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Like a superball on steroids bouncing from one shiny object to a different, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has left the new mess of Cybertruck behind to launch a brand new line of in-house photo voltaic panels. Doesn’t he have a enterprise to run? The corporate’s EV gross sales are circling the drain month after month, and now indicators have emerged that the corporate’s widespread Tesla Powerwall dwelling vitality storage product is following shut behind.
Powerwall Is Shedding Its Grip
To be clear, Powerwall is a well-regarded dwelling vitality storage system, and Tesla has the numbers to show it. The corporate celebrated its 1 millionth Powerwall sale globally on September 8, 2025, a determine that covers markets in 30 international locations, together with the US, after all.
“Since its launch in 2015, Powerwall has reworked how households generate, retailer and use clear vitality. A decade later, the affect is international and measurable,” Tesla enthused in a self-published announcement.
That’s all properly and good, however a snapshot of gross sales doesn’t point out any route, up or down. Down it’s in accordance the funding financial institution ROTH Capital Companions. In an business word cited by PV Journal’s Vitality Storage department on April 1, 2025, Roth said that it “sees draw back dangers for the Powerwall 3 dwelling battery and Tesla inverter, based mostly on discussions with its residential photo voltaic installer contacts.”
“One installer instructed Roth they had been, ‘anticipating Tesla to fall to twenty% of battery gross sales in [the] subsequent six months. We’re getting all forms of nasty suggestions if we even put pics of Powerwalls on-line. So we scrubbed all references and pics from all adverts and on-line presence,’” Vitality Storage elaborated.
Nasty suggestions? Gosh, no person would have ever anticipated nasty suggestions when a Tesla product goes on sale. Is there one thing unsuitable with the model? Like, possibly a model repute disaster?
Roth’s evaluation is sort of a turnaround from two years in the past. One indication of Tesla’s former dominance is obtainable by the net photo voltaic and storage market Vitality Sage. They ran the numbers for 2024 in a latest report and calculated that requests for Powerwall quotes took 63% share, with seemingly nowhere to go however up.
That’s seemingly as in possibly, possibly not. Vitality Sage launched its 2024 calculations in April of 2025, and clouds had been already on the horizon. “Tesla’s rising dominance in each storage and inverter quotes displays the market’s urge for food for built-in, all-in-one options,” defined Vitality Sage President and COO Charlie Hadlow. “However as considerations round availability and model sentiment floor, we’re watching carefully to see whether or not this momentum holds or if client backlash will start to shift installer and house owner preferences.”
SpaceX Lastly Limits Russian Skill to Kill Ukrainians
Tesla shouldn’t be the one considered one of Musk’s ventures that has raised eyebrows, to say the least. The most recent eye-brow elevating came about earlier this week, when reviews surfaced that the Starlink satellite tv for pc department of his SpaceX enterprise has “minimize off” Russia from its terminals in Ukraine. As reported by CNN and others, the method is ongoing and laborious, which raises questions. Primary query: why’d it take so lengthy?
Ukrainian cities have been withering below a murderous barrage of Russian drone assaults for months, aided by drone-mounted Starlink methods enabling them to bypass Ukraine’s jamming methods. Such use is unauthorized, however that’s no excuse. Russia has obtained Starlink terminals and is utilizing them to homicide individuals, unauthorized or not. Maybe Starlink’s appreciable cornucopia of expertise might have utilized a extra responsive kill swap whereas the terminals had been in growth, however that’s water below the bridge now.
Birds Of A Feather
Musk’s function as a number one aider and abettor of US President Trump’s authoritarian fantasy has been extensively reported right here elsewhere, so by no means thoughts all that. Considerably lesser recognized exterior of media circles is his function in reworking the social media platform Twitter into the digital poop-flinging hate machine X, prompting hundreds of thousands of customers to flee to newcomer BlueSky and elsewhere.
The X taint has additionally crept into Musk’s xAI synthetic intelligence enterprise, now notorious for creating Grok, the chatbot that gleefully permits X customers to undress non-consenting individuals — primarily ladies, however together with 1000’s of youngsters.
Let’s not personalize Grok, although. The fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the proprietor of X, who shouldn’t be a chatbot. Elon Musk, an precise individual with precise human company, might select decency over an ethical free-for-all, however chooses not.
Now the chickens are coming dwelling to roost. Final week, BBC Information was amongst these reporting that the cyber-crime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s workplace raided the workplaces of X, “as a part of an investigation into suspected offences together with illegal knowledge extraction and complicity within the possession of kid sexual abuse materials.” It’s the newest and most dramatic step in an effort that started final summer season. The prosecutor has summoned Musk and former X chief Linda Yaccarino to seem in court docket in April.
Good luck with that. Neither one is prone to present up within the UK both, if and when an identical investigation launched by the UK’s Info Commissioner’s Workplace results in the identical conclusion.
Has Tesla Change into Boring? Proper Solutions Solely
The Boring Firm is one other considered one of Musk’s ventures that provided the promise of a leading edge resolution to the age-old drawback of how one can dig a tunnel underground. Musk launched The Boring Firm in 2016, at a time when superior drilling rigs had been rising into widespread use, so it’s not clear why transportation planners in want of a tunnel would faucet an untried startup as an alternative of a dependable tunnel-digging skilled. Maybe the provide of a free tunnel had one thing to do with it.
Be that as it might, regrets are starting to floor. Ten years after The Boring Firm launched, the one undertaking in use is a “vacationer attraction” in Las Vegas. With that in its pocket, the corporate one way or the other satisfied Nashville transportation planners to let it construct a rather more formidable undertaking linking its airport to the town middle, at Boring’s personal expense.
On model for Musk, the brand new “Music Metropolis Loop” shouldn’t be a transit hall as in one thing that can get individuals out of their vehicles and into busses, trains, or vans. It’s going to merely promote extra Tesla EVs. As reported by Bloomberg Information final April, the concept is to ship chauffeured passenger vehicles by the tunnel, presumably unique to Tesla. The corporate definitely has loads of Cybertrucks mendacity round, ready to be put into good use.
The “Music Metropolis Loop” undertaking already has some native officers breaking out in hives, and tunneling consultants are beside themselves with alarm over the prospect of tunneling by the “difficult, sinkhole-prone limestone bedrock of center Tennessee,” as Bloomberg describes it.
“The development dangers vary from collapsing the bottom beneath a closely traveled state freeway, to knocking out utility connections, to flooding the tunnel with groundwater,” Bloomberg elaborates.
What else might presumably go unsuitable? When you have any ideas about that, drop a word within the remark thread.
Picture: Tesla Cybertruck at Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California (credit score: Kyle Subject).
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