DAVID BLACKMON: Tesla Could Be On The Brink Of ‘Blackberry Moment’

Analysts at the investor advisory site Seeking Alpha published a piece on Tuesday in which they claim that Tesla could be facing what they call a “Blackberry moment” caused by a combination of political and market factors.

This article and the ongoing negative impacts on Tesla’s business fortunes are signs of just how much Elon Musk is sacrificing as he heads up the DOGE operation for the Trump administration.

The “Blackberry moment” analogy refers to the Blackberry communications device which dominated the personal handheld market for a decade until 2007, when Apple introduced the first iPhone. Blackberry, having failed to properly assess the market and to innovate to take advantage of evolving technologies, suffered an immediate, rapid decline from that moment forward.

I’ve been a critic of Tesla myself and am not a fan of electric vehicles in general due to their chronic limitations the industry has never successfully addressed despite having been in existence since the 1890s. Relevant to this analogy, I wrote a piece in 2023 in which I observed that Tesla body designs that seemed so innovative and even breathtaking a decade ago had become stale and were in need of updating. I still believe that to be the case.

I’ve also been a real critic of the Cybertruck’s exterior design, which is so radical that it without question limits its appeal to all but a small, wealthy subset of Americans who are far more interested in the virtue signal involved in owning one than in the real functionality of owning a pickup truck. Sales of the Cybertruck have been ok so far, but just ok, and seem destined to decline as the audience for them fades.

On the other hand, Tesla remains far and away the most successful U.S. electric vehicle maker, and, as Seeking Alpha points out, even after its recent decline in stock price still sports a market cap that exceeds that of the next 9 automakers combined.