Tesla Is Hitting the Brakes on Everything but AI

After years of growing at breakneck speed, Tesla seems to be slowing down. This is sensible, but investors haven’t bestowed a $867 billion market value on the company because they like common sense.

Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk was unusually downbeat on Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call late Wednesday. The world’s richest person warned that the company’s hotly anticipated new model, the Cybertruck, could take 18 months to turn a profit given the “immense work” required to reach volume production. And he bemoaned the impact of higher interest rates on vehicle affordability, which implies that Tesla is struggling to shift inventories despite this year’s price cuts.