New initiative could make Tesla stock 'sink faster than a Cybertruck in quicksand'

Tesla, the electric car company owned by Elon Musk, has lost more than a quarter of its value over the first two months of 2025 as sales in Europe have absolutely crashed amid backlash to Musk's embrace of far-right politicians.

Now the New York Times reports that the American Federation of Teachers is putting pressure on major stockholders to sell off their shares of the company in a bid that would likely drive its value down even further.

AFT leader Randi Weingarten has written to the CEOs of major asset management firms and asked them to scrutinize the risks involved with holding onto Tesla stock, whose price-earnings ratio of 142 is more than five times higher than the average of S&P 500 stocks and is thus potentially overvalued.

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“This is about safeguarding workers’ retirements,” Weingarten told the Times. “Just this week we saw Tesla stock continue to sink faster than a Cybertruck in quicksand as European sales fell off a cliff. So, we knew we needed to act.”

The Times notes that Weingarten has long ties to the Democratic Party and that labor unions as a whole have long been antagonistic toward Musk.

That said, the report adds that Weingarten does raise some legitimate concerns about worker pensions being exposed to Tesla, including "falling quarterly earnings and profit margins, which the union said implied that Tesla was losing its pricing power; tumbling sales in California, a major market, and in Europe; greater competition in electric vehicle charging, a business Tesla has long dominated."

Progressive groups have also recently targeted Tesla dealerships for protests and have been urging people to boycott the company altogether.