Tesla’s Brand Turns Toxic: Investor Pushes Rivian to Buy the EV Business in 2026
An investor's bombshell claim lands: Tesla's brand has gone negative. The proposed remedy? Rivian should buy the EV business.
The Brand Backlash
It's not about quarterly deliveries or new battery tech anymore. The core narrative has shifted. A prominent investor is now publicly framing Tesla's most valuable asset—its brand—as a liability. This isn't a dip; it's a fundamental reassessment of consumer and market sentiment. The shine is off.
The Radical Prescription
Forget a new CEO or a marketing blitz. The suggested fix is a corporate takeover. The investor is pointing squarely at Rivian, the upstart, as the potential acquirer of Tesla's electric vehicle division. It's a staggering role reversal—the legacy-maker being absorbed by the challenger to salvage its core operation. Talk about a plot twist Wall Street didn't see coming.
Market Mechanics in Motion
This isn't just gossip. It's a signal flare about perceived value dislocation. When a brand turns from an asset to an anchor, the calculus for investors changes completely. It forces a brutal conversation about break-up value, strategic optionality, and who actually has the momentum. Rivian gets named not just as a savior, but as the entity with the clean slate needed to reset the story.
The move would be less about synergy and more about survival—stripping the tarnished brand to salvage the industrial machinery beneath. It’s the ultimate finance cynic's play: when the story's broken, sell the parts. Sometimes, the most bullish move for a company's technology is to give up on its name.
Rivian posts surprise profit, shares jump 27%
Rivian delivered a shock to the market last week when it reported far stronger results than analysts had expected. Shares in the Irvine, California-based company jumped 27% on Friday after the announcement, with investors seeing the numbers as a sign that Rivian may finally be on its way to lasting profitability after years of heavy losses.
For 2025, Rivian reported a gross profit of $144 million, a major turnaround from a net loss of $1.2 billion in 2024.
“It’s a turnaround for the ages,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “The past few years have been very frustrating for investors.”
Rivian said the improvement came from stronger software and services revenue, higher average selling prices, and lower costs per vehicle.
Rivian delivered 42,247 vehicles in 2025, down from a record 51,579 the year before, and produced 42,284 over the same period. It still recorded a net loss of $432 million for the year on its automotive operations, though that was an improvement from 2024. The company said it expects to deliver between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles this year.
Rivian also said Amazon now has more than 30,000 custom-built electric delivery vans running in the United States and parts of Europe. The vans are part of a deal that calls for Amazon to have 100,000 of the purpose-built vehicles on the road by 2030.
The delivery van has been in production largely unchanged since late 2021. Its biggest update came in 2023 when Rivian switched to a lithium iron phosphate battery pack and an in-house electric motor. The company is now planning a broader refresh for the van, which has led segment sales in the United States, boosted in large part by the Amazon contract.
Tesla’s profits fall for second straight year
Tesla, by contrast, reported its second straight year of falling profits last month. The Austin-based company’s net income dropped 46% in 2025, coming in at $3.8 billion.
On Sunday, Daniel Milligan posted a video on X tagging Elon Musk and Tesla’s VP of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, saying his Tesla “tried to drive” him into a lake while running Full Self-Driving version 14.2.2.4.
My Tesla tried to drive me into a lake today! FSD version 14.2.2.4 (2025.45.9.1)@Tesla @aelluswamy pic.twitter.com/ykWZFjUm8k
— Daniel Milligan (@lilmill2000) February 16, 2026
In the video, Milligan sets a destination on the map, activates FSD, and the car heads straight onto a boat ramp before he hits the brakes.
Milligan then posted a follow-up video the next day to show the incident was not a one-off. “Here is a video I took inside the car to prove I didn’t fake it. It’s repeatable at night,” he wrote. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
The videos have drawn fresh attention to questions about how reliable FSD actually is. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into the technology in October last year, covering over 2.88 million Tesla vehicles after receiving reports of more than 50 traffic safety violations and multiple accidents.
Milligan is not the only one raising concerns. Gerber has also criticized FSD, calling it “annoying” and saying it does not work properly in sunny weather. Gerber was also using version 14.2.2.4 at the time.
Musk, meanwhile, has continued to tout Tesla as having the largest autonomous vehicle fleet in the world. Investor Gary Black of the Future Fund LLC says Tesla stock could rally once the company announces it is running hundreds of unsupervised Robotaxis in Austin and other cities.
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