Robotaxis, Belichick, and the QAnon Shaman’s Meltdown

Coming up on today's Community, Tesla's profits keep falling, but Elon Musk says the robo tax revolution is right around the corner. We will be talking about that. Meanwhile, the cybertuck, the cyber trucks not going so well. They are a little bit flat to say the least. Not just their tires, but but actual sales then. Bill Belichick hasn't coached a single college game, but UNC has already sold out the entire football season. Every single seat. We break down whether the $10 million gamble was worth it. Next, French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife are suing US Influencer Candace Owens and a US Court over a bizarre conspiracy theory. And the charges are serious. Also, the QAnon Shaman is back. Shaman, Shaman. Shame on me if you're not getting that right. And he's turned on Trump with some wild new rants. What does that say about Trump's support from his most extreme former fans? And finally, my review of and Juliet. It's a Shakespeare remix set to pop hits with a lot more glitter and a lot less depth. Stick around. All that and more on today's Community. It's going to be a fun, fun show. I'm happy you're joining me and we're going to get a lot done today. Hello and welcome. This is Communiverse. This is where news meets personal development. Every single day, I look at the top news stories of the day and analyze them through the lens of personal development and communication skills, all with the goal of making you more successful. So that's where about My name is TJ Walker. I've been coaching CEOs, billionaire fund managers, Fortune 500 executives, plus presidents and prime ministers for the last three, four decades on how to communicate effectively. Now I take you into their world so you can see what's really happening and learn how to communicate and be more successful yourself. That's what we are all about right here. First step, we're going to take a look at what's going on in Elon Musk's world. Always something going on in Muskville. So let's take a look at that right now. So Tesla's latest earning report is out. It's not good news. The company posted its third consecutive quarterly profit decline, making just $1.2 billion from April to June, down from 1.4 billion the year before. Sales also dropped and dropped somewhat significantly. We're going to give you at least my take on why exactly that's happening. So we'll be going into that in more detail in just a moment. Elon Musk isn't sweating it. He says the future lies in robo taxis, autonomous software and humanoid robots, not necessarily in selling cars. And certainly his valuation is based on that promise, that expectation. Tesla has started testing a robo tax service in Austin and says unsupervised versions could be available by year's end. But here's the catch. Those future tech dreams aren't bringing in real revenue yet. Meanwhile, the car business, Tesla's cash cow, is struggling. Musk's political involvement, lack of new affordable models and the flop of the cybertruck aren't helping. And new GOP policies are eliminating tax credits and clean air penalties, both of which used to boost Tesla's margin. So what's really going on here? Also, Tesla's clean air credit revenue fell from $890 million to $439 million. Now, Tesla gets a huge, huge, huge bump up because of its perception that, oh, it's about future, it's about growth. Its valuation is given a multiple so much larger than what Ford and other traditional motor companies are getting. Is that going to continue? Here's what I think is really going on. Elon Musk is very much a part time CEO. He's busy running seemingly 10 other companies. He's still dabbling in politics, and he seems to be tweeting every five seconds in a bitter feud with the President of the United States. So I just don't know how much longer investors can say, we have complete trust in this guy. Now, his stock has not fallen by any means to the point where the valuation is similar to Ford or General Motors. If that happens, we're going to see about a 90% crash in the valuation of Tesla stock. Now, to be clear, I'm not making a prediction that that's happening anytime soon. And this show is not about giving you financial investment advice. I'll leave. I'll let you rely on others for that. So don't go shorting Tesla stock because of something I said. I do think, though, that there is a huge, huge hit to the Tesla brand, because the Tesla brand is really the Elon Musk brand. And we've seen, according to a whole variety of sources in mainstream media, the Internet, that the perception of Elon Musk has gone way down. His negatives have gone up in the past. He was seen as this visionary, solving all the great problems of the world and doing great things with rockets and cars and ev, protecting the planet. To a guy who many believe is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people through his evisceration, of US aid, other things he did to the federal government during his tenure as head of Dodge, and now these squabbles with Trump. So Musk basically alienated himself from his core audience in America, which was progressive, centrist liberals who like the idea of protecting the environment. So they were buying, buying electric vehicles. Now he's alienating the Trump people because he's constantly attacking Trump. So who does he really have left? What is his base? And that's part of the challenge that Elon Musk faces, but it's also the challenge that Trump, that Tesla is facing is who is the base anymore. I think a lot of investors are asking themselves, don't we deserve for a company this big, for a company worth hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, can't we get a full time CEO? And yes, Elon Musk may have more energy than a lot of CEOs than the average bear, I get it. But does he really have enough energy to be running Tesla and his SpaceX and his satellite company and his Neuralink company and 10 other companies and trying to be influencing public policy and getting in huge, huge fights with the most powerful political leader in the entire world? Does anyone really have that much energy? And I think increasingly investors are going to be saying, no, we want you full time, Elon, or we want a CEO who's going to get up all day long and think every thought about how do I improve shareholder value for Tesla. At some point there's going to be a clamoring for that. It's not there yet, but I don't think we are that far off. This is the Communiverse. Thank you for joining me. My name is TJ Walker. What we try to do here is a little bit different. It's so easy to look at news programs and just get depressed, get bummed out. What we try to do here is really analyze things through a communications lens to give you lessons, personal development lessons to help with your own career. The lesson I see from Elon Musk and Tesla is don't get sucked into your own good press. I think Elon Musk has been held up, put up on a pedestal for so long, gotten so much hero worship, surrounded himself with so many sycophants saying, yes, boss, you're a genius. You're Tony Stark, you're the most powerful, the smartest, richest guy in the world. You can do no wrong. And he started to believe it. And that's not going to work in the long run if the profits don't reflect that here's the big problem with Tesla as I see it, is doesn't seem like it's been improved in the last decade. Now, I don't own a Tesla, but I often get in Teslas when I travel around the world. And the car picking up an Uber is a Tesla. And it's not bad, it's not awful, but it certainly doesn't give me the luxurious feel of a Mercedes Benz or a Porsche or a lot of other luxury cars. And just the fact that you were an electric vehicle 10, 15 years ago, that was a big deal. Well, guess what, it's not a big deal anymore. There are a lot of electric vehicles to choose from. So just being an electric vehicle, you don't get a lot of brownie points for that anymore. And if you seem like just a regular boxy car, I mean, to my mind a Tesla isn't that much more comfortable than a Toyota Prius. And that's not anyone's idea of a luxury car. So we're going to be watching this. He's the fascinating character. There's no doubt no one's predicting the demise of Elon Musk anytime too quickly. But I do think that, you know, the days of him just being able to do anything and everything he wants and everyone trying to say this guy can do no wrong, I think those days are in fact coming to an end. Let's get a story too. UNC sells out as Belichick takes over in Chapel Hill. Every seat for the 2025 football season is sold out thanks to one man, Bill Belichick, the six time super bowl winner making his college football debut at the tender young age of 73. Now Belichick is reportedly being paid, when you add everything together, about 10, $10 million a year, making him the highest paid college football coach or certainly one of the highest paid coaches. But based on early numbers, UNC is seeing a return on that investment. Ticket revenue alone is expected to reach $40 million, with football total related income potential reaching 60 to 70 million. Beyond money, Belichick's presence has brought national media attention and ESPN Monday night opener and full blown branding of the program. Now comes the hard part. Winning. He is going to have to win. The expectations are very high and anyone who really follows professional sports and college sports, whether it's football or anything else, they know that what works at the professional level often doesn't work at the college level. What works at the college level often doesn't work at the professional level. So how is this going to work? Let me be very upfront with you and be transparent. There are few people in the United States who know less about NFL football or college football than I do. So let me be very, very upfront. And, and when it comes to unc, I do have a, a bias in that I went to duke, which is UNC's rival. So you could say, well, TJ's attacking UNC because he's biased. You could make that case. I get it. But I'm going to try to, to. To be dispassionate about this and be as fair as I can. How is he going to do? I don't really know. We'll see. That's part of what makes sports exciting is you never really know what's going to happen. But this is unfortunately one of the situations where our new economy of winner taking all does have a big role on creating income inequality. I was one who said, you know, why in the world are colleges paying football coaches such outrageous fortunes? Meanwhile, their adjunct professors are living on food stamps and living in their car in many cases. I happen to believe we would all be much better off if you were, especially for a public university. But any university that gets a lot of public funds, which is every university in America, that they have a cap on salaries, and the cap should be whatever the President of the United States makes, which is about $450,000. No one who gets public money at a university should be able to get more than that. And that's my solution. That's what I would like to see. But I'm not a huge college football fan. A lot of people, if you gave them the choice in the United States of we can have the best football team in the country at our state university, but you'd have to close every school and shut down every road. A lot of people would say, well, sure, what's the catch? I think it's shortsighted. But there's no doubt that a lot of people care and care passionately about college sports. And we live in a world where media buzz, branding, name ID is paramount in so many industries. And we are seeing in part at what looks like unc, unc, University of North Carolina, making a winning bet. They paid a lot of money and it's already paying off in terms of ticket sales for the first year. Now, football fans, like all fans everywhere, are fickle. And if it's a losing season, you're going to see people saying, I never liked them anyway, and I'm not going there. So I think that's what we're going to find out and we won't know until the middle of the season maybe by the end of the season. Now if he wins and wins big and has the same level of success that he did at the professional level, you know he may be renegotiating his contract to get 20 or 30 million dollars. We will see. So it is a fascinating world of what goes on in sports because they are celebrities in their own right. They have huge followings, huge name brand ID and it commands a premium issue three this is a little bit nasty and I apologize to you but I have to give you the top stories of the day. React as it relates to media and communication. This involves France and the United States. Macron sues Candace Owens for Defamation in an unusual legal move French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have filed a 22 count defamation lawsuit in Delaware against US right wing commentator Candace Owens. This is a bizarre case. The lawsuit stems from Owens repeated claims on social media and YouTube that.