My top financial advice for the week: #shortTesla.

Actually, this has been my top financial advice for some time. But it’s starting to look cannier and cannier as Elon Musk’s taxpayer-funded business empire begins to crumble and more and more people start to ask awkward questions like: “This solar snake oil you’re selling. How exactly does it work for anyone other than the guy who’s selling it?”

In Hong Kong they’ve already wised up to this. Tesla sales have plummeted to zero after the government removed the tax breaks.

Incentives matter: Tesla sales fall to zero in Hong Kong after tax break slashed, WSJ analysis of city data shows https://t.co/gC7If7Tf2k pic.twitter.com/15wNQJLHD2 — Newley Purnell (@newley) July 10, 2017

People only buy impractical, expensive, virtue-signalling cars when heavily bribed by the government to do so. Who would have thought, eh?

But for Elon Musk likely the much bigger disaster just waiting to happen is the deal he has struck with the government of South Australia, promising to help resolve the state’s energy crisis by building the world’s largest grid-scale battery. The Independent reports:

South Australia has picked Tesla to install the world’s largest grid-scale battery, which would be paired with a wind farm provided by France’s Neoen, in a major test of the reliability of large-scale renewable energy use. South Australia, the fifth-biggest state with a population of 1.7 million, has raced ahead of the rest of the country in turning to wind power. Its shutdown of coal-fired plants has led to outages across the eastern part of the nation, driving up energy prices. The drawback to South Australia’s heavy reliance on renewables has been an inability to adequately store that energy, leading to vulnerabilities when the wind doesn’t blow.