Tesla is off to a bumpy start this year.

The electric vehicle giant’s profit plunged 71% in the first quarter to $409 million as the company faced a flurry of setbacks, including looming tariffs and a brand crisis perpetuated by Chief Executive Elon Musk’s prominent role in the Trump administration.

The Austin, Texas-based company reported adjusted earnings per share of 27 cents, well below analysts’ expectations of 41 cents.

Revenue during the period dropped 9% from a year earlier to $19.3 billion.

Although it remains the world’s dominant automaker, Tesla has seen its stock plunge nearly 40% this year amid a decline in automotive sales and increasing competition from other electric vehicle manufacturers.

Tesla’s share price, which rose 4.6% on Wednesday to close at $237.97, has been subject to turbulence for months.

Shares rose after President Trump purchased a Model S on the White House lawn in March, but fell significantly in early April as investors became increasingly worried about a backlash against the Tesla brand.

The treasurers of eight states wrote an open letter to Tesla’s board of directors last week, voicing concern that “Tesla’s recent performance signals deeper governance and leadership challenges.”

The treasurers questioned Musk’s role in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and cited dropping share prices and vehicle delivery numbers.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives previously slashed his price target for Tesla shares by more than 40% to $315 from $550.

Driving Tesla’s woes is Musk’s deteriorating reputation, Ives said, which has led to protests and boycotts against Tesla and incidents of vandalism on Tesla vehicles and chargers.

Musk leads DOGE, which has made controversial cost cuts under Trump.

“Tesla has become a political symbol around the world and that’s not a good thing,” Ives said in an interview. “Musk needs to recommit to Tesla and officially take a step back from DOGE to do damage control.”

Tesla drivers who were once drawn to the environmental benefits of electric vehicles are growing embarrassed by their cars’ association with Musk, The Times has reported. Several celebrities have gotten rid of their Teslas as part of a public stand against the company.

Meanwhile, the vehicles’ falling resale value suggests a drop in demand, said Iseecars.com analyst Karl Brauer. In February, Tesla topped the list of brands that lost the most resale value year over year.

Although Musk has found himself securely in Trump’s corner, the president’s actions on tariffs pose a significant challenge for Tesla, which now faces a 25% tax on auto imports.

This month, Tesla suspended imports of crucial auto parts from China after Trump announced a 145% tariff on Chinese goods. Tesla had relied on China for components used to build its Cybercab, Musk’s budding robotaxi effort that has yet to hit public roads.

Musk unveiled the Cybercab in October and said Tesla’s autonomous driving technology would be ready for use in the near future. He has been touting the capabilities of the company’s Full Self-Driving mode for years, though the feature cannot be used without a human driver behind the wheel.

The decision to halt imports from China could disrupt plans to mass produce the Cybercab, which are vital to investor confidence in the company. Tesla will also stop importing Chinese parts for its electric semi truck.

Tesla said it produced 362,615 vehicles in the first quarter and delivered 336,681 vehicles. Deliveries fell 13% from last year. The company’s newest vehicle, the Cybertruck, has seen a falloff in sales.

In a quarterly webcast, Musk sought to allay investor worries, saying he would spend less time in Washington.

He painted a bright future for Tesla, citing the potential of autonomous driving and predicting that Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, would lower labor costs and increase productivity.

“Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world by far but there will be a few bumps in the road before that happens,” Musk said on the call.

A number of otherwise skeptical senators took at face value the pledge by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Senate hearings in January to “follow the science” on issues related to the causes of disease in the U.S., helping him receive confirmation as secretary of Health and Human Services.

As he demonstrated last week at his very first news conference as the government’s top healthcare official, he was blowing smoke.

The topic was what he described as an “alarming … epidemic” of autism, supposedly documented by a new report by the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

His advice was to ignore what decades of scientific research have established as contributors to the reported increase in autism prevalence. These include genetic factors; the ever-broadening definition of autism itself, now known as autism spectrum disorder, or ASD; and vastly improved screening programs nationwide.

The inescapable conclusion is that Kennedy’s HHS is in the grip of a pseudoscience revolution in which misinformation and disinformation are ascendant. The cost to scientific research generally and to households caring for those with chronic conditions such as ASD is incalculable.

Kennedy’s words left much of the autism community aghast. At both his news conference and an accompanying HHS press release, “Kennedy repeated false claims that autism was a ‘preventable’ ‘epidemic’” and that the CDC report’s findings “could not be explained by improved access to screening,” stated the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. ASAN accused Kennedy of having “cherry-picked” data and having misinterpreted basic science.

“It’s not that the amount of autism in the population has changed,” the network’s statement said — “it’s that more people are getting the tools necessary to get a diagnosis.”

Observes Holden Thorp, the editor of Science, who disclosed last year that he was diagnosed with autism at the age of 53 (he’s now 60), “almost everything in the CDC report talked about better identification and better diagnosis being the source of the increase. … The main recommendation is to get people more access to services.”

I asked HHS to provide me with Kennedy’s response to these and other criticisms, but didn’t receive a response.

Kennedy’s words were so averse to understanding the truth about autism that they deserve to be set forth here in some detail. To a great extent, they’re refuted by the CDC report itself, which Kennedy referred to repeatedly at his news conference. The CDC estimated the rate of autism in the general population at about one in 31 children born in 2014. That’s a higher rate than was found even two years earlier.

But it doesn’t amount to an “epidemic” that is “running rampant,” as Kennedy said. He said “most cases now are severe,” which is untrue. In fact, the vast majority of new cases involve children without the intellectual disabilities often associated with stereotypical autistic behavior, such as sensitivities to touch and an absence of verbal skills. The prevalence of more severe cases has actually declined in recent years, according to a 2023 study from Rutgers.

Kennedy took special aim at what he called “the ideology that … the relentless autism prevalence increases are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition or changing diagnostic criteria.” He said “this epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media and it’s based on an industry canard” perpetrated by “people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures.”

Well, no. The contributions made by updated diagnostic standards and improved screening to changes in prevalence rates aren’t concoctions of the media, but findings from professional research — including the CDC report.

Kennedy scoffed at research that has established a genetic component to autism, even though such findings have been conclusive; he implied that spending on such studies is a waste of money because the research is a “dead end.”

He painted a dire picture of the lives of autistic people. “Autism destroys families,” he said. “These are kids who will never pay taxes, never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Kennedy’s fans played the “what he really meant to say” game on social media, arguing that he was referring only to the most seriously impaired. But that distinction wasn’t clearly made either in the HHS press release or at Kennedy’s news conference. Just to be plain, given Kennedy’s effort to shroud autistic people in stigma, many pay taxes. Many hold jobs. Many play baseball. Many write poetry, go on dates, don’t need help to use a toilet.

Put it all together, and Kennedy’s performance raises urgent questions about whether he understands autism at all or is just using it as a stalking horse to promote his assertion that “environmental toxins” are the root of chronic diseases.

Kennedy’s erroneous ideas about autism aren’t new. He has long favored the long-debunked claim that autism is related to childhood vaccinations. He didn’t specifically mention vaccines during his appearance, but more than once he claimed that “someone is putting environmental toxins into … our medicines.”

What medicines have most children received by their second birthday, when autism is commonly diagnosed? Vaccines, that’s what.

Kennedy seemed impervious to the findings of scientific researchers. That was the conclusion of Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine expert whose daughter Rachel is autistic. In 2017, the National Institutes of Health asked Hotez to meet with Kennedy to move him off the hobbyhorse of a vaccine-autism link. “I couldn’t engage him,” Hotez told me. “But he was so deeply dug in about vaccines that he wasn’t interested in listening.”

His encounter with Kennedy was what prompted Hotez to write his 2018 book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism.”

The truth is that researchers have made great strides in unearthing the causes and characteristics of autism. They’ve identified some genetic anomalies that lead to a predisposition to the spectrum.

Scientists at the University of North Carolina, Stanford and UC Davis have found unusual prenatal growth patterns in the brain that appear to correlate with ASD diagnoses in early childhood, though it’s unclear what triggers that growth. Some have found evidence of environmental factors, chiefly experienced by women in pregnancy, though some question whether any such factors can be primary determinants of ASD.

Kennedy would have been well-advised to spend more time reading his own agency’s report before citing it at his news conference. That’s because it refuted much of what he claimed.

To begin with, the report took a more nuanced view of autism than the horrific picture he painted of autism sufferers. Throughout, it refers to ASD — “autism spectrum disorder” — rather than painting it as “autism” with a single broad brush, as he did. The report explicitly states that the change in reported prevalence of ASD “can reflect differing practices in ASD evaluation and identification,” as well as differences in the availability of services for autistic people and their families.

Among other factors, the report states that ASD diagnoses among Black, Hispanic and other ethnic groups have increased because those “previously underserved groups” have received “increased access to … identification services” in recent years. That has certainly contributed to the apparent increase in ASD prevalence overall.

Until about 10 years ago, the report notes, the highest prevalence of ASD was found among white children and those from wealthier neighborhoods, plainly those with both the incentive to track their children’s intellectual development and the best resources to obtain services. (Access to health insurance covering autism diagnosis and treatment also correlated with prevalence rates, the CDC found.) Black, Hispanic and other ethnic groups have been catching up.

The report further documented how reported rates of ASD are related to differing approaches to screening and diagnostic services among states and local communities. The reported ASD rate was 9.7 per 1,000 children in Texas, but 53.1 in California.

Why would it be so high in California? The report notes that California has trained local pediatricians to screen and refer children for assessment as early as possible — at an average of 36 months, compared with the Texas average of nearly 70 months — which “could result in higher identification of ASD, especially at early ages.” California, moreover, has established “regional centers throughout the state that provide evaluations and service coordination for persons with disabilities and their families.”

What is Kennedy’s endgame here? He portrays himself as a seeker of scientific truth, but throughout his news conference he denigrated scientists for purportedly ignoring what he said were clear signals of an autism epidemic rendering “thousands of profoundly disabled children somehow invisible.” In doing so, he overlooked decades of fruitful research efforts aimed at uncovering the causes and nature of autism.

He left the impression that research into genetic or prenatal causes will get short shrift in grants from the National Institutes of Health, which comes under his jurisdiction. Instead, he’ll favor studies aimed at identifying specific environmental toxins, although their significance is unclear. He has already indicated that he plans to revive research tying vaccines to autism, though that connection consistently has been disproved.

Perhaps most disturbing is that Kennedy showed almost no awareness of the diversity of ASD — and the contribution that it has made to humanity. “Some neurodivergent people are meticulously observant and are able to connect seemingly disparate concepts — assets in the world of science,” Thorp wrote in connection with his own diagnosis. “Neurodiversity scholars and advocates have stressed that autistic thinkers are responsible for many innovations and advances across human history.”

There’s reason to fear that Kennedy’s quest for a cause or even a cure for autism will shoulder aside other research more important for those with ASD. As Emily Hotez, Rachel Hotez’s older sister and a leading autism researcher at UCLA, noted in an article she co-wrote after the CDC report’s release, the effort to identify autism’s cause has overlooked “something far more urgent: improving the lives of autistic people and their families, here and now.”

Nearly 2 million California rooftop solar owners could lose the energy credits that help them cover what they spent to install the expensive climate-friendly systems under a proposed state bill.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Lisa Calderon (D-Whittier), is a former executive at Southern California Edison and its parent company, Edison International. She says the credits that rooftop owners receive when they send unused electricity to the grid is raising the bills of customers who don’t own the panels.

Her bill, AB 942, would limit the current program’s benefits to 10 years — half the 20 year-period the state had told the rooftop owners they would receive. The bill would also cancel the solar contracts if the home was sold.

Southern California Edison and the state’s two other big for-profit utilities have long tried to reduce the energy credits that incentivized Californians to invest in the solar panels. The rooftop solar systems have cut into the utilities’ sales of electricity.

The legislation, which applies to people who bought the systems before April 15, 2023, has outraged some Californians who invested tens of thousands to install the solar panels.

“We’re just trying to reduce our carbon footprint and you’re penalizing me for that?” said David Rynerson, a Huntington Beach resident who spent $20,000 to install the panels. “That’s just absurd.”

Until she was elected in 2020, Calderon spent 25 years at Southern California Edison and Edison International. Her last position was as a government affairs executive at Edison International, where she managed the utility’s political action committee.

Calderon declined to be interviewed. In a statement, she said that she wasn’t acting on behalf of the utility companies.

“I introduced this bill with one goal in mind: to help lower the cost of energy for Californians,” she said.

Calderon said if her bill was enacted it would reduce electric costs for customers who do not own the panels beginning in 2026.

According to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political spending, Southern California Edison and the other two big investor-owned utilities are among Calderon’s most generous corporate donors.

Last year, the the company gave Calerdon’s campaign $11,000. Sempra, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric, also contributed $11,000, while Pacific Gas & Electric provided $8,000.

Southern California Edison spokesperson Kathleen Dunleavy said that the company supports rooftop solar but it also supports efforts to reduce the amount of costs that have been shifted to customers who don’t own the panels.

She said the company’s political contributions to elected officials “are based on their shared interest in how best to safely serve SCE customers reliable and affordable energy.”

In her statement to The Times, Calderon said that “political contributions have no bearing on any policy decisions I make.”

Calderon is a member of a political dynasty that has held power in the blue-collar neighborhoods east of Los Angeles for four decades.

She is married to Charles Calderon, a former state Assembly speaker and former state Senate majority leader. She was elected to the Assembly seat that had been held by her stepson Ian Calderon.

Under California’s rooftop solar program, owners get a credit on their electric bills for the solar energy they produce but don’t use. The credit is based on the current retail electric rates. The value of the credits has increased rapidly as the state’s Public Utilities Commission approved rate increases requested by the companies.

In December 2022, the big utility companies successfully pressed the commission to slash financial incentives that rooftop solar owners could receive by about 75%, starting with those people purchasing the systems on April 15, 2023.

The commission left in place the program for owners who purchased the panels by that date. The agency says the value of the credits given to those owners is now a leading cause of the state’s rising electric bills — a claim that has been disputed by the rooftop solar industry and dozens of environmental groups.

In a February report to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the commission suggested reducing the number of years that rooftop solar owners can receive credits at the retail electric rate — similar to what Calderon’s bill would do — as a remedy for escalating power costs. California now has the country’s second highest electric rates.

The commission says the rooftop customers are not contributing their fair share of the costs to maintain the electrical grid, so the expense is shifted to those who don’t own the panels.

Dozens of environmental groups sent a letter this month to the chair of the Assembly Utilities & Energy Committee opposing Calderon’s bill and pointing out that the state has long said the solar contracts would last for 20 years, which is the expected useful life of the panels.

“The CPUC’s new proposal, to break energy contracts mid-stream, would be patently unfair,” the groups wrote. “It would punish the very people who California encouraged to invest in solar energy. And it would gut consumer confidence and trust in government.”

The groups pointed out that when Californians bought the systems, they signed a state-mandated legal agreement with their utility that details in the terms that the customer is eligible to receive the credits for 20 years.

In California, under a policy known as decoupling, utilities don’t make more money as customers use more energy. Instead they make most of their profit by building infrastructure, including poles, wires and the rest of the grid.

In their letter, the environmental groups pointed to an analysis that economist Richard McCann performed for the rooftop solar industry that found that electric rates had risen as the utilities spent more on infrastructure.

Even though homeowners’ solar panels helped keep demand for electricity flat for 20 years, the three utilities’ spending on transmission and distribution infrastructure had risen by 300%, McCann found.

“To address rising rates, California must focus on what’s really wrong with our energy system: uncontrolled utility spending and record utility profits,” the environmental groups wrote.

A hearing on the bill is scheduled in the Assembly Utilities & Energy committee on April 30.

Cherene Birkholz of Long Beach said that she and her husband spent $22,000 on panels for their home. The couple saw the solar panels, she said, as a way to control costs so they could stay in California after they retired.

Birkholz said she believed the credits would continue for 20 years. The proposed legislation, she said, “came as a shock.”

“If I had known, I may not have made these decisions,” she said.

Dwight James of Simi Valley said that he spent $35,000 on solar panels in 2018 and another $40,000 on batteries to store the power in 2021. He said he financed the purchase with a 20-year loan and that he found it “disturbing” that the state would now back out of what it had promised.

“If you follow the money, it gives you all the answers,” James said. “My thought is that this bill is a way for the utility companies to try to hold on a little bit longer and slow the adoption of solar.”