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March has been a month of back-to-back blows to Elon Musks Tesla, and now theres yet another concern to add to the list. New data from Edmunds shows that Tesla drivers are on track to trade in their vehicles at an all-time high this month. According to the report, Tesla cars from model year 2017 or newer accounted for 1.4% of all vehicles traded in until March 15up 0.4% from March 2023 and 1.2% from last month. If the trend continues in the second half of March, it will represent a bleak new record of dissatisfied Tesla customers. The trade-ins are representative of the wide-scale backlash faced by the brand as Musk, its billionaire CEO, claims unprecedented administrative power in the U.S. government even while Tesla’s vehicles are recalled at alarming rates. Teslas backlog of woes Tesla’s stock has been on a sharp decline since early December, a trend thats only been exacerbated by investors mounting fears surrounding Musks sweeping cuts to federal programs and funding through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The brand’s problems are mounting almost too quickly to count: There have been plummeting sales in Europe and China, major advancements from Chinese competitor BYD, and a spike in both Tesla vandalisms and wide-scale protests as a response to DOGEs cuts. Meanwhile, Tesla just had to recall nearly every Cybertruck ever made due to an exterior panel that could detach while drivingjust one of a laundry list of design issues that have historically plagued the brand. All of this has culminated in an increasingly negative outlook for Tesla. As of yesterday, the brands stock is down 42% since the beginning of 2025, with some analysts estimating that Musk has lost more than $100 billion since December (though it’s important to note that shares are still up more than 40% year over year.) And now, Edmunds new data shows that even Tesla drivers are feeling less confident about the companys vehicles. In an interview with Reuters, Edmunds head of insights Jessica Caldwell noted that, “Brand loyalty is becoming a bigger question mark as factors such as Elon Musk’s increasing public involvement in government, Tesla depreciation concerns, and its increased saturation in major metro areas leave some longtime owners feeling disconnected from the brand. According to Reuters, Edmunds analysts predict that used Teslas prices will likely decline as Tesla trade-ins reach the market. Thats on top of a Fast Company analysis earlier this month, which found that the price of used Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles depreciated more than any other cars in 2024. Over the past couple of months, some regretful Tesla owners have resorted to putting bumper stickers on their vehicles with phrases like, I bought this before we knew Elon Musk was crazy, or even rebadging their Teslas entirely to distance themselves from the brand (and to avoid potential vandalism.) Based on Edmunds new data, it seems that many are deciding to take their disavowal one step further.
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E-Commerce
U.S. President Donald Trump awarded Boeing on Friday the contract to build the U.S. Air Force’s most sophisticated fighter jet yet, dubbed the F-47, handing the company a much-needed win. The Next Generation Air Dominance program will replace Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor with a crewed aircraft built to enter combat alongside drones. Trump, the 47th president, announced the new jet’s name, the F-47. “We’ve given an order for a lot. We can’t tell you the price,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Our allies are calling constantly,” Trump added, saying foreign sales could be an option. “They want to buy them also.” For Boeing, the win marks a reversal of fortune for a company that has struggled on both the commercial and defense sides of its business. It is a major boost for its St. Louis, Missouri, fighter jet production business. The engineering and manufacturing development contract is worth more than $20 billion. The winner will eventually receive hundreds of billions of dollars in orders over the contract’s multi-decade lifetime. Shares of Boeing rose 4% after the news. The U.S. company beat out Lockheed Martin for the deal. Lockheed’s shares fell nearly 7%. Reuters reported Boeing’s victory before the official announcement. The plane’s design remains a closely held secret, but would likely include stealth, advanced sensors, and cutting-edge engines. “Compared to the F-22, the F-47 will cost less and be more adaptable to future threatsand we will have more of the F-47s in our inventory,” said Chief of Staff of the Air Force General David Allvin. Boeing and Lockheed did not immediately respond to requests for comment. NGAD was conceived as a “family of systems” centered around a sixth-generation fighter to counter adversaries such as China and Russia. Allvin added the F-47 will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, and will be more sustainable and more easily supported than the F-22. Major win Boeing’s commercial operations have struggled as it attempts to get its best-selling 737 MAX jet production back up to full speed, while its defense operation has been weighed down by underperforming contracts for midair refueling tankers, drones, and training jets. “The win is a major boost for the company, which has struggled with cost overruns, schedule delays and execution on other DoD programs,” said Roman Schweizer, an analyst at TD Cowen. Cost overruns at the KC-46 mid-air refueling tanker program have surpassed $7 billion in recent years, while another fixed-price contract to upgrade two Air Force One planes has created a $2-billion loss for the top 5 U.S. defense contractor. Boeing has faced ongoing scrutiny since a series of crises including a mid-air emergency in January 2024 involving a new Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 missing four key bolts. In January, Boeing reported an $11.8-billion annual lossits largest since 2020due to problems at its major units, along with fallout from a crippling strike that shuttered production of most of its jets. Boeing has ceded ground to rival Airbus in the delivery race and entered the crosshairs of regulators and customers following a series of missteps. The Federal Aviation Administration in early 2024 imposed a production cap of 38 MAX planes per month. Lockheed, which was recently eliminated from the competition to build the Navy’s next-generation carrier-based stealth fighter, faces an uncertain future in the high-end fighter market after the loss. Billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk has voiced skepticism about the effectiveness of crewed high-end fighters, saying cheaper drones were a better option. While Lockheed could still protest the award to Boeing, the fact Trump announced the deal in a high-profile Oval Office press conference could reduce the possibility of a public airing of arguments against the agreement from the Bethesda, Maryland-based defense firm. Mike Stone, Reuters Additional reporting by David Shepardson.
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E-Commerce
Market manipulation in the cryptocurrency world is rampantand fewer than 500 people are responsible for as much as $250 million a year in profits and over $3.2 trillion in artificial trading, according to a new study published on Cornell Universitys preprint server arXiv. Honglin Fu and colleagues at University College London have developed a tool that can track the coordination of pump-and-dump schemes, where crypto coin holders artificially inflate the price of a cryptocurrency by touting fake recommendations and generating nonexistent hype, making ordinary people intrigued enough to buy into a cryptocurrency before the owners then pull their stake and crash the price. Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging platform widely used by cryptocurrency investors, has become a favored tool for coordinating these schemes. Perseus, the tool Fu and his colleagues developed, identified more than 400 so-called masterminds that helped seed fake hype for crypto coins through millions of Telegram messages. By eavesdropping on Telegram chats where pump-and-dump schemes are discussed, then training Perseus on what happens, the team were able to identify nearly 750,000 messages organizing such scams. There is one kind of bad actor, we call a mastermind in the paper. Theyre the main distributor, you can think of them as, of the pump-and-dump method, says Fu. Then they have followers: what they do is the mastermind will distribute messages to the others, and theyll spread the message further to attract as many investors as possible. The accomplices are crucial to carrying out the scam, Fu says, because theyre the ones that convince people at scale that a cryptocurrency is worth investing in. The ease with which the scammers are able to organize their activities and bank profits is a concern to Fu, who hopes that more awareness of the way the scams work, thanks to Perseus, will help raise awareness and push an impetus to action. The crypto market is not really regulated, and it should be regulated to ensure that there are at least some safety measures for the public, Fu says. Right now, the crypto market has so many scams out there. Its like a Wild West.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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