Tesla shares have tumbled 62% from their peak as investors gear up for a growth slowdown.
The stock drop has fueled an estimated $160 billion decline in Elon Musk's net worth.
The Tesla CEO is now worth about $178 billion, down from $340 billion in November 2021.
Tesla's mounting troubles have dealt a heavy blow to Elon Musk's net worth.
In November 2021, the Tesla CEO held the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and seemed untouchable with an estimated fortune of $340 billion. He was more than three times richer than Warren Buffett at that point.
However, Musk's net worth has plunged by about $160 billion since then to $178 billion at Tuesday's close. The key driver has been Tesla stock, which has tumbled from a split-adjusted peak of $415 in 2021 to $157 — a 62% decline.
The share-price slump has slashed Tesla's market capitalization from north of $1.2 trillion to below $500 billion. Musk's net worth has taken a big hit from the decline because his 13% stake in the automaker makes up a big chunk of his wealth.
Musk's start to this year has also been dismal relative to his peers in the 12-digit club. He topped the Bloomberg rich list with a $229 billion fortune in January, but his net worth has crashed by $51 billion, or 22%, since then.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO now ranks third in the wealth rankings, behind LVMH's Bernard Arnault and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is on the verge of leapfrogging him too.
Moreover, Musk is the only one of the world's 11 richest people whose net worth has declined this year. He's lost more money on paper than anyone on the list has gained, including Zuckerberg who's up almost $50 billion.
Tesla's stock has tumbled in recent months due to mounting concerns about the company. Musk told employees over the weekend that more than 10% of the company's global workforce would be laid off, signaling demand for EVs is faltering.
Musk's fortune isn't completely tied to Tesla. He also owns an estimated 42% stake in SpaceX, the space exploration company valued at $180 billion in December, and a roughly 79% stake in X after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it last year.
The new guideline, which kicks in on December 1,ensures that bosses officially consider requests for flexible arrangements that help workers manage their personal and professional lives, according to a Tuesday government release.
The announcement highlights a global effort by governments to give employees more flexibility and relax in-office policies. The UK, Ireland, and Australia have implemented similar arrangements.
In Singapore, 73% of young employeessaid they preferred remote jobs, according to a 2023 survey by research firm Universum.
While the guideline is not legally binding, employees can seek assistance from the national trade union or their individual union if they feel their request was not properly considered. Employers can reject the request if they believe it affects the company's productivity and ability to meet a client's demand.
Women and older workers are more likely to request flexible work arrangements, the government noted. Women are more likely to work from home than men: 41% of women, compared with 28% of men, worked remotely in the US, according to the 2022 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey.
"Flexible work arrangements can be beneficial for both employees and employers," said Gan Siow Huang, Singapore's minister of state for manpower, in the press release. "They enable employees to achieve better work-life harmony, and give employers a competitive advantage in talent attraction and retention."
Singapore's version of the guideline applies to all businesses, regardless of size. It includes all workers once they have completed probation, the trial period at the beginning of the job when the employer can asses if someone is a good fit.
Having a formal process in place for workers to make requests can improve employees' mental health and work-life balance, Theodoric Chew, CEO of workplace mental health platform Intellect, told Business Insider.
If early adopters, like government agencies, show that flexible work helps employees without sacrificing productivity, companies will follow, Chew said.
Several American leaders, including Bernie Sanders, Point72 CEO Steve Cohen, and IAC and Expedia chairman Barry Diller, have called for, or predicted, four-day workweeks.
US Fed chair Jerome Powell has signaled a delay in expected interest rate cuts.
He said the Fed needs more time to be confident that its fight against inflation is working.
An analyst suggests excess money, a result of pandemic-era policies, may be drained from the economy this year.
US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell damped expectations of impending interest rate cuts on Tuesday — a sign that the Fed may have pumped so much money into the economy during the pandemic that the surplus is still making its way through the country.
Speaking on a panel discussion at the Wilson Center in Washington, Powell said while inflation pressure has eased in the last year, it hasn't come down enough in recent months.
"The recent data have clearly not given us greater confidence and instead indicate that is likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence," Powell said Tuesday
This means that the Fed isn't confident at this point that inflation is headed to its 2% target level in the longer term.
Strong job growth is contributing to price gains. In particular, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index — a key inflation metric for the Fed — was little changed in March over its 2.8% reading in February, Powell pointed out.
So the Fed can keep interest rates higher for longer to cool price rises — although the central bank also has room to cut should the labor market "unexpectedly weaken," Powell added.
"If higher inflation does persist, we can maintain the current level of restriction for as long as needed," he said.
Higher interest rates make borrowing more expensive for anything from mortgages to credit cards — it encourages people to save rather than spend, which in theory, helps bring down prices. But it takes a while for the effects to be felt, and the risk is that the central bank raises rates to the point where the economy slows down and even tilts into recession as demand contracts.
Conversely, lower interest rates encourage borrowing and spending — thus driving the economy when growth slows, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Fed cut rates massively and pumped money into the system.
Excess money may be drained from the economy this year, an analyst said
Powell's comments on Tuesday were a departure from just a month ago, when Fed officials stuck to their expectations of three rate cuts this year.
They also illustrate the Fed's tricky balance as it tries to steer the US economy into a "soft landing," thus averting a recession.
Jim Reid, a research strategist at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note on Tuesday that he believes it will be "incredibly difficult" to achieve a soft landing for the US economy because it's moved from the largest jump in the money supply since the World War II to the largest contraction since 1930.
Even though the Fed has tightened the money supply — hiking interest rates 11 times since March 2022 — the scale of the COVID-19 stimulus and money supply is still taking time to work through the system, Reid added in the note published before Powell's comments on the same day.
But Reid thinks the excess money could be drained from the economy later this year, when money supply in the economy normalizes.
"If that's correct, then maybe cutting rates in preparation for that is actually the correct thing to do," said Reid. "However, faced with inflation that is currently accelerating, that would be very, very difficult for the Fed to communicate and be comfortable doing."
Deustche Bank is just pricing in one Fed rate cut, in December 2024.
Demand, supply chain snarls, and fiscal stimulus also contribute to inflation
To be sure, money supply isn't the only thing that contributes to inflation.
As Bill Dudley, a former president of the Federal Reserve of New York, explained in an opinion piece for Bloomberg in February 2023, other factors influencing the US economy includeconsumer demand and stimulus money, and the Fed keeping rates "too low for too long."
"If rates had been considerably higher, earlier, the economy would have grown more slowly, the labor market wouldn't be as tight and wage and price inflation would be lower," wrote Dudley.
Fed Chair Powell had said inflation was "transitory" amid the COVID-19 pandemic but stopped using the term in 2022 amid persistent price rises.
The Fed will gather on April 30 to May 1 for its next policy meeting.
The "turtle tank" was seen in Ukrainian drone footage earlier this month.
Screenshot/Telegram via @Khortytsky_wind, ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
A Russian tank has gone viral after being spotted with a metal roof during an attack.
Dubbed the "turtle tank" online, it's become a meme-like fascination for those interested in the Ukraine war.
The modification hearkens to the last-resort practice of installing "cope cages" on tanks at the start of the war.
Ukrainian drone footage of an attacking Russian convoy has revealed an odd vehicle rolling onto the battlefield — a tank appearing to wear a metal tent on its head.
Jury-rigged with what appears to be a large metal structure resembling the roof of a shed, the vehicle was seen leading a convoy toward Krasnohorivka, a city in Donetsk, in clips uploaded on Telegram by Ukrainian forces on April 9. It's unclear when the vehicle was first deployed on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Ukraine said the attack was ultimately repelled, but the modified vehicle, dubbed the "turtle tank" online, has become an internet star for its comically hefty shielding.
Since the early days of the war in Ukraine, Russian engineers have been spotted fitting crude metal structures on their tanks to better protect occupants from anti-tank fire. Ukrainian tanks were later seen following suit. Military observers, doubting their true effectiveness, often call these "cope cages."
But the "turtle tank" takes things one step further, with metal sheets covering its body so extensively that the vehicle can barely turn its gun, as seen in a separate video uploaded by the open-source intelligence Telegram channel CyberBoroshno. The close-up shows what looks like a T-72 covered from front to back by the roof-like structure.
CyberBoroshno later posted that based on the footage, its team geolocated a hangar that housed the "turtle tank." It said Ukrainian forces had struck the building, and uploaded drone footage of the wrecked vehicle.
Since then, several similar Russian vehicles have been spotted online. A day after the "turtle tank" became internet famous, open-source X account Ukraine Battle Map posted a photo of another tank clad in a tent-like metal structure.
And on Tuesday, Ukrainian activist Serhii Sternenko posted two photos of another vehicle covered in pallets, but this time fitted with an electronic jammer to ward off drone attacks.
Sternenko said the Russian vehicle was spotted near Krasnohorivka, where the original "turtle tank" was seen.
Russia's defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
The extreme tank modifications come as Ukraine leans into strikes with first-person view unmanned drones, which are cheap and often piloted with explosives into weak spots of armored targets.
Drones are being used so extensively in the war that they've sparked interest in unmanned devices becoming a staple in modern conflicts elsewhere.
A Russian radar installation during Vostok-2018 (East-2018) military drills at Telemba training ground on September 12, 2018.
MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP via Getty Images
Ukraine said on Tuesday that it used 7 exploding drones to destroy a Russian radar system.
Ukrainian media said the destroyed system was a Nebo-U, which monitors hundreds of miles of airspace.
Ukraine assessed that the Nebo-U, downed by cheap drones, was worth $100 million.
Ukrainian media reported on Tuesday that Kyiv destroyed a sophisticated Russian radar complex using seven exploding drones, in another apparent sign of how the cheap, unmanned devices are changing the face of modern combat.
Citing an unnamed source from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the Kyiv Independent and Ukrainska Pravda reported that the Russian system was a Nebo-U radar complex stationed in Bryansk, a Russian region bordering northern Ukraine.
It was monitoring Ukrainian airspace as deep as 434 miles past the border, per the SBU source. Ukrainian outlets reported that the destroyed Nebo-U was worth about $100 million.
The exact price of this Nebo-U is not immediately clear, but it's a newer system rolled out to Russian forces about eight years ago, per Russian state media reports.
With the elimination of this Nebo-U, the SBU source said, Russia now has "fewer opportunities to detect air targets along Ukraine's northern border."
Ukraine said this is the second Nebo-U that it's destroyed, with the first taken out in Belgorod, a Russian region near the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Multiple variations of the Nebo, which translates to "sky" in Russian, are used by Russian air and ground forces. More modern versions, such as the Nebo-U and the Nebo-M, were listed at launch by Russian media as being able to detect aircraft, guided missiles, and ballistics up to a range of 372 miles.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has intensified drone strikes on Russian soil, attacking targets hundreds of miles from the front lines. On April 5, for example, it launched a large-scale drone attack on an airbase in the Russian region of Rostov.
The Russian defense ministry and Ukraine's security services did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
The war in Ukraine has cast a spotlight on the combat deployment of first-person unmanned drones, which are inexpensive and often equipped with explosives that can be dropped on or flown into targets with precision.
Grzegorz Wajda/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Elon Musk says Tesla has to do a "complete organizational overhaul" every once in a while.
This, Musk says, would enable his company "to reach the next level."
Musk's remarks come after a round of mass layoffs at Tesla, where it cut more than 10% of staff.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the EV giant needs to do a "complete organizational overhaul to reach the next level" every "half decade or so."
"That said, our executive tenure is unusually high at well over 10 years at Tesla," Musk wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Musk's remarks come after reports of mass layoffs at Tesla. The company is slashing "more than 10%" of its head count, per an internal memo obtained by BI. Tesla employs more than 140,000 people around the world.
In his memo to staff, Musk said that Tesla's "rapid growth" had resulted in "duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas."
"There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done. This will enable us to be lean, innovative, and hungry for the next growth phase cycle," Musk wrote.
This week's layoffs also coincide with the departure of two longtime Tesla executives.
Drew Baglino, senior vice president of powertrain and Electrical engineering, and Rohan Patel, vice president of public policy and business development, said on Monday that they are leaving the company. Baglino and Patel joined Tesla in 2006 and 2016, respectively.
Vehicles hardly move on flooded streets due to heavy rain in Dubai on April 16, 2024.
Stringer/Anadolu/Getty Images
The United Arab Emirates experienced torrential rainfall and severe flash floods on Tuesday.
The flooding was worsened by to UAE's cloud seeding practice to address water scarcity.
The weather modification method involves getting clouds to drop more precipitation.
Torrential rainfall pummeled the United Arab Emirates this week, resulting in flash floods that have caused air travel delays, closed schools, and deluged homes.
Dubai International Airport — recently named the most luxurious airport in the world — was diverting planes as of Tuesday evening until the weather conditions improved, according to a statement.
Videos on social media appeared to show a heavily flooded tarmac, with large passenger airplanes taxiing through several feet of water.
The airport did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider about the videos.
Vehicles drive on a flooded road during torrential rain in the Gulf Emirate of Dubai on April 16, 2024.
GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images
Dubai got over 4 inches of rain by Tuesday evening, around the amount it typically gets in an entire year, CNN reported, citing United Nations data.
The UAE was playing rainmaker by cloud seeding
While images of extreme flooding can show the consequences of the climate crisis, this particular event was worsened by a direct attempt to play rainmaker — literally.
To address water scarcity in the typically dry country, the UAE started using a practice referred to as cloud seeding in the 90s and early 2000s.
Cloud seeding is a method designed to increase the amount of water that falls from a cloud. It involves identifying suitable clouds and then using aircraft or ground-based generators to introduce a chemical agent that facilitates the production of snowflakes.
Cloud seeding has been used in countries worldwide, including in western US states dealing with drought, like California, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Texas.
Vehicles are stranded on a flooded street following torrential rain in the Gulf Emirate of Dubai on April 16, 2024.
GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images
The practice has long been controversial, with critics dismissing it as an attempt to "play God" or being potentially harmful to the environment or public health. Scientists have not documented harmful impacts of cloud seeding, and recent studies have suggested that the practice works.
But according to Bloomberg, the UAE's cloud seeding operations contributed directly to the heavy rainfall that fell this week.
Ahmed Habib, a specialist meteorologist at the UAE's National Center of Meteorology, told the outlet that two planes conducted cloud seeding operations on Monday and Tuesday and that seven seeding missions had been carried out in two days.
"For any cloud that's suitable over the UAE you make the operation," Habib told Bloomberg.
A submerged duty machine is seen after heavy rain in United Arab Emirates on April 16, 2024.
Stringer/Anadolu/Getty Images
Despite warning citizens to remain home during the heavy rain, the UAE government's press office said they were "rains of goodness," as the country has dealt with a rise in heat-related illnesses and deaths that some hope can be alleviated by an increase in rainfall.
Nike Team USA merchandise and uniforms at the Team USA Media Summit at Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City.
Dustin Satloff/Getty Images
A Team USA bodysuit is reigniting a conversation about the design of women's athletic outfits.
Retired runner Lauren Fleshman said if skimpy outfits were efficient, men would also wear them.
In recent years, women have pushed for more modest uniform options.
A skimpy red, white, and blue bodysuit featured next to a much more modest version for men took the sport of track and field by storm on Friday.
The Team USA bodysuit, first showcased by running outlet Citius Mag as a piece to be worn during the Olympics, drew ire and derision from female track and field athletes, sparking a conversation for many athletes about how far the sport has come in creating an equal playing field — and how much farther it still has to go.
Following the reveal of the showy unitard, athletes quipped that they would definitely need a thorough wax to wear the women's piece. On the mannequin, at least, the sides of the crotch were on full display. Others wondered if it was even possible to wear the outfit while running, vaulting, or hurdling without risking a major wardrobe malfunction.
Some track and field athletes defended the outfit. Olympian long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall said the outfit was "beautiful" in person during a media gathering of Olympic and Paralympic athletes on Tuesday, per the Washington Post.
Anna Cockrell of the US poses with a two-piece version of the controversial bodysuit during the Thursday Paris Event
Stephanie Lecocq/Reuters
Nike, which designed the suit and displayed it among dozens of other design kits during a Thursday Paris event, defended itself, pointing out that the bodysuit was just one uniform iteration out of nearly 50. There were shorts options as well.
Jordana Katcher, Nike's vice president for global sports apparel, also told the Post that several women athletes had requested the unitard specifically.
Nike did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Sprinter and hurdler Queen Harrison-Claye — who competed in the 2008 Summer Olympics — took the more humorous route when she asked for a new company to sponsor the upcoming games.
"Hi @europeanwax would you like to sponsor Team USA for the upcoming Olympic Games!? Please and thanks," she wrote in an Instagram comment.
Harrison-Claye told Business Insider in an interview that the lighthearted approach was just a reflection of how she interpreted the campaign. In her opinion, sexism was at play in Nike's decision to display the itty-bitty bodysuit — but says there are two sides to every story.
'Why are we presenting this sexualized outfit as the standard of excellence?'
For Harrison-Claye, the cut of the controversial uniform "didn't make sense from an athletic standpoint, or even aesthetically," — but that didn't mean that Nike should completely scrap the idea of having different options.
"The beauty of athletics and women is we're not a monolith," Harrison-Claye said. "For some women, they can see that and be like, 'Oh, I will feel so cool, and I'll feel sexy," and they have that right to feel like themselves … and then there will be a lot of female athletes that are like, 'Oh no, this cut is too small.'"
Queen Harrison-Claye during the 2018 Athletics World Cup London
Marc Atkins – British Athletics via Getty Images
Other athletes, like Lauren Fleshman, a retired runner and author of "Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World," told The New York Times that she took issue with the fact that the company chose to preview the revealing women's suit alongside the covered-up men's suit — instead of displaying two similar suits.
"Why are we presenting this sexualized outfit as the standard of excellence?" Fleshman told the outlet. "In part because we think that's what nets us the most financial gain from sponsors or NIL opportunities, most of which are handed out by powerful men or people looking at it through a male gaze."
Harrison-Claye shared a similar sentiment.
"There's always this feeling that our value is in our bodies versus the performing that our bodies do," she said.
A broken record
Women are being spotlighted in sports like never before. Athletes like Naomi Osaka and Sha'Carri Richardson are mega-stars with millions of fans.
Most recently, there has been so much hype around women's college basketball stars Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark.
Harrison-Claye agreed that sports have come a long way in fairly representing women, but the inequality is still there — she pointed to the pay discrepancy in track and field as one example.
She also pointed out that for Black women, the issues are magnified. Black women athletes are often hyper-sexualized or painted as angry or evil. A recent example of this is Reese being called a villain by sports analyst Emmanuel Acho after the rising basketball star addressed receiving racist and sexist attacks from viewers.
Skimpy outfits in women's sports have become a hot-button topic in recent years. More athletes are loudly questioning why their uniforms are so different from men's.
Women athletes in sports like gymnastics, volleyball, and track and field are sometimes expected to wear bikini bottoms or short leotards. There isn't a technical reason the difference exists — though some women, like track and field athlete Katie Moon, who said she wore a body suit similar to the controversial Nike one during a previous Olympics, say that the more revealing outfits work better for her.
"Women's kits should be in service to performance, mentally and physically. If this outfit was truly beneficial to physical performance, men would wear it," Fleshman wrote on Instagram
And that's a large part of why women athletes have been pushing back.
Voss told the BBC in April that the bodysuits would help athletes "feel safe."
FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images
In 2021, the Norwegian women's beach handball team took on a fine of $1,760 after refusing to wear bikini bottoms during the European Championships. Their move prompted the International Handball Federation to change its rules and allow women to wear tank tops and bike shorts.
That same year, Germany's Olympic gymnastic team decided to show up to the Tokyo Olympics in black bodysuits that went up to their ankles — similar to men's styles. The outfits were not against the rules, but the team said they intentionally chose to wear the full-length leotards to protest the sexualization of female gymnasts.
Harrison-Claye said she wants to help the next generation of women feel confident by being her "authentic self" on the track. She emphasized that women should choose to wear what they want while they play and is in the process of founding a social club to inspire young female athletes.
"All we can do in this generation is to keep cultivating it for the next one," she said.
TikTok is Bytedance's most popular product, with over a billion users worldwide.
Jaap Arriens/Getty Images
TikTok announced a partnership with AXS to sell concert tickets.
A new feature in the app allows users and artists to promote tickets to live events.
This move follows TikTok's previous partnership with Ticketmaster for a similar feature.
You can now buy concert tickets for your favorite artists on TikTok through AXS.
The social media site announced that users in the US, UK, Sweden, and Australia will soon be given access to a feature that allows people to discover and score AXS tickets to events, the company announced in a press release.
What the company calls Certified Artists will also be able to use the feature to promote and link directly to tickets for their own AXS live shows, the outlet reported.
"TikTok has become one of the most important global platforms for music content attracting an incredible community of artists and fans." Marc Ruxin, Chief Strategy Officer for AXS, said in the press release. "By combining the reach and influence of TikTok artists with AXS' global ticketing platform, the partnership will provide seamless ticket-buying access to some of the world's most iconic venues, festivals, and tours."
The feature is similar to one offered by TikTok and Ticketmaster — whose parent company, Live Nation, could face an antitrust lawsuit by the DOJ over allegations that the company is stifling competition among other ticket sellers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Ticketmaster feature, which launched on TikTok in 2022 and expanded globally in 2023, is another example of the app's outreach to music artists.
Music executives are keenly aware of how the app can bring artists from obscurity to fame — or make old hits popular once again, as Business Insider's Dan Whately reported — and are leaning into TikTok as an influential music marketing tool.
TikTok has recently drawn the ire of the music industry as well — the social media app and massive record label United Music Group are locked in a battle on how much artists should be paid to have their music on TikTok.
Meanwhile, TikTok's fate in the US remains uncertain as lawmakers push for a ban on TikTok should its Chinese parent company ByteDance fail to divest from the app.
TikTok redirected BI to its press statement, as did AEG, the parent company of AXS.
A US Air Force fighter aircraft F-35 performs aerobatic maneuvers on the second day of the Aero India 2023 at Yelahanka air base in Bengaluru, India, Tuesday on Feb. 14, 2023.
AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi, File
The US military's F-35 program is very expensive — and beset with challenges.
A new watchdog report found that the lifetime cost for the stealth fighter has topped $2 trillion.
The jet's availability has decreased, and the Pentagon also plans to use it less.
The US military is cutting future flight hours for the F-35 — already not available as often as it should be — as the program's price tag grows, a new watchdog report revealed this week.
The Pentagon estimates that the full life-cycle cost for the F-35, which consists of purchasing, operating, and sustaining the aircraft over the next several decades, has now surpassed more than $2 trillion, the US Government Accountability Office noted in a Monday report.
The eye-popping figure from the GAO for what was already the world's costliest weapons program is much larger than the previous estimate of $1.7 trillion. The Department of Defense currently fields around 650 F-35s — of which there are three variants for the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps — and it plans to procure around 2,500 in total by the mid-2040s.
The GAO also said that sustainment costs for the F-35 program grew from around $1.1 trillion in 2018 to about $1.58 trillion in 2023 — a 44% increase that comes, in part, as a result of the aircraft's extended service life from 2077 to 2088. Inflation and use play a role as well.
An F-35B Lightning II jet at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, April 20, 2023.
US Marine Corps/Staff Sgt. Theodore Bergan
The Pentagon's planned future use of the F-35, as well as the stealth aircraft's overall availability over the past few years, have both decreased.
Changes to planned future use keep the costs down. "The military services have lowered the number of hours each aircraft is estimated to fly, which has contributed to reduced cost estimates and the services' ability to meet their affordability targets," the GAO said in its report.
The F-35 Joint Program Office reported in a 2020 Annual Cost Estimate that the advanced fifth-generation aircraft would fly 382,376 hours each year at "steady state," which was identified by the GAO as occurring in the mid-2030s. In a 2023 Annual Cost Estimate, however, the steady state flight hours decreased by nearly 82,000 per year to 300,524 — a 21% decrease.
The F-35 Joint Program Office and various military service officials told the GAO "that this reduction in planned flight hours reflects lower than anticipated use up to this point and evolving projections about future use of the aircraft," the report said.
US Air Force F-35s over the US Central Command area of responsibility on Sept. 30, 2020.
US Air Force/Senior Airman Duncan Bevan
But there are other challenges. The GAO said it has consistently found that the F-35 fleet is not meeting availability and performance goals, even as projected costs for the program go up. Indeed, a 2023 report revealed that the aircraft was only capable of flying missions just over half the time, thanks to a plethora of serious and widespread maintenance issues.
The Pentagon "has pursued cost savings efforts and continues to look for new ways to reduce costs," the GAO explained in its report. However, it cautioned, "officials generally agree that these efforts are not likely to fundamentally change the estimated costs to operate the aircraft."
The Lockheed Martin-manufactured fighter is the second fifth-generation jet in the US arsenal after the F-22 Raptor, and was built for air-to-air combat and ground attacks. Several US allies also operate the aircraft.
The F-35 has so far only seen actual combat experience in the Middle East, with its most recent engagement occurring over the weekend, as Israel used the fighter in an air-defense role to defend against an unprecedented Iranian missile and drone attack.