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With layoffs in the Supercharging division, Elon Musk is beating Tesla’s past into a pulp.
Chaos at Tesla is nothing new. But the company now appears to be going through something of an identity crisis, with its future at war with its past.
Let’s just recap the past few weeks: First, Tesla released first-quarter delivery numbers that came up well short of even analysts’ most cynical predictions, followed by first-quarter earnings that were, in a word, poor. In between those two events, Reuters reported that Tesla had canceled a long-promised sub-$30,000 electric vehicle (a report CEO Elon Musk denied ... sorta), and the company laid off more than 10% of its workforce.
All of which brings us to today and reports of further layoffs at Tesla, this time in the company’s Supercharging division. To just about everyone who follows the company, this was shocking news. Tesla’s Supercharging network isn’t just a competitive advantage, it’s the de facto national standard for EVs in the United States. Major automakers — Ford, Toyota, General Motors — and EV startups like Rivian have signed deals with Tesla to use its charger design, known as the North American Charging Standard and designed their new vehicles (or sent adapters) so their drivers can access the network.
The Supercharging network was, however, consistent with what might now be called the “old” model of Tesla — a company that tried to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” as the company’s mission statement put it, by getting as many electric cars (ideally, but not solely, its own) on the road as possible. But that model seems to be on its way out. As Musk told investors on the earnings call, Tesla should be thought of “thought of as an AI or robotics company” — not, anymore, as merely a car company.
Those Supercharging partnerships weren’t an act of charity. BloombergNEF, Bloomberg’s in-house energy research group, estimated that Tesla’s charging business could generate three-quarters of a billion dollars of profits by 2030. While it doesn’t seem like Tesla is going to rip the Superchargers from the ground, a now-former Tesla employee said on X that “further improvements to standards and engagements across the industry will suffer.” Already the company has pulled out of four planned new Supercharger locations in New York, according to Electrek.
“Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations,” Musk tweeted (after the market close) Tuesday afternoon.
If the future of the growth of the Supercharging network is in doubt, Tesla’s expansion of its self-driving efforts (which are still well short of rivals like Waymo’s) is full steam ahead. Close Tesla-watchers have speculated that the future of Tesla’s charging infrastructure will change as the company advances further towards truly autonomous driving and its much-heralded “robotaxi,” which Musk has promised to reveal by August 8. All of this seems to have pleased investors, who responded to the announcement by sending Tesla shares up 10% in aftermarket trading. That share price jumped again Monday, after news that Musk had paved the way for Full Self-Driving to be deployed in China.
One would think that reports of Tesla further tightening its focus on artificial intelligence and automation would have delighted these investors. The company's burned some $2.5 billion of cash in the first quarter thanks to both its extravagant spending on developing its AI capabilities and the fact that it made too many cars for what turned out to be a soft electric vehicle market. “Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction,” Musk wrote in an email to staff about the Supercharging layoffs, according to The Information. “While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.” And yet shares were down 5.5% by the time the market closed on Tuesday.
The investment community can’t seem to decide whether it wants Tesla to be the type of company that will devote its resources to a mass market car or throw them at a much more exciting — though by no means assured — autonomous driving play.
In its earnings presentation, Tesla said that new models were coming, but not on a whole new platform, which meant that there would less capital expenditure for a new production line. For some analysts, it was all they needed to hear, Morningstar's Seth Goldstein wrote a note titled “Our Long-Term Growth Thesis Is Confirmed as Affordable Vehicle Still in Development.”
And some in the the analyst community were also jazzed by Musk's China jaunt. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, a longtime Tesla bull, hailed the trip, writing “whether Tesla’s CEO is sleeping on a floor or on a plane ... the message is clear: he’s back.” Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, another Tesla optimist, said approval for FSD in China was “a watershed moment for the Tesla story.” As recently as Tuesday morning, Axios cautiously declared that the company “may be steadily regaining investor confidence after a rough patch.”
Tesla is also working on wireless charging, as was confirmed last year in a video hosted by, of all people, Jay Leno. Tesla’s design chief, Franz von Holzhausen, told Leno that “we are working on inductive charging. You don’t even need to plug anything in at that point. You just drive over the pad in your garage and you start charging.” It’s obvious why this type of charging would be more conducive to autonomous driving than the company’s exist Superchargers, as all they would require is driving over them.
Even the multiple rounds of deep layoffs are a sign to some Tesla optimists that Musk’s attention is now fully devoted to the company. When asked by an analyst on the earnings call to “talk about where your heart is at in terms of your interests,” Musk said that Tesla “constitutes a majority of my work time,” adding: I'm going to make sure Tesla is quite prosperous.”
If investors are sending mixed messages, Musk, certainly, has made his preference clear. Tesla will become a autonomous driving company or die trying — at least until he changes his mind again.
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On once-in-a-lifetime bad weather, Trump tariffs, and Tesla’s shares
Current conditions: A heat wave triggered power cuts in Kuwait as electricity demand exceeded capacity • Australia just rounded out its 12 hottest months ever recorded • Temperatures in New York City are forecast to reach 73 degrees Fahrenheit today, nearly 30 degrees higher than yesterday.
Powerful thunderstorms are tearing across the Midwest and Mississippi Valley in what the National Weather Service has warned will be a “multi-day catastrophic and potentially historic” event. Destructive and deadly tornadoes were reported overnight in multiple states including Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Indiana. The system also brought a threat of once-in-a-lifetime flooding caused by heavy rainfall. More than 1.4 million people were under flash flood warnings. “This isn’t routine,” the National Weather Service in Memphis, Tennessee, warned. “This is a rare, high-impact, and potentially devastating event.” The storm is expected to stall over the region and continue to dump heavy rain – up to 12 inches in some areas – through the rest of the week.
NOAA
As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange has reported, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is highly confident in the attributable influence of climate change on extreme rain, and “everything we know about thunderstorms suggests that a warmer, wetter atmosphere will mean severe convection storms become both more frequent and more intense.” These historic spring storms are hitting as the Trump administration slashes jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, hampering the government’s ability to effectively forecast and respond to weather emergencies.
President Trump on Wednesday announced sweeping 10% baseline tariffs on imported goods, as well as higher “reciprocal” tariffs against about 60 countries that impose charges and other trade barriers on U.S. products. China will be hit with a 34% reciprocal fee, on top of Trump’s existing 20% tariffs on Chinese goods, bringing the overall rate to 54%. The European Union will be hit with 20% reciprocal tariffs; India 26%; South Korea 25%; Japan 24%, and Vietnam 46%. The full list is here.
The newly announced levies exclude imported energy commodities such as crude oil, natural gas, and refined products. “The exemption will come as a relief to the U.S. oil industry, which had expressed concerns that new levies could disrupt flows and raise costs,” Reutersnoted. Meanwhile, high reciprocal tariffs on goods from southeast Asia mean higher prices for solar panels, “another potential dent to the clean energy buildout by a president keen to boost fossil fuels,” according toBloomberg. Trump’s 25% tariffs on auto imports also come into effect today, a move expected to hike car prices for American consumers.
Tesla’s shares have been on a rollercoaster ride over the last 24 hours, falling by about 6% on weak quarterly EV sales, then rebounding on a report that CEO Elon Musk plans to step away from his role within the Trump administration. The electric vehicle company delivered 336,681 cars in the first quarter of 2025, far below analyst expectations of 390,000. The results are the company’s weakest since 2022, a further sign of curdling consumer sentiment as Musk spearheads unpopular mass firings across multiple federal agencies as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. On Wednesday, Politicoreported that President Trump has been telling his Cabinet that Musk will soon “return to his businesses and take on a supporting role” within the administration. The White House denied the report, but the rumor seemed to buoy Tesla’s stock market position, with pre-market shares up about 5% on Thursday.
A group of 16 Republican state legislators on Wednesday sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright asking him not to pull the plug on funding for seven nascent hydrogen hubs dotted across the country. The Department of Energy is reportedly thinking about cutting $4 billion in funding for the hubs, which were approved under the Biden administration in an effort to turn hydrogen into a viable fossil fuel alternative. The GOP lawmakers urge Wright to preserve funding for the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub in particular, pitching it as a boost to manufacturing, energy independence, and domestic economic growth. Senate Democrats sent their own letter to Wright on Wednesday slamming the contemplated hydrogen hub defunding. “Indiscriminately canceling program funding and executed contracts, and refusing to execute on the funding directives Congress enacted, neither honors existing agreements nor is consistent with the spending laws that have appropriated funding for specific purposes,” the Democrats wrote.
Global coal-fired power capacity additions in 2024 were at their lowest level in 20 years, according to a new report from the Global Energy Monitor. The drop signals an ongoing slowdown in coal use as renewables come online, but the fleet is still growing, especially in China and India. China’s 30.5 gigawatts of newly commissioned coal power capacity last year accounted for 70% of the global total. Meanwhile, India recorded more new coal proposals than ever before. Coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels, accounting for 40% to 45% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.
Global Energy Monitor
Montana’s Colstrip power plant, which produces more fine particulate emissions than any other coal-burning plant in the United States, has asked President Trump for an exemption from the Environmental Protection Agency’s air pollution standards.
While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.
It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.
Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.
But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.
Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.
“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”
While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.
The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”
Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.
Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”
Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”
Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)
But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”
The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.