An all-but-doomed tax credit highlights just how much Elon Musk’s biggest business has to lose under President Donald Trump.
Trump’s massive tax bill would largely eliminate a credit worth as much as $7,500 for buyers of some Tesla Inc. models and other electric vehicles by the end of this year, seven years ahead of schedule. That would translate to a roughly $1.2 billion hit to Tesla’s full-year profit, according to JPMorgan analysts.
After leaving his formal advisory role in the White House last week, Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, has been on a mission to block the president’s signature tax bill that he described as a “disgusting abomination.” The world’s richest person has been lobbying Republican lawmakers — including making a direct appeal to House Speaker Mike Johnson — to preserve the valuable EV tax credits in the legislation.
Tesla’s business is under threat regulatory elsewhere. Separate legislation passed by the Senate attacking California’s EV sales mandates poses another $2 billion headwind for Tesla’s sales of regulatory credits, according to JPMorgan.
Taken together, those measures threaten roughly half of the more than $6 billion in earnings before interest and taxes that Wall Street expects Tesla to post this year, analysts led by Ryan Brinkman said in a May 30 report.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The House-passed tax bill would aggressively phase-out tax credits for the production of clean electricity, and other sources years earlier than scheduled. It also includes stringent restrictions on the use of Chinese components and materials that analysts said would render the credits useless and limits the ability of company’s to sell the tax credits to third parties.
Tesla’s division focused on solar systems and batteries separately criticized the Republican bill for gutting clean energy tax credits, saying that “abruptly ending” the incentives would threaten US energy independence and the reliability of the power grid.
The clean energy and EV policies under threat were largely enacted as part of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The law was designed to encourage companies to build a domestic supply chain for clean energy and electric vehicles, giving companies more money if they produce more batteries and EVs in the US. Tesla has a broad domestic footprint, including car factories in Texas and California, a lithium refinery and battery plants.
With those Biden-era policies in place, US EV sales rose 7.3% to a record 1.3 million vehicles last year, according to Cox Automotive data.