Tesla sold a record number of electric vehicles in the fourth quarter, helping it to exceed its year-end objectives. According to a press statement issued Tuesday morning, the business shipped 1.81 million EVs in 2023 and produced 1.85 million.
These results were somewhat higher than the 1.8 million target Tesla declared earlier this year and were mostly driven by the company’s most inexpensive EVs, the Model 3 and Model Y. This year, the two models accounted for more than 96% of all Tesla vehicles made and exported.
Tesla produced over 500,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter alone at its plants in California, Texas, Germany, and China, delivering 484,507 vehicles globally. This includes the first few Cybertrucks, which began selling late last year for roughly $100,000. However, we don’t know how many Cybertrucks have been delivered to consumers as the business lumps those data in with Model S and X sales in an “other models” line item.
The year’s good conclusion comes after Tesla’s deliveries fell in the third quarter for the first time in a year due to manufacturing shutdowns, undermining CEO Elon Musk’s loftier target of delivering 2 million vehicles this year. The firm spent much of the year experimenting with its prices, beginning with large price cuts, which have eaten into its industry-leading profit margins.
Tesla’s successful year is also owed in large part to the company’s performance in China, where competition for market share has been tough owing to waves of price drops from competitors. This includes BYD, which has recently surpassed Tesla’s global EV sales.
In a recent filing, Fidelity has reduced its stake in X Holdings, the parent company of X (previously Twitter), controlled by Elon Musk, by 71.5% from the initial share price.
In October 2022, Fidelity paid $19.2 million for a share in X. In October 2023, the fund management reduced the value by 65%. And now, in the November 2023 statement, the corporation has reduced X’s worth even lower. Fidelity’s disclosures, in particular, are one month behind the current date.
X has gone through a number of changes in the last year, including the appointment of a new CEO, former NBCU executive Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino said during an interview at the Code Conference in September 2023 that the firm will become profitable in 2024.
The company’s greatest difficulty is convincing marketers to spend money on the platform. Many big sponsors, including Apple, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM, Paramount Global, Lionsgate, and the European Commission, left the platform after Musk referred to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory as the “actual truth.”
He urged marketers to go screw themselves later that month at the DealBook Conference.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” Musk went on to say. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”
The Financial Times reported in December that X would try to get small and medium-sized firms to spend money on advertising on the platform. X refuted The New York Times’ assertion that the platform would lose $75 million due to an advertising boycott, telling the FT that the loss would be approximately $10–12 million.
“Small and medium businesses are a very significant engine that we have definitely underplayed for a long time,” X told the newspaper. “It was always part of the plan—now we will go even further with it.”
Musk has also made contentious choices to reinstate previously banned users’ accounts, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Kanye West, former US President Donald Trump, far-right influencer Andrew Tate, and right-wing scholar Jordan Peterson.
