"Reality doesn't give a damn about your PowerPoint."
That sentence should be framed on the wall of every CEO who, over the past five years, walked onto a stage with lasers and fog machines to announce they were going to "lead the electric revolution." Well then: Stellantis — that massive conglomerate controlling Jeep, Dodge, Fiat, Chrysler, Peugeot, and a whole bunch of other brands you've either driven or dreamed of driving — just posted the first annual loss in its history.
This wasn't a minor stumble on the curb. It was a crater of €22.3 billion. Converted: roughly $26.3 billion. To put that in perspective, you could buy the Dallas Cowboys, the New York Mets, and still have enough left over to pick up an NBA franchise.
The write-down that's really a confession
Inside that massive loss, €25.4 billion are write-downs — in plain English, the company looked at everything it invested in electric vehicles and said: "This stuff isn't worth what we thought it was."
It's like that guy who bought Bitcoin at $69,000 in 2021 and now has to face his account statement. Except here we're talking about factories, technology platforms, entire assembly lines built on a single premise: the whole world is going to want an electric car, and they're going to want it now.
CEO Antonio Filosa — who inherited this ticking time bomb — was surgical in his statement: "Our 2025 results reflect the cost of overestimating the pace of the energy transition."
Translation from corporate-speak: "We bought into the narrative, and the narrative was bullshit."
It's not just Stellantis — the whole sector is retreating
This is where the story gets really interesting for investors.
Stellantis isn't alone in this billion-dollar mea culpa. GM, Ford, and Honda — all of them — announced massive write-downs in recent months, acknowledging they threw money into a pit called "EVs at any cost."
This is corporate herd mentality in its purest form. Remember The Big Short? When everyone in the American housing market swore prices could only go up? Same dynamic here. CEOs watched Tesla riding a wave, governments handing out subsidies like candy on Halloween, and thought: "If we don't jump in now, we'll be left behind."
The problem? The consumer never got the script.
The average consumer — the one paying bills, supporting a family, and needing a car that works without the drama — looked at the EV price tag, looked at the real range (not the one in the brochure), looked at the charging infrastructure, and said: "No thanks. Give me the hybrid. Or better yet, give me the good old combustion engine."
The numbers that matter for investors
- Adjusted operating loss of €842 million in 2025 versus a profit of €8.65 billion in 2024. That's epic value destruction.
- Dividends suspended in 2026. If you were a shareholder counting on that yield, well, tough luck.
- Shares dropped more than 31% on the year. And fell another 0.8% on announcement day — the market had already priced in part of the disaster.
- The company issued €5 billion in hybrid bonds to shore up its cash position. Translation: it had to take on debt to survive its own bet.
The "less bad" side? In the second half of 2025, revenues rose 10% and shipments in North America improved. The company promises positive industrial free cash flow by 2027 and reiterated mid-single-digit revenue growth guidance for 2026.
In other words: there's a recovery plan. But plans look great on paper — execution is a whole different story.
The lesson nobody wants to hear
Nassim Taleb would say this is the classic cost of fragility: systems that look robust in calm waters and blow up at the first headwind. Stellantis bet on a linear narrative — "inevitable and accelerated energy transition" — and discovered that the future isn't linear, it's chaotic.
The electric car market isn't dead. But the fantasy that it would be instant mass adoption? That one's in the coffin.
And you, investor: next time a CEO with a toothpaste-commercial smile promises you an "inevitable revolution," remember these $26 billion that went up in smoke.
The one who footed the bill wasn't the CEO. It was the shareholders.
It always is.
