😕 Iran Says It Never Happened

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Trump posted on Truth Social. Stocks jumped. Then Iran said it never happened.

That's Monday morning, compressed.

The post called Iran a "failing nation" that "wants to make a deal, quickly and badly." Trump added that he'll decide whether the U.S. engages, and that he's open to the concept.

Major U.S. averages ticked higher within minutes of it going live.

Because markets have been holding their breath over the Strait of Hormuz.

The conflict has been on-again, off-again, and every flare-up has disrupted energy flows through that one narrow channel.

So the second any hint of de-escalation appears, traders buy first and read later. Nobody signed anything. Somebody just typed something.

Iranian state-linked outlet Tasnim News dismissed the whole thing.

Their line: Iran has repeatedly made clear it isn't seeking talks with the U.S., and Trump is distorting where Tehran actually stands.

So one side says a deal is close and the other says there are no talks. Very reassuring.

Worth noting Trump has run this play before, calling Tehran eager to negotiate while questioning whether Iran would honour any accord it signed.

Monday's move was priced off a post.

Nothing changed in the physical world. No tanker route reopened. No document got signed. A message went up and the market read it as risk-on.

That's the thing about geopolitical rallies. They can unwind on the next headline just as fast as they arrived.

Everything still hangs on the same unresolved question, which is whether energy can move through Hormuz without incident. Until that's answered, oil and equities will keep getting yanked around by whoever posts last.

Meanwhile the economic calendar keeps grinding away in the background. No drama, no rally, still the thing deciding most of this.

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Tesla now sells more than half the EVs in America.

It got there by selling fewer cars.

Tesla captured 52% of U.S. EV sales through August, up from 43% a year earlier, according to Motor Intelligence data reported by The Wall Street Journal.

More than every other EV brand in the country combined.

You let everyone else lose faster.

Tesla's U.S. sales fell 16% to 325,351 vehicles. Ugly. Except the overall EV market shrank 30%.

Losing less than the field is still winning the field. It's just a strange trophy to hold up.

Rewind twelve months and Tesla looked finished. Its share hit a record-low 41% in 2025 as rivals flooded the market with new models and Elon Musk's political side quest cost him a chunk of the buyer pool.

Then the rivals walked off the pitch.

Federal EV incentives expired, the maths stopped working, and Ford $F ( ▼ 0.79% ) and GM $GM ( ▲ 1.8% ) started quietly reversing out of the driveway.

The casualty list of models being killed or phased out:

GM also cut production plans for the revived Chevy Bolt, and Nissan delayed the cheapest version of its new Leaf.

Tesla didn't out-innovate anyone here. It just stayed in the building.

The Model Y accounted for roughly one-third of all U.S. EV purchases. Not a third of Tesla's. A third of everyone's.

Sales dipped just 2% while the market fell off a cliff. Tesla even stretched it into a six-seat Model Y L this summer.

Now look at the rest of the lineup.

Model 3 sales dropped 34%. Cybertruck managed 9,769 units, which is about 3% of Tesla's own U.S. volume and a rounding error on a truck that was supposed to be a category killer.

The Model S and Model X? Discontinued. No direct replacements. Musk has moved on to robotaxis and humanoid robots.

So the whole American car business now balances on one SUV and a lot of promises.

A bigger slice of a smaller pie is still a real advantage. Tesla's competitive position genuinely strengthened, and analysts expect it to keep its dominant U.S. spot while legacy carmakers stay spooked on EV spending.

What it doesn't fix is demand. Buyers are leaving the category, and Tesla's earnings still depend heavily on selling metal boxes with wheels.

Which puts the long-term story on autonomous driving, AI and robotics actually turning into revenue. That's the bet now, whether investors signed up for it or not.

Three things would shift the picture: cheaper battery tech, renewed regulatory support, or a real recovery in consumer appetite. Until one of those shows up, the competitive threat stays parked.

Michael Burry thinks the AI doomsday talk is a marketing campaign.

The guy who shorted the housing bubble just aimed at OpenAI, Anthropic and every other lab currently asking the world to please slow them down before they hurt someone.

His verdict on the whole genre: "self-serving."

Here's the argument 👇

He posted four reasons he isn't buying it:

That last one is the spicy bit. Burry is suggesting the danger narrative is load-bearing for the valuation.

OpenAI and Anthropic both filed initial IPO paperwork with the SEC earlier this summer.

Then Sam Altman said OpenAI won't actually list this year, calling it an "ill-advised moment."

So: paperwork in, listing out, apocalypse chatter up. Burry's read is that the third thing keeps investors warm while the second thing slips.

The slowdown chorus is not two guys with a book to sell.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in a weekend essay that capability progress should be slowed. Altman publicly agreed on pacing the frontier. Elon Musk's contribution was three words: "Dario is right."

Microsoft's Satya Nadella has backed deliberate pacing so alignment gets designed in rather than bolted on. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis has supported coordinated slowdowns if risks build, and in July called for a US-led global watchdog to screen the most advanced models.

That's a lot of rivals agreeing on something that supposedly only helps incumbents. Then again, they're all incumbents.

There are two stories on the table and you can't verify either from the outside.

Story one: the people building it know something scary and are saying so out loud.

Story two: caution is the cheapest marketing a pre-IPO company can buy.

Both can be partly true at once. What's worth watching is whether the safety talk survives contact with an actual listing. Companies rarely go on roadshows advertising how dangerous their product is.

The wider signal here is simpler. When the loudest bear in finance starts arguing the AI story is running on narrative rather than numbers, the numbers are the thing to go check. Revenue growth, capex, and whether the compute bills ever start paying for themselves.

Burry has been early before. He's also been wrong before. Usually in that order.

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