Whatever you think of Elon Musk personally, you have to give him credit for, more than anybody else, moving the world from the internal combustion past to the EV future. Or do you?

Why it matters: A narrative is now emerging that Musk might have actually done more harm than good for the EV industry as a whole. That narrative, however, largely ignores the crucial role played by the stock market, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.

The case against Tesla, as laid out in a now-deleted post on Threads by Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, is that two big lies propelled Tesla to its dominance in EVs.

1. Tesla lied about the range of its vehicles, at a time when range anxiety was the top concern that car buyers had with EVs, as a Reuters investigation found.
2. Tesla persuaded buyers into shelling out thousands of extra dollars for software with names like "enhanced autopilot," "full self-driving," and the like — all on the false promise that cars with that software would soon get an update making them fully autonomous vehicles that could earn money on their own by acting as driverless taxis.

What they're saying: "I call this the biggest Kickstarter rugpull in history," wrote Moskovitz.

Between the lines: Moskovitz's thesis is that Tesla's lies created a "gravitational effect" whereby customers, talented employees and funding ended up flowing to Tesla rather than anybody else.

The big picture: Absent Tesla's lies, asserts Moskovitz, other companies — most notably BYD, in China, but also Toyota, Nikola, and others — would have had more demand for their own EVs, more access to talented engineers, and more cashflow with which to develop new models.

• "At a high level, I believe Elon accelerated the development of EVs by at most 1-2 years," wrote Moskovitz. "It's plausible to me he actually delayed it."

The other side: Even now, EVs comprise only a minority of new vehicles sold in the U.S. and in most other markets. Ford has been surprised by demand for its hybrid vehicles and is ramping up their production, even as it continues to lose billions on its EV operations.

• There's one reason above all others why a storied and profitable business like Ford would invest so much money in EVs — and that's Tesla's market valuation.
• Tesla's market cap (it's worth $850 billion, versus just $50 billion for Ford) is very real, even if its claims and promises are fake. And the only way for legacy car makers to lay claim to some of that perceived future value is for them to move aggressively into EVs themselves.

The bottom line: The world should be happy that Musk failed to take Tesla private in 2018. Its astonishing success as a public company — more than its success as a carmaker — is what has really driven the rest of the world to switch to an electric-first strategy.

🛑 CVS to cut 5,000 jobs and reduce travel in cost-cutting moves. (WSJ)

🇨🇳 U.S. commerce chief Gina Raimondo plans a trip to China as tension over tech control simmers. (Bloomberg)

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A new survey from Zillow offers a snapshot of the "rate lock" phenomenon we’ve been writing about, Emily writes.

• The survey finds that homeowners with a mortgage rate below 5% are much less likely to consider selling their homes than those with a higher rate.

Why it matters: Some 80% of mortgage holders in the U.S. have rates below 5%, per the survey. It's no wonder the pace of existing home sales keeps dropping, while prices remain elevated.

What's next: The same survey found that the share of homeowners (with or without mortgages) who say they're considering selling within three years has increased to 23% from 15% in 2022.

• That sentiment is a sign that the housing market is looking a lot more stable than at the start of the Fed rate-hiking campaign when the expectation was that prices would drop, and it wasn't clear how high rates would go.
• "It makes a lot of sense to try and ride out that storm," said Jeff Tucker, a senior economist at Zillow.
• These days rates have settled into a range of 6%-7%, and home prices have been relatively flat. "People are getting used to it."

German stocks are at record highs, while their U.S. cousins remain short of such levels, Felix writes.

Why it matters: TSMINTE (the stock market is not the economy). German GDP was stagnant in the second quarter, showing zero growth rather than the 0.3% growth that economists had expected.

Between the lines: German stocks trade at more than a 40% discount to U.S. stocks in terms of price-to-earnings ratios, and they've underperformed the S&P 500 significantly over the past five years.

• As a result, compared with U.S. stocks they may actually look attractive, even when they're at record highs.
• Just don't take that as a vote of confidence in the sluggish German economy.

The latest SLOOS is out — and it shows a growing share of banks still tightening their lending standards, Axios' Courtenay Brown reports.

• Be smart: The SLOOS — or the Fed's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey — provides a quarterly snapshot of whether banks are tightening or loosening credit.

Why it matters: If credit keeps tightening, it could weigh on the economy, which has already showed signs of cooling but has so far remained resilient despite the Fed's ultra-aggressive rate hiking campaign.

By the numbers: A net 51% of banks said they had tightened lending standards for larger and medium-sized businesses over the last three months, per the latest survey, out yesterday.

• That's up from roughly 46% of banks who said the same in the first quarter of this year.

Of note: What remains unclear is the extent to which this spring's bank failures sped up the tightening of lending that was previously underway.

• As Fed chair Jerome Powell said at his press conference last week: "I think it's really hard to tease out … how much of [the tighter loan standards] is from this source or that source, but I think what matters is the overall picture is of tight and tightening lending conditions."

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