We Have a Soft Landing, and the Tesla Event Sucked

We have two topics to discuss today, and both bring me joy. The first is JPMorgan stating that the US has reached a soft landing. That we as a nation have made it to the promised land, and that Jerome Powell has secured his Nobel Prize in Economics. The second topic of discussion is another completely mid Tesla event. It makes me mad when investors react positively because, frankly, I hate Elon Musk. Any support for him makes me mad. He is just such a loser, and his intellect and ability are completely wasted with his Homelander-esque immaturity. First, let’s start with the soft landing, and then we can branch out into the Tesla event that sucked.

JPMorgan had a really strong report for their quarter. They raised their forecasts for earnings, and crucially, continued to make more than expected on lending, despite a 50 basis point cut from The Fed. “These results are consistent with a soft landing,” said their CFO, Jeremy Barnum “That’s pretty consistent with this kind of Goldilocks economic situation.” It’s not just JPMorgan continuing to do well, Wells Fargo reported spectacular earnings.

Now, this is not to say that everything was sunshine and rainbows. JPMorgan lost quite a bit more from its credit card division, which does show that the US consumer is experiencing more strain than they have previously. This obviously is not great, but I think signs like this mean that the Fed is cutting at the right time. The US consumer is starting to feel a little strain, but inflation is coming down exactly at the right time. If inflation was still in the low 3-s, and the US consumer was beginning to show major strains, I would be extremely worried.

Jerome Powell, if you want to give him credit, has done a really good job. The market is infuego, so everybody who has money in the market is making money, the consumer price index and inflation have fallen to pre-pandemic levels, and I would say people are pretty optimistic about the state of America. The overall picture is solid, and while I do not think that we necessarily have achieved the soft landing, I do think that we are making spectacular progress, and I would be willing to give an 85%+ chance that eight months from now, we will have achieved the soft landing.

Now, we get to the more fun part of today’s article.

Writing about Elon Musk is my guilty pleasure. It achieves very little, and I always come away with the same conclusion every time, stay as far away as possible from him. Nonetheless, I cannot stop doing it. In much the same fashion as usual, Elon Musk/Tesla did something stupid.

Tesla had their much-hyped, much-looked-forward-to Robotaxi Event, and it was lame. It was so lame that the stock fell 8%, knocking $50 billion-plus off their market cap. Elon arrived at the event, corny as usual, in their driverless car, Tesla showed off their Robovan, Tesla’s robot, Optimus, milled about, and Elon talked about a new charging method. This may sound like sort of a cool event, and to be honest, despite deeply disliking him, this does sound kind of cool. HOWEVER, there was virtually no substance. Tesla is worth three times that of Toyota, and they are worth the market cap of the second through eighth car companies combined, so they needed something genuine to back up all this supposed value. There was no substance.

The event was “focused on branding and marketing Tesla’s vision,” as an analyst put it. The most concrete detail was that the Cybercab would possibly come out in 2026, which frankly, is never happening. The Cybercab, which is an admittedly cool name, will be out in early 2028 at the earliest, in my opinion. Elon also promised that the car would cost under $30,000, which is completely unrealistic. That will never, never happen.

There was no mention of Tesla’s ridesharing app, which they had mentioned at their last event in the Spring, there was no discussion of any concrete details in terms of market share or revenue projections, and in general, the event was disappointing. What else are you supposed to expect by now though?

Elon Musk is a man who cannot run companies. He is truly great at leveraging his assets and connections when building a company up, I will give him that. Starlink, Tesla, and SpaceX are impressive companies that he has made, but this guy cannot maintain and innovate once he has reached the peak. This is a guy in his mid-50s, who is doing too many drugs, spreading his efforts too thin, and who is too mentally weak to resist radicalization. He has completely lost the plot, and as I say always, you need to stay away from this guy with your money.