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Norway’s central bank, Norges Bank, manages the Norwegian krone and the country’s foreign exchange reserves. It also runs the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, the Government Pension Fund of Norway. The international part of that fund, the Government Pension Fund-Global (GPFG) owns about 1.5 percent of all public companies around the world, on average. (The fund is so enormous because Norway wisely chose to invest its oil revenue rather than spending it, to avoid deindustrializing itself and making its economy dependent on the gyrating price of oil.)
GPFG’s holdings include 35.7 million shares of Tesla, or about 1.1 percent of the company. Norges Bank should sell off that stake immediately, both on the financial merits and to fit with the fund’s own ethical rules around investment.
Let me begin with the business case against Tesla. As I wrote back in January, before Trump took office, the long-term prospects for the company looked dim, despite its sky-high stock price. Elon Musk’s association with Donald Trump was obliterating Tesla’s reputation among its core customer base of affluent liberals, while conservatives tend to hate EVs on principle. Tesla’s poorly constructed product lineup is aging, and its only new vehicle since 2019, the Cybertruck, has been a flop. Meanwhile, competition is ramping up both domestically from Hyundai and GM, and especially internationally, where BYD and other Chinese companies have caught almost every incumbent automaker, including Tesla, with their pants down.
Since January, things have gotten much worse. Musk’s reputation has gotten dramatically more toxic, above all thanks to his throwing a Sieg heil! salute at a Trump inauguration rally and his illegal cuts to federal spending through DOGE. Musk’s antics have created the kind of headlines and protests—including a few instances of vandalism—that any rational company would desperately avoid. Sales are falling sharply in all but one of Tesla’s top national markets, from 34 percent in the Netherlands to 71 percent in Germany, the biggest car market in Europe. In China, the company’s second-largest market, sales are down 49 percent. (The U.K. is so far the lone exception, though I bet not for long.)
Indeed, in Norway itself—which used to be Tesla’s eighth-biggest market because almost all cars sold there are EVs now—Tesla went from the biggest seller by far in 2024 to, as of March, third place behind Toyota, which has just one distinctly underwhelming EV for sale.
The only thing keeping Tesla’s stock price up is the retail investor cult of personality around Musk—but this is deflating too.
As a result, Tesla’s price has fallen by about 40 percent since I wrote that piece, erasing about $520 billion in market capitalization. But even this is a preposterous overvaluation. It is still worth $888 billion at time of writing, making it the ninth-most valuable company in the world. That puts it at a price-to-earnings ratio of about 136, or roughly 14 times that of Toyota, which sold six times as many cars and earned seven times as much profit last year. Tesla is “worth” more than TSMC, which made about $35 billion in profits last year, as compared to Tesla’s $7.1 billion.
Musk has promised that autonomous robotaxis and robots are the future of Tesla, but not only has he been promising and failing to deliver this technology for nearly a decade now, his most recent promises are ridiculous on their face. Last year, he claimed his Optimus robots alone—hopefully not just some guy in a suit—will turn Tesla into a $25 trillion company. The man is a charlatan.
Incidentally, there are companies that actually have figured out driverless taxis, like Waymo, and all indications are that at best it is a low-margin business, because the cars require so much expensive technology, as well as significant human oversight in case of glitches.
The only thing keeping Tesla’s stock price up is the retail investor cult of personality around Musk—but this is deflating too. As John Herrman writes at New York, prominent YouTubers who were previously very friendly to Tesla have started avoiding or criticizing the company. The MAGA-adjacent channel “Whistlin’ Diesel” went mega-viral with a video showing how in a bad towing situation, the entire back portion of the Cybertruck’s shoddy cast aluminum frame will snap right off. (Every Cybertruck in the country has been recalled because the panels keep peeling away.) Mark Rober, whose channel has 66 million subscribers, did the same with a video showing his Tesla’s Autopilot crashing directly into a Wile E. Coyote–style painted wall.
At a minimum, it is highly likely that Tesla’s valuation will eventually fall to something like a normal car company, to maybe $75 billion. It may well fall into a death spiral of collapsing sales and investment and go bankrupt entirely. All this is obvious—it’s why company executives and board members have been selling their shares by the hundreds of thousands, while buying precisely zero. The rats are deserting the ship. Norges Bank would be wise to unload its Tesla stake before reality fully sinks in among the Musk fan base.
Second: the moral case against Tesla. Norges Bank is not a passive investor. On the contrary, as Matt Bruenig points out at the People’s Policy Project, the fund is actively managed, it attempts to participate in every shareholder vote, and there are some moral priorities in its investment strategy. As its website says, “We aim to promote long-term value creation at the companies and minimise negative effects on the environment and society.” That’s why some companies are blacklisted from the fund, according to criteria outlined back in 2014. Tobacco companies, manufacturers of certain kinds of gruesome weapons, and coal companies are ruled out. So might a company that “contributes to or is responsible for … serious or systematic human rights violations” or “other particularly serious violations of fundamental ethical norms.”
Until recently, Tesla made up the majority of Musk’s wealth, and he used that wealth to buy the American presidency and seize direct control of the federal budget with his DOGE organization. He and his goon squad of fascist cyber criminals have wreaked havoc across the federal budget, and nowhere worse than the foreign aid budget. USAID has been devastated, funding to PEPFAR (which provides HIV drugs to poorer nations) has been frozen, and a vaccine program was recently terminated.
If these cuts hold, millions of people will die. Experts told The New York Times that one year of cutting off HIV/AIDS treatment will kill about 1.65 million people; food aid, 550,000 people; vaccine funding, 500,000 children; tuberculosis funding, 310,000 people; and malaria funding, 290,000. That’s a total of 3.3 million per year. The funding freeze to PEPFAR alone has already killed an estimated 27,000 adults and 2,800 children. It’s shaping up to be the worst crime of the 21st century so far, and may rival the death tolls of Hitler and Stalin.
Any Tesla shareholder is implicated in Musk’s crimes against humanity, and more implicated the more shares they possess.
Furthermore, Musk is also leading a charge to destroy European democracy. He has meddled in German politics to boost the extreme far-right AfD party, and in British politics in an attempt to oust the Labour Party government. As Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said back in January, “I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and large financial resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries.”
Indeed, in February Musk personally attacked Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen for having the temerity to vote against Musk’s outrageous $55 billion pay package, calling him a “dangerous politician.” Norway has an election in September this year, and it would be entirely in keeping with Musk’s previous behavior to attempt to boost the far-right Progress Party in retaliation for Norges Bank exercising its legal rights as a Tesla shareholder.
So, Mr. Tangen: Dump those Tesla shares, and if you need somewhere to sock away the cash, I suggest Rheinmetall.
