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Tesla Drops 6% After BYD Partners With DeepSeek

Tesla shares dropped 6% on Tuesday after Chinese rival BYD announced plans to develop autonomous vehicle technology with DeepSeek and said it would offer its Autopilot-like system in nearly all of its new cars, adding to fears that Elon Musk’s company is falling behind the competition.

TakeAway Points:

  • Tuesday saw a 6% decline in Tesla shares, which have now fallen for five days in a row, wiping out nearly $200 billion in market capitalisation.
  • The most recent decline followed Chinese competitor BYD’s announcement that it will be collaborating with DeepSeek to develop autonomous vehicle technologies.
  • Additionally, it came after Musk reportedly tried to spearhead an investment group’s acquisition of OpenAI.

Tesla shares dropped 6%

There’s also growing concern surrounding Musk’s distractions outside of Tesla after news surfaced that the world’s richest person is offering to lead an investor group in purchasing OpenAI while he steps up his work with President Donald Trump’s White House.

Tesla’s stock price has slid for five straight days, falling close to 17% over that stretch to $328.50 and wiping out over $200 billion in market cap.

BYD, which has emerged as Tesla’s fiercest rival on the world stage, said on Monday that at least 21 of its new model vehicles will come equipped with its partially automated driving systems that include features for automatic parking and navigating on highways.

Tesla doesn’t yet offer a robotaxi and its EVs currently require a human driver to remain at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time. On Tesla’s earnings call last month, Musk said the company is aiming to launch “Unsupervised Full Self-Driving” and a driverless rideshare service in Austin, Texas, in June. Alphabet’s Waymo already operates a robotaxi service in Austin as well as in parts of Phoenix, San Francisco.

“In our view, competition between Waymo, Tesla and a host of Chinese players is a key driver on the path to commercialization” of robotaxis,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to clients after the BYD announcement. The firm recommends buying the stock and has a price target of $430.

Waymo said on Tuesday that it added 10 square miles of coverage to its robotaxi service in Los Angeles.

In a report on Tuesday, Oppenheimer analysts wrote that the “autonomy competition may limit [Tesla] profitability.” Even if Tesla meets its June 2025 timeline for driverless cars in Texas, the company is “one of several autonomous technology providers, suggesting competition on price and performance,” they wrote.

In addition to running Tesla, Musk is CEO of SpaceX, owns social media company X and is head of artificial intelligence startup xAI. He’s also spending significant time these days in Washington, D.C., running the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) as a special government employee, aiming to slash federal spending, personnel, regulations and even entire agencies.

Many projects, many distractions

Investors already concerned about Musk’s hefty commitments beyond his trillion-dollar EV company have more reason for trepidation after events that unfolded on Monday. Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, confirmed to CNBC that Musk was leading a consortium of investors in a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI.

Musk was among the founders of OpenAI in 2015, when the AI startup was created as a nonprofit research lab. Musk sought to have Tesla acquire OpenAI, and he later departed the organization’s board.

OpenAI has since commercialized numerous products, most notably ChatGPT. Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is seeking to restructure OpenAI as a for-profit entity. Musk has sued OpenAI to prevent that transition and started xAI as a direct competitor.

The Oppenheimer analysts wrote that, “While Tesla has shifted focus to being a physical AI play, we view Elon Musk’s bid for OpenAI as a distraction from [Tesla’s] challenges.”

Altman told employees in a memo on Tuesday that OpenAI’s board hasn’t received an official offer from Musk and reminded staffers that “Elon has a history of making claims that don’t hold up.” 

Later on Tuesday, Toberoff said in a statement that he emailed the bid for OpenAI on behalf of the Musk-led consortium a day earlier to OpenAI’s outside counsel William Savitt and Sarah Eddy “for transmission to their client.” Toberoff said the bid was “in the form of a detailed four-page letter” and was addressed to OpenAI’s board.

“Whether Sam Altman chose to provide or withhold this from OpenAI’s other Board members is outside of our control,” he wrote.

Oppenheimer’s analysts also highlighted the added risks associated with Musk’s extensive work with the Trump administration.

While Musk’s behavior “has fans in certain circles,” his public life “risks alienating consumers and employees as the Trump administration tests the limits of its power,” they wrote. For example, they referenced recent vehicle registration data that showed steep year-over-year declines in California and across several European markets.







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Google Will Test Using AI To Ascertain Users’ Ages

Google announced on Wednesday that it will begin using artificial intelligence to assess if customers are old enough to use its goods.

TakeAway Points:

  • Google says it will start experimenting with using AI to better enforce its product’s age limitations.
  • Google uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to determine if a user is over or under the age of 18.
  • The decision follows Google’s ambition to deploy AI for additional tasks and as it faces pressure from lawmakers for child safety.
  • Google’s calendar product no longer displays some observances that were shown in previous years.

AI to determine users’ ages

Google announced the new technique for determining users’ ages as part of a blog focused on “New digital protections for kids, teens and parents.” The automation will be used across Google products, including YouTube, a spokesperson confirmed. Google has billions of users across its properties and users designated as under the age of 18 have restrictions to some Google services.

“This year we’ll begin testing a machine learning-based age estimation model in the U.S.,” wrote Jenn Fitzpatrick, SVP of Google’s “Core” Technology team, in the blog post. The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company’s flagship products and for protecting users’ online safety. 

“This model helps us estimate whether a user is over or under 18 so that we can apply protections to help provide more age-appropriate experiences,” Fitzpatrick wrote.

The latest AI move also comes as lawmakers pressure online platforms to create more provisions around child safety. The company said it will bring its AI-based age estimations to more countries over time. Meta rolled out similar features that use AI to determine that someone may be lying about their age in September.

Google and others within the tech industry have been ramping their reliance on AI for various tasks and products. Using AI for age-related content represents the latest AI front for Google.

The new initiative by Google’s “Core” team comes despite the company reorganization that unit last year, laying off hundreds of employees and moving some roles to India and Mexico, CNBC reported at the time. 

Google Calendar no longer includes start of Black History Month or Pride Month

Google’s popular online and mobile calendars no longer include reference to the first day of Black History Month or Women’s History Month, among other holidays and events.

The company’s calendar previously had those days marked at the start of February and March, respectively, but they don’t appear for 2025.

The Verge first reported on the removals from Google Calendar late last week, which followed comments from users.

A Google spokesperson said the changes took place in the middle of last year.

“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” the spokesperson added.

Google has made numerous changes lately that align with an altered political environment in the U.S. The company recently began scrapping its diversity hiring goals, becoming the latest tech giant to change its approach to hiring and promotions following the election of President Donald Trump. One of Trump’s first acts as president after taking office in January was to sign an executive order ending the government’s DEI programs and putting federal officials overseeing those initiatives on leave.

In late January, the company said it would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” in Google Maps after the Trump administration updates its “official government sources.” Google also said it would follow Trump and start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the mountain in Alaska currently called Denali.

On Google Calendar, the company has removed other events as well. It previously had Nov. 1 as the first day of Indigenous Peoples Month and June 1 as the start of LGBTQ+ Pride month.

The company spokesperson said that in mid-2024, the company “returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.” The timeanddate.com website says its company has 40 employees and is based in Norway.

Google Calendar users noticed the changes and left comments on the user support web pages and on social media. The user support site previously received comments from people upset about the company adding such observances.







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