Why is Elon Musk still CEO of Tesla?

As the tech billionaire and his EV company take a beating, Apple castigates itself over Siri failures and a Meta tell-all book evokes a strong reaction

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. In this week’s edition: Elon Musk suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Apple beats itself up over Siri, and Meta goes after one of its own over a tell-all book.

Musk took a beating last week, as did Tesla

The past 10 days have marked several of the most significant setbacks for Musk in months. Tesla, arguably his marquee company, continued to fall in value as investors worried about the threat of trade war and possible recession – as well as declining profits. Escalating protests against the company over the billionaire’s role in the government also grew in number and intensity across the US, coupled with rising cases of vandalism and social stigma against his cars. SpaceX has also struggled, with one of its rockets dramatically exploding in midflight last week and then an announcement that it was delaying a rescue mission to retrieve “stranded” astronauts. The company tried again two days later.

Adding to Musk’s headaches, his social media platform, X, experienced widespread outages throughout the day on Monday. During a Fox Business interview, he claimed that it was the result of a “massive cyberattack” that the company had traced to the area of Ukraine.

Musk is also dealing with increasing pushback over his role at Doge. Multiple outlets reported that the “first buddy”, as he’s christened himself, got into a heated exchange with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a White House meeting last week, which ended with Donald Trump appearing to rein in Musk’s power to make staffing decisions at government agencies with a Truth social post. A federal judge in California also issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday to reinstate thousands of the workers that Doge mass fired. Meanwhile, polling this week from Quinnipiac University shows that despite Musk repeatedly declaring that the public loves what Doge is doing, a strong majority of people disapprove of his initiative.

To shore up Musk’s fortune, Tesla held a sales event on the lawn of the White House. Donald Trump browsed several of the company’s vehicles and eventually announced he would purchase one and label vandalism against Tesla showrooms as domestic terrorism.

The scene was a striking use of the presidency to endorse the business of the commander-in-chief’s biggest financial backer. However, the display also gave the impression that Musk needed Trump to reverse his string of losses and quell the backlash against him.

Methinks the CEO doth protest too much. It’s unclear if the maneuver will work. Republicans buy far fewer electric cars than Democrats, and Democrats newly hate Musk, per recent polls and automotive industry consumer data compiled by the New York Times. As one analyst told the paper: “When you make your product unattractive to half the market, I promise you, you won’t increase your sales.”

Tesla’s stock has fallen 37% since the start of 2025. Given so much decline and more on the horizon with Trump’s tariffs and plummeting consumer sentiment, would the company’s board have a fiduciary duty to remove him? In theory and in #Resistance fanfiction, maybe, but in practice, there’s little chance. Will shareholders sue? They have in the past, taking legal issue with his enormous $56bn pay package, and a judge found in their favor twice. However, that pay package was the result of a fundamental truth about Tesla: Elon Musk is synonymous with the company. To serve on the board, to buy its shares, and now even purchase one of the company’s cars is to believe in him. The Cybertruck is as much a Maga emblem as a red hat.

Apple trumpeted Siri upgrades at last year’s company conference for software developers. Illustration: Observer Design

iPhone owners and Wall Street alike have been waiting for Apple to catch up to the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Samsung. If an explosive internal meeting is any indication, they’ll be waiting a lot longer.

Last week, Apple’s senior director, Robby Walker, told the Siri team that their failures had been ugly and embarrassing, according to Bloomberg, in whose pages this saga has primarily played out. For a company that touts its designs as so very beautiful, harmonious and superior, it’s hard to think of a more insulting assessment.

Apple had trumpeted the Siri upgrades at last year’s company conference for software developers. The team had reportedly been cranking deliver new features this spring, only to see their work shelved and executives raise the possibility of scrapping it entirely.

What arrived instead was a public humiliation: the announcement of an indefinite delay on any major changes to Siri. Senior leaders at Apple including software chief Craig Federighi worried that the AI features didn’t work as advertised or even function in a basic manner when they tried it out. Some members of Apple’s AI division think the work on Siri’s new features should be scuttled like a defunct warship and restarted under new leadership, according to Bloomberg. The company has taken down an ad for Siri’s AI enhancements released in 2024.

Since the inception of Siri, Apple’s iPhone homunculus has won infamy as an inept digital assistant. I still can’t cajole her into controlling Spotify accurately or consistently, a problem that has persisted since I owned an iPhone 6. With the advent and proliferation of generative AI, Siri’s problems have been thrown into glaring relief. She can’t compete with ChatGPT’s multiple functions. Compounding Apple’s problems are the baffling, wrong and viral summaries of notifications by Apple Intelligence, a suite of features announced in September alongside the iPhone 16. Meanwhile, Amazon has revamped its line of smart devices with a refreshed Alexa two weeks ago, courtesy of Anthropic’s Claude AI models