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The effort to measure companies’ carbon footprints is remarkably imprecise — and suddenly more important than ever.
Large companies generate a gargantuan amount of carbon-dioxide pollution.
Take the big-box retailer Costco. During the financial year 2020, it emitted 144.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — a number on par with the Philippines’ annual emissions. Nike pumped out the equivalent of 11 million metric tons of carbon during the same period, a footprint roughly equal to Zimbabwe’s. Apple, meanwhile, was somewhere on the order of Estonia.
You’ve probably seen data like this before. But here’s a question: How do companies actually arrive at these numbers? How did Costco know its carbon footprint in 2020? Carbon dioxide and other climate-warming gases are invisible, potent even in trace amounts, and constantly absorbed and produced by hundreds of billions of different organisms and chemicals around the world. Costco alone directly or indirectly choreographs the actions of millions of people and things: sailors and longshoremen, factory workers and cotton farmers, employees coming in for their shift and marketing managers spending down an advertising budget.
How could a company like that possibly know its carbon footprint?
Here’s the sorry answer: Most companies don’t. They estimate.
Those estimates are suddenly looking more important. New laws and a proposal from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could soon require that companies treat this data with the same seriousness that they devote to their accounting books. Companies now need their corporate climate data to do something that it was never meant to do: help them make decisions.
So the race is on to help companies estimate better. On Wednesday, Watershed, a startup that helps companies run their climate programs, bought VitalMetrics, a climate-data mainstay that owns and manages one of the most important tools that companies use to estimate their carbon footprints.
That tool, called the Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive, or CEDA, provides what’s known as carbon-intensity data for hundreds of products as made in more than 140 countries. It is one of several tools that has been used to advise Microsoft, Kellogg’s, and Virgin Atlantic since Sangwon Suh, an industrial-ecology professor and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change author, founded VitalMetrics in 2005.
Watershed’s acquisition of VitalMetrics signals that corporate climate data is entering a new stage, Taylor Francis, one of the company’s cofounders, told me. Watershed, at least, is a different kind of company than the climate bean counters of yore: Founded by former employees of the payments behemoth Stripe, it has raised $84 million from the venture-capital firms Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, as well as the billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs.
“The traditional corporate climate complex was basically designed for a world of numbers in the corporate social responsibility report, and a pledge, and a press release,” he said. ”We’re shifting to the new world of numbers in a 10-K,” the annual financial report that public companies must file with the government, “and a planet running out of time.”
I will admit I had it all wrong. I had assumed that because corporate carbon footprints sounded precise and vaguely science-adjacent, they were produced by something like a scientific methodology themselves. I imagined a company’s employees — or at least their consultants — collecting emissions data smokestack by smokestack, pacing around factories while studying air-quality monitors, and doing careful math somewhere in the vicinity of a bunsen burner or two. (I believed this, I should add, despite knowing that many corporate climate reports contain glaring arithmetic errors and sometimes literally do not add up.)
That sort of methodology is the “platonic ideal of carbon accounting,” Francis, the Watershed cofounder, told me. In a perfect world, a company would have measured the per-ton emissions of each of its processes, and it would know these for each of its suppliers down to the raw material.
Yet this is still a ways off for most companies. Instead, the bulk of carbon accounting today now happens in spreadsheets, and it uses dollars, not tons, as an input. Each consumer good or raw commodity aligns to a “factor,” a multiplier that says that for every dollar spent on, say, glass or aluminum, a certain amount of carbon is emitted. A climate team inputs the dollar amount, multiplies it by the factor, and arrives at a result: a company’s annual carbon footprint.
Until now, Watershed and other firms have often calculated corporate climate emissions by using a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-made database called the Environmentally Extended Input-Output, or EEIO, model, Francis said. “You start with very coarse input data like, we spent $100 million on marketing. So you go to the old EEIO database, and the EEIO says that in the U.S. 10 years ago, the carbon emissions per dollar of marketing spend was X, and you multiply that to get your emissions number.”
“I think that gets you into the right order of magnitude,” he said, but it was messy. The EEIO data is roughly a decade out of date, meaning it overstates climate pollution from the power grid and understates the role of inflation.
VitalMetrics’ CEDA database, on the other hand, is updated every year. It contains carbon-intensity factors for more than 300 products and — most important — it varies these factors based on the country of origin. Going forward, Watershed will calculate corporate emissions data using these CEDA estimates.
This kind of data-gathering isn’t fine-tuned enough for companies to actually make better decisions with their data, Madison Condon, a law professor at Boston University who has criticized the reigning approach, told me. Under the current approach, a company can improve their carbon-accounting data only by shifting production to countries with lower emissions factors. It doesn’t get credit for, say, installing technologies at its existing factories that lower emissions.
That is unsustainable because corporate carbon accounting is becoming important to governments around the world. The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed requiring publicly traded companies to disclose carbon data and major climate-related risks. Even if that rule is swatted away by the Supreme Court, the European Union will soon require tens of thousands of companies to disclose sustainability and emissions data; these rules could apply to more than 10,000 foreign companies, including many mainstream American brands. California could soon pass its own law mandating that companies produce carbon-accounting data.
Even apart from those disclosure requirements, carbon-footprint requirements are now written into laws. Some of the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies will pay out only if a product’s carbon intensity is below a certain threshold.
Eventually, Watershed hopes to produce a hybrid tool that can use dollar-based production factors, tonnage estimates, and technology-based improvements together, Francis told me. More broadly, Watershed’s acquisition of Vitalmetrics — not to mention Watershed itself — is a gamble about how the climate economy will eventually work.
“Five years from now, the disclosure piece is just part of the water. No one talks or writes about it because it is an expected part of doing business for every company. And it’s relatively low friction. It’s a part of your annual close, your quarterly close,” Francis told me. “We don’t really talk about climate as a political issue because businesses don't think of climate as a political issue because they see it as, you know, the biggest growth sector of the decade.”
Of course, if that’s true, then companies may not need a startup like Watershed to do their climate counting for them. Bog-standard corporate accountants, like KPMG or Deloitte, will do the task just fine.
But Watershed is betting that climate accounting will remain both more technical and more central to a company’s employee and investor relationships than, say, its power bill. Just as companies use Salesforce specifically to manage customer relationships, or Justworks to manage payroll and benefits, Watershed hopes they will need a single place to manage all their climate data — a single source of emissions truth. It’s investing in its database to try to make that bet payoff.
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Rob talks with Sarah Kapnick about our new era of energy insecurity.
We live in a new energy era — one in which the inputs and technologies key to clean electricity production are at the heart of international politics. What will that mean for decarbonization? And how should climate tech companies prepare?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob chats about those questions and more with Dr. Sarah Kapnick. She is the Global Head of Climate Advisory at J.P. Morgan, where she advises the bank's clients on climate, energy, biodiversity and sustainability topics. She was the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2022 to 2024, and was previously a research scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: When companies come to you looking for help navigating this particular moment — where federal policy is quite up in the air, where rates are coming down but kind of high, AI capex is surging — what advice do you give them for navigating this moment?
Sarah Kapnick: The advice that I give them is looking to some of those things that strategically are likely to have more consistency over time, and that they’re looking for those places of more consistency, and that they feel that they can invest in, that they will have support ongoing — particularly if it’s a project that lasts beyond administrations.
They’re really concerned with what they think is going to last. And then for the stuff that doesn’t, that there may be more volatility, they want to identify that volatility, and they want to think through, okay, how can I take opportunity now if I think there’s a small window for it? Or how do I plan for taking opportunity when the opportunity presents itself down the line?
And so, it’s a mixture of long-term planning and thinking through, strategically, where the world is headed and where they can fit in over time, yet also taking opportunities that either present themselves now or they have conviction that will present themselves soon, and then being ready to be the first when that opportunity presents themselves so that they can run with it.
Mentioned:
The New Map of Energy and Geopolitics
Previously on Shift Key: How China’s Industrial Policy Really Works
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Thea Riofrancos, a professor of political science at Providence College, discusses her new book, Extraction, and the global consequences of our growing need for lithium.
We cannot hope to halt or even slow dangerous climate change without remaking our energy systems, and we cannot remake our energy systems without environmentally damaging projects like lithium mines.
This is the perplexing paradox at the heart of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, a new book by political scientist and climate activist Thea Riofrancos, coming out September 23, from Norton.
Riofrancos, a professor at Providence College, has spent much of her academic career studying mining and oil production in Latin America. In Extraction, she traces the lithium boom of the past five or so years, as the aims of the Global North and Global South began to resemble an inverted mirror. Countries in the latter group that have long been sites of mineral extraction — with little economic benefit — are now seeking to manufacture the more lucrative high tech products further down the supply chain. Meanwhile, after decades of offshoring, Europe and the U.S. suddenly want to bring mining back home in pursuit of “green dominance,” she writes. All of this is happening against the backdrop of China’s geopolitical rise, the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, and worsening effects of climate change.
The book also spends time with the indigenous communities and environmental defenders fighting the lithium industry in Chile, Spain, and the American West. Riofrancos doesn’t shy away from difficult questions, such as whether there is such a thing as a “right place” for a lithium mine. But she’s optimistic that there’s a better path than the one we’re on now. “The energy transition has presented a fork in the road for the entire economic and social order,” she writes. Down one road, we entrench existing power structures. Down the other, we capitalize on the energy transition to create a more just society.
Green capitalism, Riofrancos argues, is an oxymoron. While we can’t avoid extraction, we can reduce the need for it, for example through better public transit, smaller EV batteries, and minerals recycling, she concludes.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Are there notable differences between lithium and the extraction of other natural resources?
Yes and no. Whether it’s copper or lithium or gold or cobalt — and even I would include hydrocarbons in this, to a degree — whether we look at the economics, the way that they have boom and bust cycles, the fact that governments, even neoliberal governments, tend to take a pretty concerted interest in extractive sectors within their jurisdiction, environmental concerns and direct forms of violence that are meted out at environmental defenders — no, it’s not different. Which should raise alarm bells because a lot of those dynamics are not positive.
What’s different, though, is that precisely because mining companies and host governments claim that the extraction of lithium is urgent and essential for the energy transition, what ends up happening is that these big claims are made — like, “We are now a sustainable mining company because we’re extracting lithium,” or, “This is part of our green industrial policy.” This toxic and dirty extractive sector is now greenified because of its role in the energy transition. On the one hand, that’s greenwashing. On the other, it’s an opening. When companies make those claims, it’s something to hold them accountable to.
I was somewhat surprised by the issues you describe with the way lithium mining is regulated in Chile — the companies do their own environmental monitoring, there’s a lack of transparent data, the brine they mine in the Atacama is not considered water under Chilean law, etc. It seems like the state could change a lot of this. Why hasn’t it?
States in the Global South, although not exclusively there, lack geological and hydrological data about their own territory. In ways that we can trace to colonialism and neocolonialism in terms of who controls the territory and who has knowledge about it, the actors that have the basic data about deposits, how they interact with water sources, all of that, are the companies. And so to even regulate these companies better, you first need to set up independent and objective sources of data collection — and that’s something that any state might struggle with, but especially in the Global South, given the kind of legacy under which these companies operated, with little oversight of the state.
The [U.S. Geological Survey] doesn’t exist everywhere in the world. Not every state has a surveying agency with that level of expertise. And even in the U.S., the USGS actually has quite partial knowledge of what’s here. And there are many examples of companies in the U.S. hiding proprietary knowledge from the government.
What about after Gabriel Boric became president in Chile, in 2022, and created this new public-private partnership between the mining giant SQM and the government. Wouldn’t that have given the Chilean government more visibility and more control?
I think in some ways he’s made strides. He has set aside many salt flats for conservation. A right wing government wouldn’t have done that. He also is inserting the state, via the state-owned copper company Codelco, entering into public-private partnerships with companies, including SQM. If all goes according to plan, that will help the state learn more about lithium extraction, or maybe even set up their own lithium company, which was the initial goal of this government.
I’ll just point out two things to show how this is difficult. According to indigenous communities and environmental activists that have been organizing around this, they were excluded from the initial moment where that memorandum of understanding between SQM and Codelco was signed, and so they felt like it was a reenactment of historic injuries by a government that they had cautiously supported or thought would be different. Now they’re back at the negotiating table and indigenous communities are being consulted again. But there was a critical moment where the MOU was signed and indigenous communities were not present, and actually learned about it from the media. These historic patterns are really hard to change because companies hold a lot of power.
Even a progressive government is balancing indigenous rights and ecological protection with a desire to not lose market share. Argentina is starting to catch up with Chile — is Chile still going to remain the number two producer globally? Does it need to change its regulations to attract more companies? This is the kind of double bind that Global South societies find themselves in.
You write about this tension between expanding extraction and minimizing environmental and community impacts. Do you believe there are actually ways to minimize these impacts?
Absolutely. You can do anything better. I believe in human ingenuity and science and figuring out how to improve processes. There are ways to extract using less water, using a smaller land footprint, using fewer polluting energy sources. One of the reasons emissions from mining are not insignificant is a lot of it happens off-grid, and for now, that means diesel generators or gasoline-powered mining vehicles, let alone the cargo ships that are shipping the stuff around the world. So we could think about localizing or regionalizing supply chains.
The question is, how do we get companies to change their practices? They might do it if a regulator tells them they have to, if civil society puts so much pressure on them that it just becomes reputational harm if they don’t do it, if perhaps activist shareholders ask or tell the company to change its practices.
But the company, if it’s a shareholder-owned company, has one main obligation, which is to maximize the value of their shares. Changing your technological setup and your physical plant arrangement is costly, and it may not immediately produce more profits. And so you have to think about, what are the crude economic dynamics that keep companies on a particular technological path in terms of how they do their physical operations? And then think, using the power of policy, of economics, of consumer pressure, whatever it is, how to get them to make a decision that may not be in their immediate shareholder interest.
One theme in the book is that countries in the West are making a case for domestic mining by arguing that it will be greener than mining in the Global South. Is there any evidence for that? What’s the logic?
This was honestly one of the most surprising things in my research as someone that primarily has worked in Latin America. I heard some rumblings — and this was in 2019, before the pandemic — of EU officials wanting to onshore. It confused me because mining is toxic, it’s low value-added. And what I learned is that it had come to a point where Western policymakers saw the whole supply chain as a domain of geostrategic power.
And then, probably some people really feel this way, and other people are using it as nice rhetoric, but Western policymakers also started to come to the idea that it would be more “responsible” to mine in the West. This is in no small part due to the fact that the mining industry has deservedly gotten a lot of negative coverage for, in some cases, outright killing people. In other cases, you have an avalanche that destroys a village. You have water contamination. There are issues around forced labor, how the Uyghurs are treated in China. So there was a lot of bad press on the industry. I think they thought, We can solve a few problems at once. We can increase our geopolitical power by having domestic supply chains for the most important 21st century technologies, and we can also make the claim to consumers, regulators, and the media that this is better if you care about responsible, ethical, green mining.
The reality is, of course, more complex than that. Our mining law in the U.S. that governs hard rock mining on public lands is from 1872, which tells you everything you need to know. It’s extremely out of date with the modern mining industry and the scale of harm that mining poses, and it also literally was implemented during the westward expansion and dispossession of indigenous peoples to serve that end.
In fact, countries in Latin America tend to have better — on paper — governance of mining than the U.S., though they may not have the state capacity to always implement it. In Europe, there’s even more dependence on imports. A lot of the European countries have almost no regulations on the books for basic things like, how do you deal with mining waste? And so in the Global North, what we have to fight for is a mining governance regime and a set of legal codes and regulations that is up to date.
This book is pretty critical of the way communities have been treated in the lithium boom so far. What are some of the ways community engagement can be done better?
We see better outcomes when communities are organized, when they actually identify as a community, have some meetings, maybe set up a group to coordinate themselves. Like, who’s going to go to the public hearing? Who’s going to contact a lawyer? Who’s going to contact the water expert? Because communities need a lot of outside help. The companies have lawyers, they have experts, they probably have friends in government. A lot of lawyers and experts that companies hire used to work for the government, and they know these processes inside out, and so the community needs to be as or more organized. They’re already on the losing end of a power imbalance.
In a way, none of this is about what companies can do, because I presume that companies are responsive to pressure. Multinationals, insofar as they’re shareholder-owned, their main goal is to maximize value, and that’s it. It’s that simple. And so in order to get them to behave differently towards communities, outside forces need to take a role. The first outside force is the community itself. A second is, how involved is the government? And how objective and public-serving is the government? Where governments take a more objective role and help protect the baseline rights of communities, make sure that those rights are not being violated by companies, help distribute more culturally sensitive and appropriate information about the mine, we could get better outcomes that way.
You had activists tell you, “I support lithium mining, but this is the wrong place for it.” Do you think there is such a thing as a right or wrong place, or even a better or worse place for a lithium mine?
This was honestly the most vexing question that I had to contemplate in my own research. I often think about how these communities are called NIMBYs, and there’s two reasons that’s a really inappropriate term. First of all, the “my backyard” — not every person has private property, or that’s not their stake in the matter. It’s not about, this is going to decrease the value of my property, or this is going to disrupt my ocean view. It’s about the land that they have a deep relationship with.
The second thing is, I don’t think most of the people that call these communities NIMBYs would really want to live next to a large-scale mine, either. They are just enormous scars on the landscape. I understand that they are necessary, to some degree, to provide for the technologies that we enjoy, including life-saving and planet-saving technology. Even in my perfect world, where everyone is riding an electric bus or bike or walking around, some lithium is still needed in the near term. In the future, we could conceivably enter into a circular economy, but we don’t have the level of feedstock for that yet.
So the question remains, where are we going to mine? I don’t have an easy answer to that, but I will say that in the entire process of land use planning, the corporation is the protagonist. In the U.S., a place that I think most political scientists would say has more state capacity than a country in Africa or Latin America, we do not use that capacity to proactively plan land use. I think it would make sense to really rearrange the process such that governments plan with substantial community input, and then corporations, if we want to have private corporations doing this, get the ability to compete for contracts. I know that would be a big lift to change that policy dynamic, but I think we need to have the conversation.
You write a lot about this difficult dance between supply and demand in mining. What are you seeing right now in how the lithium industry is reacting to Trump’s dismantling of EV policy?
With Trump, it’s particularly interesting and bizarre because on the list of fast-tracked mines, you have several lithium mines and some lithium processing along with other “critical minerals.” He really wants to expand mining, to the point that the Pentagon is now the No. 1 investor in our only rare earth mine in the U.S. They bought 15% of MP Materials’ shares, the company that manages the Mountain Pass mine. And so Trump is fast-tracking mines, he’s sending huge amounts of public money to financially underwrite these mining companies. But yet, he’s destroying demand for rare earths. He loves to talk about AI and military tech — that’s a small slice of demand. It’s really about wind turbines and electric vehicle motors. That’s really where the demand is. With lithium, it’s even clearer.
That all seems like a recipe for prices to crash.
The thing is, they already had crashed because of a supply glut. But at the same time, the market will likely pick back up because we’re seeing so much action elsewhere in the world. It’s very easy to focus on the U.S., especially because the U.S. government is such a basket case right now. But if we zoom out, there’s been a bunch of recent reporting, including in Heatmap, on how rapidly the energy transition is going in other parts of the world, with China playing an enormous role not only on the trade side, but also in foreign direct investment, in setting up solar and EV manufacturing hubs in the Global South.
And so I think that Trump can dismantle EVs as much as he wants in the U.S., and that’s a shame given that transportation is our most polluting sector. I mean, that pains me as a climate activist. But the world is bigger than the U.S.
The last thing I’ll say — and this is another interesting contradiction — in the Big, Beautiful Bill, it’s not across the board against all green technologies. There’s this distinction that conservatives increasingly like to make called “clean, firm power.” So they put nuclear, geothermal, and battery storage in that. Now, battery storage, what is that made of? Lithium. So in a weird way, they like lithium mining, they like batteries for storage, they just don’t like electric vehicles. We’re still going to have lithium demand in the U.S., and lots of individual people will still buy electric cars, and blue states will still procure them for their public fleets. He’s not going to kill the market. He’s just going to slow its growth, primarily by making it less affordable for working and middle class people.
The CEO’s $1 billion share buy changes nothing — except in the eyes of his shareholders.
Elon Musk’s signature talent, the thing that made him the world’s richest man, has long been his ability to make Tesla’s stock price soar. It’s a superpower that manifests through a combination of financial lever-pulling and promises of world-changing innovations to come. For this reason, it leads to glaring disconnects such as Tesla having become the world’s most valuable automaker despite selling only a 10th as many vehicles as a true manufacturing superpower like Toyota.
By that yardstick, this week’s news might be his biggest achievement yet.
On Monday, headlines declared that Tesla has turned itself around. Its share price has rebounded after taking a nosedive early this year. In this case, the bullish stock market performance is divorced not only from the reality of the company’s electric car sales, but also from, well, everything else that’s happened lately.
Remember the protests? Remember the celebrities performatively selling their Teslas? The “I bought this before Elon went crazy” bumper stickers? With Musk having abandoned his dalliance with the Trump administration, other crises have taken over the spotlight. Even so, the echo of discontent is visible. Protests dogged the opening of the new Tesla Diner charging station here in Los Angeles, and plenty of Teslas in my neighborhood still have the apology stuck to their bumpers.
Most crucially for Tesla, the anger did real damage to its bottom line. The brand’s sales around the world fell dramatically as public disgust with Musk rose and EV shoppers ran toward a growing number of competitors, especially those from China. But even in the U.S., where cheap Chinese EVs are not an option, Tesla’s dominance has shrunk. In August 2025, the company’s share of the U.S. EV market fell to 38%. That was Tesla’s lowest figure since 2017, before the Model 3 or Model Y rolled off assembly lines. It was enough to inspire another round of speculation over whether the company might be better off freeing itself from the PR albatross that is Elon Musk.
Yet once again, the performance of Tesla’s stock would suggest that none of this had ever happened, or at least that it didn’t matter. Tesla offered Musk a trillion-dollar pay package — so absurd that even the pope felt compelled to condemn it. Musk then turned around and bought a billion dollars of Tesla stock to signal his self-confidence, which in turn propelled Tesla’s share price back up again and wiped out the losses from earlier this year.
The “why” of this financial madness is the same refrain that’s been playing for the past two years, ever since Musk rolled out the disastrous Cybertruck rather than building Tesla’s volume EV business. The man cares about robotics, AI, and autonomy — and decidedly not about building cars — and has convinced shareholders that his pivot in this direction will reap untold rewards. Once again, it’s possible that he’s right.
I am, admittedly, a cynic about Tesla and self-driving, for reasons personal and general. My Model 3 encounters the occasional worrisome blip with its relatively simpler Autopilot system, for instance on the part of Interstate 5 near Disneyland where it suddenly decides it’s on the 45 mile-per-hour access road rather than the freeway and hits the brakes.
This error alone is enough that I wouldn’t entrust my family’s safety to Tesla Full Self-Driving, to say nothing of Musk’s lifelong habit of overstating the abilities of his tech. But I know plenty of people who are already allowing versions of FSD to chauffeur them. Conversations with industry sources often settle on the inevitability of autonomy, if for no other reason than they worry about younger folks who can’t be bothered with learning to drive. Maybe Tesla will win the race to sell them self-driving electric cars. (Or, as a Bloomberg op-ed says, maybe the big buy is just window dressing, though a more apt metaphor might have been lipstick on a pig.)
Either way, it’s not great news for the here and now, the EV market of the present that Musk loves to neglect. South Korean competitors Hyundai and Kia — which are both building cool EVs for today that humans drive and trying to do much of their manufacturing in the United States — are nonetheless getting hammered by Trump tariffs and ICE raids. The federal tax credit set to expire at the end of this month is a particularly hard hit for forthcoming vehicles such as the new Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf, which could have reached compellingly cheap prices had the government not killed the incentive and slapped tariffs in its place.
Will Tesla, which has long teased an affordable EV, at least redouble its efforts to sell more cars? If anything can motivate Musk to refocus on Tesla rather than trolling on X, it’s money. To date, the company has sold a little more than 7 million vehicles; 20 million Tesla cars sold is one of the many strings attached to Musk actually earning the entire “trillion-dollar” deal.
Another condition is that he aid the company in its search for his successor, a sign that those who’ve always wanted to see a Tesla without Musk might get their wish sooner rather than later.