Call Stellantis Tom Petty because the automaker is free falling. Sales across its 14 car brands tanked last quarter for the fifth time in a row amid flailing demand for the Jeep parent’s overstocked, relatively expensive inventory, the company announced yesterday.

Stellantis reported:

• US sales between July and September fell 19.8% from the year before and 11.5% from the previous three-month period. That’s a gut punch to Stellantis’s bottom line—more than half of its profits tend to come from the American market.
• Driving the dip were Chrysler and Dodge. Sales for both plunged more than 40% last quarter, but every other Stellantis brand, except Fiat, also logged negative growth.
• The company sold enough cars to shave down its inventory by 11.6%, but its US dealerships are still bursting at the seams: Ram has about double the industry average (77 days’ worth) of trucks waiting to be sold, and Dodge and Jeep aren’t far behind.

Bad timing. Since its 2021 merger-birth, Stellantis has discontinued some smaller vehicles and focused on bigger, pricier cars, just as American drivers got hungrier for cozier, cheaper rides. Now, the company is prepping to roll out new EVs, even as consumers get more keen on hybrids.

‘You created this problem,’ dealerships tell Stellantis CEO

With this latest setback, Chief Executive Carlos Tavares will likely remain public enemy No. 1 among Stellantis’s network of US car dealers. In an open letter last month, the group’s chairman accused Tavares of prioritizing short-term profit goals that qualified him for a 50% raise to the detriment of the company’s long-term health.

Critics have noted that Stellantis raised prices more than most competitors in the past few years and waited longer to issue discounts. Amid high interest rates, that priced out a lot of customers.

Tavares copped to making “arrogant” mistakes at the company’s investor day in June. He pledged to boost car discounts but is also warning of a meager 7% operating profit this year.—ML

Threat of wider war grows in the Middle East. Israeli ground troops clashed with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon yesterday, with Israel reporting eight of its soldiers were killed in the first direct ground fighting. Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli bombings killed six people in Beirut. Meanwhile, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed retaliation for Iran’s Tuesday ballistic missile attack on Israel in response to Israel’s assassination of the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah. President Biden said he would not support an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities but said he and the other G7 leaders “agree that they have a right to respond, but they have to respond proportionally.”

Tesla’s sales are picking up—but maybe not enough. Following two consecutive quarters of declining sales, Tesla’s vehicle sales finally went up in the period from July to September. But the 6.3% jump in sales from the previous quarter still disappointed Wall Street, which had estimated an even higher delivery number than the 462,890 Tesla reported, sending the company’s stock down. Electric vehicle sales overall appeared to be improving, but for Tesla, that also means there’s more competition. Now, investors are waiting for Elon Musk’s promised robotaxi reveal on October 10.

Special counsel lays out his election interference case against Trump. In a 165-page filing unsealed yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith presented the evidence he has to argue that Donald Trump was acting in his private capacity as a candidate and not in his official role as a president on January 6, 2021. The filing is part of Smith’s effort to keep his case alive after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling granting broad immunity to presidents for official acts. Rather than acting as the president, the brief argues, Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”—AR

You’re going to want to really lean into apple picking this season. With the dockworkers strike shutting down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, supply chains will be disrupted. One of the first casualties? Bananas.

Nearly three-fourths of bananas (the most popular fruit in the US) enter through the now-dark East and Gulf Coast ports. Because they are perishable, retailers couldn’t stockpile them like other items in preparation for the strike, and it’s too expensive to ship them by air.

Other things that might get scarce:

• Hundreds of containers of coffee beans are currently waiting idle, but the good news is the cold brew will be stronger the longer the beans sit in the water.
• Cherries, electronics, and alcohol could experience delays.

Supply chain experts are also worried about vehicles and auto parts. It would be nearly impossible to load the ~200,000 metric tons of auto parts that typically enter through the shuttered ports every month onto an airplane, Michigan State Professor Jason Miller said on LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, American poultry producers and soybean farmers could have trouble exporting products.

What you don’t need to worry about. Some people will find any reason to start hoarding toilet paper, but more than 90% of paper products are produced domestically.—MM

The king of the basketball court wants to make his imprint on the racetrack: Michael Jordan’s 23XI Racing group is one of two teams that filed an antitrust lawsuit against Nascar and its CEO Jim France yesterday. It alleges that the organization uses monopolistic practices to limit competition and unfairly control teams.

The lawsuit stems from two years of ongoing negotiations between Nascar and racing teams over the charter system, a franchise-like operation in which Nascar guarantees teams’ cars a spot in each race and a portion of revenue from TV deals. In September, both 23XI and Front Row Motorsports refused to sign the charter renewal for next season, saying it denied teams a fair share of revenue.

The suit claims:

• Nascar and its owners, the France family, are “monopolistic bullies” who eliminated competition in the sport by buying up racetracks and making teams sign exclusivity agreements.
• The company threatened to take away teams’ charters if they didn’t sign its offer for next season. At least four teams are listed as having signed the contract under duress.

Zoom out: The lawsuit is the latest to take aim at powerful professional sports leagues long thought to be inviolable, following high-profile cases against the NBA and PGA. Jordan has retained GOAT antitrust attorney Jeffrey Kessler, known for garnering the USWNT equal pay and setting the groundwork for NFL free agency.—CC

Sam Altman’s path to world domination just got clearer. OpenAI has completed the largest VC fundraising round of all time, raking in $6.6 billion in a deal that values the company at $157 billion. The new fundraising, led by Thrive Capital, puts the ChatGPT-maker among the top three biggest venture-backed startups along with fellow potential supervillain Elon Musk’s SpaceX and TikTok owner ByteDance, sources told Bloomberg.

The substantial cash infusion comes as OpenAI plans to ditch its nonprofit oversight structure amid the departures of several high-ranking leaders. It also comes as the company needs massive funds to achieve its lofty AI goals: Before the funding deal came through, OpenAI expected to make $3.7 billion this year, but it still anticipated losing $5 billion because its costs are so high, per the New York Times. The company is also reportedly trying to keep competitors from getting access to the same cash pile by asking its investors for exclusivity.—AR