpha—but in recent days, analysts had braced for even worse figures following Tesla’s first-ever annual sales decline in 2024.

“The brand crisis issues are clearly having a negative impact on Tesla… there is no debate,” long-time Tesla bull Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note, adding the delivery numbers “were a disaster.” The company has lost about 45% of its value since mid-December, following the record high after Trump’s election win, when investors expected the billionaire’s close ties to the White House to ease regulatory pressure over its self-driving taxi programme.

Talking about 2025, Musk has now forecast 20% to 30% sales growth in 2025, promising to launch an affordable vehicle in the first half of the year and banking on demand for its newest vehicle, the Cybertruck. However, there is little or no information on whether the EV maker will roll out the “cheaper vehicle” as promised by the Tesla boss a few months back. Musk did not reiterate the growth forecast on the January earnings call, but said Tesla would return to growth this year. Tesla is set to report first-quarter earnings on April 22.

Tesla has started offering the refreshed Model Y SUV with a new look and updated features in China, the US, and Europe. Investors are waiting to see if demand for the model can counter competition from Chinese rivals including BYD. After enjoying a leading position among EV makers for years, the EV giant is set to be unseated by BYD for the first time in 2025, with a 15.7% market share, according to Counterpoint Research. Add the drop in sales in key European markets like France and Sweden, and things look bleak for the automaker.

Brand Damage Amid Doubts Over Musk’s DOGE Role

There was a glimmer of hope for Tesla investors, as a Politico report stated Musk was planning to step down from his role as Trump’s advisor soon, with “Republican administration insiders increasingly viewing the billionaire as a political liability.” However, the White House dismissed the report, saying the tech billionaire will stay on to complete his mission to slash government spending and downsize the federal workforce.

In fact, the Republican recently gave Musk a fresh endorsement amid criticism of the billionaire’s government reduction project and said he can stay “as long as he likes” but will eventually return to his businesses. The Tesla boss, when he joined DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), was given a 130-day mandate as a special government employee, which expires around late May.

Despite Tesla’s market bloodbath (the automaker’s stock value has dropped 45% from its peak of USD 488.54 in mid-December), Musk is still the richest person in the world.

As the EV manufacturer imports large amounts of battery-making materials, Musk has stated that Trump’s auto tariffs will increase costs for the company. Tariffs on such parts could raise the price of Tesla vehicles by at least 5% to 10%, according to Morningstar analysts.

However, it is Musk’s support of far-right European politics and his role as Trump’s adviser at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—which is in charge of precipitous cuts to US federal employees and funding for humanitarian initiatives—that might prove to be more expensive for Tesla in the long run. Incidents like vandalism of Tesla vehicles, showrooms, and charging stations are only hurting the automaker’s brand image.

Renowned Tesla bull Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst, stated that Musk’s position at DOGE “is not sustainable, and the longer Musk stays at DOGE, this adds more risk to the Tesla story and could face permanent brand damage.”

To make matters worse, Sweden’s largest insurer, Folksam, recently sold its stake in Tesla over concerns about the company’s stance on workers’ rights, as the venture is facing a backlash from unions and some pension funds in the Nordic region over its refusal to accept a demand from Swedish mechanics for collective bargaining rights covering wages and other conditions.

The post IF Insights: Tesla investors brace for another year of decline appeared first on International Finance.

He was a little quirky, but America was used to eccentric, ingenious inventor-CEOs like Steve Jobs. Musk was seen as a hero of capitalism, welcomed with applause and given a prominent seat at the table of public discourse. Perhaps his charged opinions, fantastical futurism, and idiosyncrasies won the hearts of millions initially. But those same polarising opinions, unfulfilled promises, and outlandish behaviours are getting him (or more accurately, the company he built) into terrible trouble.

Without Elon Musk, there would be no Tesla. He poured his PayPal fortune into the struggling startup, a gamble that paid off splendidly. For the longest time, his cars were symbols of environmentalism, prestige, and tech-savviness. If he had just remained the focused CEO of Tesla, it could have been one of the greatest companies of all time.

However, Musk is no longer the man sleeping on the factory floor of his high-tech automobile corporation. He is distracted by politics, petty feuds, and a dozen other ventures like Neuralink, Starlink, SpaceX, and The Boring Company.

He became deeply embroiled in politics through his purchase of the micro-blogging platform Twitter (now X) and his platforming of Donald Trump. As time went by, Musk shifted from a liberal to a libertarian, eventually patronising right-wing hardliners, including those who deny the very climate change Tesla claims to solve. There are even accusations that he did a Nazi salute.

International Finance will examine how Elon Musk’s behaviour is quantifying into a “Musk Discount,” eroding brand trust, accelerating the partisan divide in sales, and leaving the company vulnerable to stagnation while its CEO fights political battles elsewhere.

The rise of a visionary

To understand the sheer magnitude of the reputational collapse and the financial “discount” currently weighing on Tesla’s valuation, one must first painstakingly reconstruct the extraordinary “Musk Premium” that characterised the company’s ascent.

For nearly fifteen years, Elon Musk was more than a CEO; he was the singular asset upon which the entire valuation of the enterprise rested. In the early 2010s, the automotive industry was defined by insurmountable barriers to entry. It was a graveyard of failed startups, a capital-intensive sector where margins were razor-thin, and brand loyalty was entrenched over decades. Into this rigid ecosystem stepped Musk, fresh from his PayPal exit, with a proposition that seemed economically suicidal. He suggested developing a luxury electric sports car to finance the production of a mass-market sedan.

The early narrative was one of existential heroism. Musk’s willingness to pour his personal fortune into Tesla (and SpaceX) when both teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008 forged the initial layer of the “Iron Man” mythos. This was a technocratic saviour utilising capitalism to solve the climate crisis. By positioning himself as the protagonist in a battle for the planet’s future, Musk imbued Tesla products with a profound moral imperative. You did not merely purchase a Model S in 2013; it was also a symbolic vote for a sustainable future and a rejection of the “big oil” status quo.

This narrative construction created a formidable, intangible economic moat. While traditional automakers like General Motors and Toyota spent billions annually on advertising to maintain market share, Tesla spent absolute zero.

The CEO’s X account served as a global broadcasting tower, where updates on software, manufacturing targets, and rocket launches captivated an audience that far transcended the typical car-buying demographic. This “halo effect” allowed Tesla to command premium pricing and maintain high stock valuations despite fundamentally weaker financials than its legacy competitors.

The strength of this bond is visible in historical consumer data. For a sustained period between 2013 and 2020, Tesla topped Consumer Reports owner satisfaction surveys with consistency that defied statistical norms. In 2020, even as the company struggled with initial quality control issues on the Model Y, it secured the top spot for the fourth consecutive year. The satisfaction scores frequently hit 99%, a figure that indicated owners were judging the vehicle not by the panel gaps or paint quality, but by the ideological affinity they felt for the mission and the man leading it.

The financial apotheosis of this visionary status was reached during the bull run of 2020–2021. As Tesla finally conquered the “production hell” of the Model 3 ramp-up (a period where Musk famously slept on the factory floor at Giga Nevada), the market stopped pricing Tesla as a car company and began pricing it as a high-growth technology platform, akin to a software monopoly.

The inclusion of Tesla in the S&P 500 in December 2020 served as the ultimate institutional validation. It was the largest company ever added to the index by market capitalisation, entering with a weight that forced index funds to buy billions of dollars’ worth of shares, driving the price even higher. At the time of this inclusion, Tesla was trading at over 120 times earnings.

By comparison, traditional automakers like Ford or Volkswagen traded at single-digit price-to-earnings ratios. This delta, the difference between 8x earnings and 120x earnings, was the “Musk Premium.” It was the price investors were willing to pay for the optionality of Musk’s brain and the belief that he would solve full autonomy, robotics, and energy storage, creating trillions in value where others saw only steel and rubber.

Between 2010 and 2021, Tesla’s stock performance generated generational wealth for retail investors. The company’s market capitalisation eventually surpassed the combined value of the next nine largest automakers. This phenomenon cemented a base of retail shareholders (often referred to as “Tesla Stans”), who viewed Musk not just as a competent manager but as an infallible oracle.

However, the foundation of this valuation was implicitly and explicitly tied to the CEO’s singular focus. Tesla’s own 10-K filings contained “Key Man” risk disclosures that were far from boilerplate. They were a literal admission of corporate fragility with statements like “We are highly dependent on the services of Elon Musk, Techno King of Tesla and our Chief Executive Officer… Without his relentless drive and uncompromising standards, there would be no Tesla.”

As long as that “relentless drive” was directed at expanding the Supercharger network, improving battery energy density, and refining manufacturing processes, the market was willing to overlook missed deadlines, aggressive tweets, and eccentric behaviour. The eccentricities were seen as features of his genius, not bugs in his leadership.

The cost of madness

The transition from “visionary” to “liability” was not a singular event but a cascading series of reputational fractures that accelerated dramatically between late 2022 and early 2025. The purchase of Twitter (rebranded as X) marked a distinct inflexion point.

It was the moment Musk’s public output shifted from engineering optimism, the vision of sending rockets to Mars and creating electric tunnels and neural interfaces, to a relentless stream of partisan combat, cultural grievances, and conspiracy theories.

The most critical strategic error in Musk’s recent pivot has been the systematic alienation of Tesla’s primary demographic. Historically, the early adopters of electric vehicles (EVs) have skewed heavily Democratic, liberal, and environmentally conscious. These were the consumers willing to pay a premium for a “green” product.

By aligning himself with right-wing hardliners, amplifying climate change sceptics, and engaging in “anti-woke” crusades, Musk placed Tesla in an untenable commercial position. It is now a company selling a solution to climate change run by a man actively supporting politicians who mock its existence.

A landmark study by economists from Yale University and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), released in early 2025, provided devastating empirical evidence of this phenomenon. Analysing vehicle registration data matched with voter registration records across the United States from October 2022 through early 2025, the researchers identified a massive, statistically significant “Musk Partisan Effect.”

The study found an estimated 1.0 to 1.26 million lost vehicle sales (tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue) between October 2022 and early 2025. This decline was most severe in strongly Democratic counties, where sales plummeted by an astonishing 67% to 83% compared to expected trends, simultaneously providing a 17% to 22% sales increase to competitors like Rivian, Ford, and Hyundai. The study posits that without this alienation of his core customer base, Tesla’s sales in the first quarter of 2025 could have been approximately 125% higher than actual figures.

Republican interest in EVs remains structurally low due to ideological opposition to the technology itself, while Democratic interest in Tesla specifically has collapsed. The buyers haven’t stopped wanting electric cars; instead, they have stopped wanting Musk’s electric cars. They are migrating to “anti-Musk” alternatives. The study notes that this effect “showed no indication of slowing down” and had actually increased in intensity by the first quarter of 2025.
The damage to the brand’s intangible value mirrors the devastating sales data. In the early 2020s, Tesla enjoyed a reputation as the gold standard in corporate innovation, akin to the iPhone in 2010. By 2024 and early 2025, brand sentiment trackers painted a bleak picture of a brand in freefall.

Data from YouGov and other reputation indices highlight this precipitous drop. Tesla’s “Buzz score” (a metric that tracks whether consumers are hearing positive or negative news about a brand) remained consistently negative throughout 2023 and 2024, averaging -7.1. This indicates that the dominant conversation around the brand was negative for two straight years.

More alarmingly, in broader reputation polls, Tesla’s ranking plummeted from a top-tier status (sixth) to near the bottom of the list (95th). This erosion is inextricably linked to the CEO’s personal approval ratings. Pew Research Centre data from early 2025 indicates that 54% of American adults now hold an unfavourable view of Musk.

If the partisan alienation was a slow bleed, the events of January 20, 2025, served as a traumatic arterial wound for the brand. Following the inauguration of Donald Trump, Musk, who had been tapped to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” addressed a crowd of supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC.

During this speech, celebrating what he called “no ordinary victory,” Musk performed a gesture that was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute. The reaction was immediate, visceral, and global.

The optical damage to Tesla was catastrophic. For a brand that relies on coastal urban professionals, a demographic sensitive to social justice and historical sensitivity, the image of their CEO performing a gesture associated with the Third Reich was a breaking point. It cemented the “Musk Discount” as a moral penalty. Driving a Tesla was becoming a social stigma.

The “Musk Discount” is visible in the sharp divergence between Tesla’s stock performance and the broader market. While the S&P 500 and other tech giants surged on the back of the AI boom in 2024, Tesla’s stock languished, decoupling from the “Magnificent Seven” tech cohort.

Over the 12 months leading into early 2025, Tesla significantly underperformed the S&P 500. While the index grew by approximately 12%, Tesla delivered negative returns, dropping 1% over the same period and down nearly 40% from its late 2024 peak by March 2025.

By January 2025, the “political noise” was no longer treated as a sideshow by Wall Street but as a fundamental risk factor. Morgan Stanley, historically one of the most bullish firms on Tesla, downgraded the stock to “equal-weight” and cut price targets, explicitly citing “volatile behaviour” and the distraction of the CEO as primary risks to earnings. Analysts noted that the “political noise” had begun to overshadow the fundamentals.

In 2024, for the first time in its history as a mass-market manufacturer, Tesla saw a decline in annual sales in the United States and failed to meet its global growth targets. The company sold approximately 1.79 million vehicles, while the broader electric vehicle market continued to grow.

The contingency

As the liability of Musk’s leadership grows, the question of corporate governance and succession has moved to the forefront of institutional investor concerns. The lack of a clear contingency plan represents a critical failure of the board of directors, which has been accused of being “captive” to the CEO and derelict in its duty to protect shareholder value from his personal whims.

The extent of the board’s subservience to Musk was laid bare in a landmark legal ruling that reverberated through 2024 and early 2025. In the case of Tornetta vs Musk, Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick struck down Musk’s massive 2018 compensation package (valued at over $55 billion), ruling that the process to approve it was deeply flawed and legally invalid.

Tesla functions as a monarchy. The board’s subsequent attempts to reinstate the pay package through new shareholder votes in 2024 and 2025, rather than negotiating a new, reasonable deal, only deepened the conflict between institutional investors concerned with governance and retail investors loyal to Musk.
Despite “Key Man” risk being the most significant threat to Tesla’s valuation, the company has stubbornly refused to publish a formal succession plan.

Shareholder proposals demanding a “Key Person Risk” report have been repeatedly voted down by the board, which argues that such disclosures would put the company at a competitive disadvantage. However, the urgency of this issue, amplified by Musk’s distraction with X, SpaceX, xAI, and politics, has forced internal movements that hint at a shadow succession strategy.

The most prominent figure to emerge as a potential stabilising force is Tom Zhu (Zhu Xiaotong). Zhu gained fame within the company for orchestrating the “production miracle” at Giga Shanghai, where he implemented the “China Speed” ethos, characterised by extremely efficient, 24/7 operational intensity.

Under his leadership, Giga Shanghai became Tesla’s most efficient export hub, accounting for half of global deliveries in 2022. Another key player is Omead Afshar, a long-time Musk confidant often referred to as the “fixer” in the office of the CEO. Reports in late 2024 and early 2025 placed him in critical roles overseeing operations in North America and Europe, stepping in to manage sales as inventory piled up. Afshar is viewed as an executor of Musk’s will, a bridge between the chaotic vision of the CEO and the operational reality of the company.

Elon the indispensable

While the “liability” argument is supported by robust sales and brand data, any honest analysis must contend with the formidable counter-argument, i.e. Elon Musk is not merely a manager. To fire him, or to marginalise him, risks turning Tesla into “just another car company,” stripping it of the innovation premium that justifies its stock price. His “madness” is inextricably linked to the method that produced the company’s greatest breakthroughs.

Musk’s value to Tesla is most tangible in the engineering trenches. His management style, characterised by “first principles” thinking (boiling things down to the fundamental truths of physics and economics), has led to breakthroughs that traditional OEMs deemed impossible or unwise. He refuses to accept “reasoning by analogy,” instead demanding to know the atomic cost of materials and the theoretical limits of physics.

The development of the Cybertruck provides a case study in both the madness and the genius of Musk’s method. In the design phase, Musk rejected traditional aluminium body-on-frame designs, which have been the standard for pickup trucks for nearly a century. Instead, he insisted on using an ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless-steel exoskeleton.

At the same time, Musk had decided to pivot the Starship rocket design from carbon fibre to stainless steel to reduce costs and improve thermal durability. He forced this same material science onto the Cybertruck team, demanding they use an alloy so hard it would break traditional stamping presses. This decision caused immense manufacturing headaches, requiring the invention of entirely new manufacturing techniques and contributing to years of delays.

The steel was so hard it could not be painted or stamped into curves, dictating the truck’s polarising “origami” aesthetic. While some might say the design is ugly, the result is a vehicle that is bullet-resistant and dent-proof. The mobile fortress is the safest thing on the road and stands as a physical totem of his refusal to compromise vision for convenience.

The dilemma for investors is that the same psychological traits that led to the “Nazi salute” controversy (impulsiveness, lack of filter, extreme risk tolerance) are the same traits that led to the reusable rocket and the electric car revolution. You cannot have the stainless-steel truck without the chaotic personality that drives it.

Furthermore, Tesla’s recruitment strategy relies heavily on the allure of working for Musk. Top engineers in AI and robotics join Tesla not just for the stock options, but to work with the man who is trying to colonise Mars. The 10-K disclosure admits that the company competes for talent based on this “visionary” allure. Removing him could trigger a brain drain of the most critical technical talent, leaving the company as a hollow shell of its former innovative self.

The future of Tesla

The automaker is no longer a pioneer and has been sidelined by BYD in sales and technology. With Musk’s public relationship with climate change deniers, even the liberals are distancing themselves from him and his products.

The board needs to act fast and figure out if they should wait for an implosion or professionalise Tesla into a mature corporation with clear succession plans, potentially elevating leaders like Tom Zhu.

While Musk’s “first principles” thinking remains essential for breakthroughs in AI and robotics (Optimus, FSD), investors must weigh whether this engineering value still outweighs the “Musk Discount.” The company’s valuation depends on whether Wall Street continues to treat it as a tech monopoly or re-rates it as a distressed auto manufacturer.

Tesla’s future is no longer guaranteed. If the “political noise” continues to drown out product fundamentals, the company risks stagnation, surviving as a niche, volatile tech holding rather than becoming the mass-market, global titan it was promised to be.

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OIA Chairman Abdulsalam Al Murshidi has termed the move in line with the Authority’s strategy to invest in advanced technologies across diverse sectors. XAI ranks among the top five in its field, having achieved milestones such as the creation of a massive data centre in the United States and the launch of the upgraded Grok 2 platform.

The venture, in the coming days, aims to lead AI technology by understanding and analysing real-time data, a feature lacking in many competing models.

“The platform provides advanced tools and comprehensive analytics to help users explore and improve AI models, processing a wide range of visual data, including documents, charts, graphs, and photographs,” Al Murshidi added.

Speaking on the occasion, Elon Musk, through video conference, said that the partnership with XAI would yield results in developing superintelligent AI capable of solving numerous problems. The tech boss, whose social media platform X played a crucial role in ensuring Republican Donald Trump’s win in the recently concluded US Presidential Elections, also revealed that the start-up was nearing completion of training the ‘Grok 3’ model, which will be the smartest AI model in the world.

The AI company recently raised USD 6 billion in funding, with some 97 investors donating a minimum of USD 77,593 (as per the media reports). The new cash brings xAI’s total raised to USD 12 billion, adding to the USD 6 billion tranche the start-up raised in 2024. CNBC reported in November that xAI was aiming for a USD 50 billion valuation, double its valuation as of six months ago.

According to the Financial Times, only investors who’d backed xAI in its previous fundraising round were permitted to participate in this one. Reportedly, investors who helped finance Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition were given access to up to 25% of xAI’s shares.

Elon Musk formed xAI in 2023. Soon after, the company released Grok, a flagship generative AI model that now powers a number of features on X, including a chatbot accessible to X Premium subscribers and free users in some regions.

He has projected Grok as an alternative to ChatGPT and other AI systems that the billionaire tech boss believes are “too woke.” He’s also referred to Grok as “maximally truth-seeking” and less biased than competing models. Grok has become an established feature in X (formerly Twitter). Due to an integration with the open image generator Flux, Grok can generate, and analyse images on X, apart from summarising news and trending events.

As per the reports, Grok will be further empowered to handle even more X functions in the future, from enhancing the micro-blogging platform’s search capabilities and account bios to helping with post analytics and reply settings.

As it takes on ChatGPT and other generative AI models, xAI launched an API in October 2024, allowing customers to build Grok into third-party apps, platforms, and services. There were reports about xAI preparing to release a standalone consumer app similar to OpenAI.

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