Elon Musk Isn’t Leaving Tesla Anytime Soon

Good morning! It’s Thursday, May 1, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re checking out reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has no plans to leave the company as well as just how badly tariffs are hurting General Motors and Volkswagen. We’re also looking at what Stellantis is doing to deal with sluggish Jeep Gladiator sales. 

It’s another fun day in Car World, friends.

Folks, Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn’t going anywhere, despite the fact that the automaker’s last quarter was dire and tensions are rising between him and his board of directors. That tension has apparently led some members to start a search for his replacement, but it doesn’t look like anything will come of it.

About a month ago, several Tesla board members reached out to executive search firms to find a new CEO as Tesla’s sales, profit, reputation and stock price fell while Musk spent the bulk of his time at the White House with President Trump. Of course, Tesla’s board chair, Roby Denholm, denied the Wall Street Journal’s original reporting on social media on April 30. From Automotive News:

“There was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company. This is absolutely false,” Denholm said on Tesla’s official X account. “The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”

Musk also called the article “deliberately false” in a post on his social media site, X.

It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors! https://t.co/9xdypLGg3c

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2025

For now, it looks like Musk and Tesla’s board seem to have resolved their issues. That happened after Musk agreed to pull back from his role in the government at the Department of Government Efficiency, though what impact that could have on Tesla’s reputation remains to be seen. The Journal’s report says Tesla board members told Musk he needed to spend more time at the Austin, Texas-based automaker. 

Musk said on Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call April 22 that he would devote more time to Tesla and less time in his cost-cutting role at the controversial DOGE agency.

“I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said, adding he would continue to spend one or two days per week on his government job.

“As some people know, there’s been some blowback for the time I’m spending with government,” Musk said April 22. “I think the work we’re doing there is actually very important.”

Right now, it doesn’t seem like anyone truly knows what comes next for Musk and Tesla, but there are a few things that are fairly certain: “next” isn’t coming for a long time, and Musk isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

General Motors had to take an axe to its 2025 profit forecast after getting some clarity from the White House on automotive tariffs. In a letter, CEO Mary Barra told shareholders that the company would keep a dialogue with the Trump administration on trade and other policies. The automaker released a new profit forecast two days after it pulled the previous version, which had not accounted for Trump’s tariffs.

Now, GM expects an annual adjusted core profit between $10 billion and $12.5 billion, including a current tariff exposure between $4 billion and $5 billion. Previously, guidance for earnings before interest and taxes was between $13.7 billion and $15.7 billion.

The automaker now expects an annual net income between $8.2 billion and $10.1 billion, that is down from the $11.2-$12.5 billion range it previously stated. 2025 full-year capital spending will also be somewhere between $10 and $1 billion. From Reuters:

In an interview with CNBC Thursday morning, Barra said the automaker expected to make further announcements on plans to increase U.S. production.

“We are making a commitment that we are going to bring more production back to this country to build on what we already have,” Barra said.

Reuters broke the news that GM will increase light-duty truck production at its Fort Wayne, Indiana, assembly plant.Barra also said the company is “assuming a pricing environment that’s similar to what it is today,” even though industry estimates find new vehicle prices could increase by thousands of dollars under tariffs.

Executives and shareholders cannot be thrilled about all of this. Of course, as is the way with many of Trump’s tariff policies, everything he has planned right now could go away tomorrow. 

Volkswagen Group’s earnings dropped a staggering 40% in the first quarter due to higher manufacturing costs and Donald Trump’s tariff nightmare. Earnings before tax came in at €3.1 billion ($3.5 billion) in the first three months of the year. That’s down from the €5.1 billion it made during the same period a year earlier. The automaker’s operating margin also fell from 6% to 3.7%. From Bloomberg:

Volkswagen has seen profitability drop as it confronts rising costs and excess capacity at European factories, as well as weaker demand in China, a key market. Meanwhile, purchases of electric vehicles in Europe and the US have been uneven, and President Donald Trump’s tariffs are threatening to hurt profits further.

While Volkswagen left its outlook for 2025 unchanged, it said its forecast of up to 5% sales growth didn’t factor in the impact of US tariffs. The company, however, said it now expects an operating return on sales at the lower end of its 5.5% to 6.5% targeted range.

Tariffs in the U.S. are the big issue here.

European carmakers have struggled to assess the full impact of US tariffs as the Trump administration continues to change its position with caveats, exemptions and delays. Most recently, Trump signed an directives on Tuesday to lift some duties on foreign parts and prevent multiple levies from stacking on top of each other. The move could reduce the total tariffs imposed on VW models made in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Puebla, Mexico, and on Audi and Porsche vehicles shipped in from Europe.

VW had pre-released its quarterly earnings earlier in April, and it noted that its operating profit had been hit by about €1.1 billion in special items. Nearly €300 million of that money came from diesel issues and the U.S. tariff impact on cars shipped in March.

Stellantis announced it is pausing Jeep Gladiator production in Toledo Ohio this week in an effort to “align parts inventory with demand” as the company continues to struggle. The two shifts at the Toledo Assembly Complex have apparently been down since April 28, but the automaker says it’s going to “continue to monitor the situation to assess whether further action is required, but the plant is expected to resume normal production the week of May 5.”

This isn’t the first Stellantis plant to hit the pause button recently as weak depend, tariffs, parts shortages and model changeovers ravage production. From The Detroit News:

[Shutdowns] include the Detroit Assembly Complex, which is also down this week, as well the Warren Truck Assembly Plant, which is paused for several weeks due to an engine shortage.

The Windsor Assembly Plant in Canada came back online last week after two weeks off, while Toluca Assembly Plant in Mexico also stopped making vehicles for most of April. Stellantis said it paused those facilities in response to the Trump administration’s 25% tariffs on finished vehicles that took effect in early April. The Saltillo Van Assembly Plant also was idled recently.

This isn’t even the first time that the Gladiator’s production was down for a significant stretch, either. Slow sales forced Stellantis to temporarily halt production late last year. The truck has already been heavily discounted this year in an effort to increase sales. It’s common to see 2024 model-year Gladiators with up to 20% off the sticker price, and 2025s are getting a $7,000 bonus cash allowance. Still, sales fell 7% year-over-year in the first quarter.

On this day in 1926, Henry Ford decided its workers deserved some semblance of a life, so his automaker became one of the first companies in America to use a five-day, 40-hour-per-week work schedule for its factory employees. Here’s more from History.com:

The decision to reduce the workweek from six to five days had originally been made in 1922. According to an article published in The New York Times that March, Edsel Ford, Henry’s son and the company’s president, explained that “Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation….The Ford Company always has sought to promote [an] ideal home life for its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more time to spend with his family.”

Henry Ford said of the decision: “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.” At Ford’s own admission, however, the five-day workweek was also instituted in order to increase productivity: Though workers’ time on the job had decreased, they were expected to expend more effort while they were there. Manufacturers all over the country, and the world, soon followed Ford’s lead, and the Monday-to-Friday workweek became standard practice.

Folks, it’s Friday eve and the weather is getting warmer. There’s no better song to usher in some good vibes than “Right Back Where We Started From.” I dare you to listen to this song without getting a little shimmy going. It’s not possible.