This is all so frustrating. Tesla could have easily been an American auto maker generational success story. Instead they’re working hard to undermine their own success, turn their brand toxic, and even design vehicles that are unappealing to key purchasing demographics (Cybertruck).
What changed is he took the mask off. He was always the sleaze that he is today, but a lot of us were fooled into believing he wanted to do something good.
He brought good things due to high-conviction bold moves though, like democratizing EVs, reusable rockets, and most of all, actual internet in airplanes.
Is it accurate to say Tesla democratized EVs? The Roadster came out in 2008 but was over $100k. Over its lifetime they only sold around 2500. It was always a rich person's car.
The first 21st century EV in the US that was aimed at a more mainstream mass market was the Nissan Leaf which launched in late 2010, and in the first year sold 4x as many units Tesla Roadster's lifetime sales.
Tesla took a significant step toward an EV for the less rich with the Model S in 2012. It was still a lot more expensive than a Leaf (about 80%ish more for a base Model S) but way less than the Roadster.
The Leaf was the world's best selling EV in 2011-2014 and 2016, and in 2020 was the first to reach 500k sales.
It wasn't until 2017 with the model 3 that Tesla had a car that, like the Leaf, was priced in the range typical middle class families could afford. That's when they took off, and they caught up and passed Leaf in cumulative sales in early 2021.
- he most certainly did not democratize EVs, although he said the plan all along was to make cheap EVs it wasn’t until other car companies started “democratizing” EVs that his had was forced (and delayed)
- we had internet (and still do) in planes that have nothing to do with starlink
I don't agree after reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Elon. It's deeply unfortunate that the book is already a few years old, I'd love and buy the hell out of a 2nd edition that is updated with the last few years.
Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.
>Having reportedly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Musk even voiced his pro-Dems alignment in 2022 when he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he had “strongly supported Obama for President” in 2007.
I think he turned after Tesla was snubbed at Biden's 2021 EV summit because although it was the US's largest EV maker it wasn't unionized and Biden was in with the unions.
There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).
Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.
Though IMHO it's not just a Biden problem, it's a "everybody in power" problem. They just can't seem to resist (ab)using their power to shape the conversation and censor their opponents. It's also not new, it's been happening for hundreds of years at least. But it did get a lot more brazen under Biden IMHO with Twitter/Facebook etc and admin officials telling private companies what to censor (err, "moderate").
This is your regularly mandated PSA that the quote about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" comes from Schenck v US, which used that analogy to justify why the government could ban people from protesting the draft in WW1. It is not good law anymore, and has been fully superseded since the Brandenburg v Ohio case which limited the exemption to "imminent lawless action."
Read the links. It wasn't just that. People from the administration were actively talking with social media companies and telling them to take stuff down. At some points they even demanded it.
andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?
They didn't. Fbi told Facebook etc to be on the lookout for Russia pushing stories to influence elections etc, they didn't ask them to do anything specific. Bidens campaign did ask Twitter to remove nudes of his son, which already broke Twitters own rules. This is why the twitterfiles were a nothing burger.
2018 (tham luang cave rescue) is when the cracks really started showing up, so the trajectory was probably set a while earlier.
The tendency was probably always there given the serial lying about self driving started circa 2015, or the weird ego trip of ousting the founders and getting himself called co-founder, but if we’re looking for a point event the removal of his long time PA in 2014 still stands out to me.
What did he do specifically to crater his reputation?
Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.
Two very public Nazi salutes without any attempt to deny it afterwards will certainly crater anyone's reputation. It's not really politics, but more a question of humanity, but then people don't become billionaires without having a contempt for others and a desire to underpay and mistreat everyone you come into contact with.
Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.
Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.
Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.
Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.
Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.
No they haven't. You've likely been misled by seeing still images of their hand in that position, whereas if you see the video, then it's clearly nothing like a Nazi salute. Meanwhile, the video of Musk makes it incredibly clear that it's a Nazi salute and he has not denied that as far as I know.
His politics also seem to align very much with white supremacy and the far right.
That doesn't seem like a denial from Musk, but instead he's just accusing others, but the article doesn't include specific quotes.
From what I remember of the incident, he specifically didn't deny that they were Nazi salutes, but merely hinted that they may have been a Roman salute, though that's pretty much the same thing.
I can't recall any time that he's tried to distance himself from Nazis or their ideology.
Although the ADL didn't think that it was a Nazi salute, most other Jewish organisations thought that it was and Germany very much condemned it, so on balance reasonable people should conclude that it's generally thought of as a Nazi salute. Also, former ADL national director Abraham Foxman described the gesture as a "Heil Hitler Nazi salute".
Reasonable people can simply watch the video and see for themselves - it very much looked exactly like a Nazi salute to me.
Here's video of Musk performing his fascist salutes. He did it deliberately, he did it with gusto, he grunted with the effort, and he did it twice just to make sure:
He did deny it multiple times on Twitter/X. Probably your news source of choice is the one which omitted this fact.
I think it probably did look a bit that way and maybe he did it for engagement, maybe he intended to create controversy or maybe it was none of these things. In any case, it wasn't an actual Nazi salute.
No. For all practical purposes, Chinese cars are perfectly fine for most consumers. Since you cannot beat China on manufacturing costs, this war is already lost. Musk or no Musk.
There is no reason Chinese EVs couldn’t have been beaten on cost.
The labor/environmental costs of car manufacturing is relatively low and more than made up in the cost of shipping cars. One example of this was the number of foreign car manufacturers that were relocating manufacturing to the NAFTA region to serve the U.S. car market even before the tariff nonsense.
The area where China might have an edge is batteries cost. I’m not convinced that’s the case but even if we assume it is, it’s irrelevant because Chinese battery companies are largely not vertically integrated with the automakers and have been selling those batteries to non Chinese automakers at the same rates in an open market.
The reason Chinese EVs are cheaper is plain and simple competition. Some of those price advantages will disappear as Chinese companies need to start showing profits, but a lot of those won’t because they were the result of genuine innovation driven by the tremendously competitive market and the economies of scale that were rapidly created.
Keeping that in mind, while a lot of Tesla’s missed opportunities are self owns, the larger problem ultimately was the lack of govt support in developing a competitive ecosystem in the US.
Ford and Stellantis are meanwhile busy trying to partner with Chinese companies, to make their own battery factories. Even though it seems like maybe they'll end up making more batteries for stationary power than for vehicles.
(Sales in 2026 were low until March 2026, Musk probably gotta thank Trump for oil-prices jumping up enough to move the needle again)
The worst news for Tesla isn't the sales though, with "Texas-like" distances in Sweden (and Norway and Finland) there was a perception that only Tesla cars could properly handle the distances without getting too much battery angst.
When people started looking around they realized that the other carmakers were getting their shit together and could actually deliver cars that handled distances well enough.
> Chineese phonemakers exist yet Apple pulls in a significant portion of profits due to their _halo_ allowing them to sell at a higher price point.
The difference is that most customers have the financial wiggle room to buy a more expensive phone. With cars this is an entirely different story because cars are the most expensive things people own (besides a house).
For most people it holds that a car should just get them from A to B. The money for anything more fancy is better spent on something else.
There is a reason Apple is not in the car business.
> Tesla had that, all Musk had to do was refrain himself from waving his hand around in that certain fashion.
He probably also would have had to refrain from retweeting white nationalists and adding the 100 points emoji that is usually used in that context to mean "100% agreement with the tweet".
Buying a Tesla was already considered edgy in some demographics, but doing that famous fascist gesture because you feel powerful definitely crossed a line as far as Europeans are concerned.
DOGing half the US population didn't help. I guess he wasn't content firing most of twitter, then begging half of them to come back, only to then lament that twitter had lost 80% of it's value in this processs wasn't enough. He had to do the same to the entire US ... and it's still working.
DOGE was super crazy and corruption at its finest, but that was US internal politics of which many in Europe do not care to such a degree.
Effectively endorsing Hitler is on a different level for many Europeans.
Even the right most extremists/fascists parties don't do that in the open, as far as I know (in Germany that would even be illegal and a party doing that systematically could get banned).
Yeah, EVs are completely mundane now. Not sexy enough of a story to justify the high PE ratios anymore.
I think this is the reason for the weird pivot to humanoid robots and for taking SpaceX public even though he originally said he wouldn’t. Better story for the investors than EVs.
It could be, except it's not factually correct (and an element of truth is necesssary for good humor). GP was talking about Tesla, not about Elon. The correct pronoun for a company is surely "they"
The most amusing to me is that British English considers a company a collective noun, and says "Apple are going to make an iPod" whereas the US considers it a singular entity and says "Apple is going to make an iPod".
WHOOSH! You're completely missing the point that it's all Elon's fault, not his company's. GP was incorrect to blame Tesla for Musk's own failures. Blaming the destruction and undermining and toxicity on "them" is obfuscating the true cause, and smearing hard working innocent people, who didn't just shoot off their big fat racist mouths like Elon did.
Nobody else at Tesla made Nazi salutes, and publicly bullied, abused, and humiliated their own daughter, and perpetrated DOGE's destruction and corruption. Tesla ("they") had nothing to do with any of that, but suffered from Elon doing it.
I think Tesla as a company is doing the right moves. The management (excluding Elon) seems solid and smart.
The problem is that we often attach a company or a larger idea to a single person, even when it is much much bigger than that individual. People started boycotting Tesla because of Elon Musk, without considering that Tesla is actually thousands of engineers, workers, and managers. And majority of decisions are not done by Elons.
But people tend to think in terms of heroes and anti heroes. Cesar Chavez is another example of how this dynamic plays out.
Elon has always been the face of Tesla since he acquired it from the founders. Early he was a brand asset, but tying one's identity so strongly to a company is a brand risk when that person's image is tarnished.
Just look at Martha Stewart Living during her incarceration.
Celebrities are great at building brands, but they need to back away from their personal successes have bootstrapped the new brand before something they do becomes a liability.
Subway made their own celebrity spokesperson (Jared) and hitched their wagon to him for far too long. One or two years is understandable, but Subway had him so long it merged its identity with Jared until the truth about Jared was revealed.
Perhaps OP is referring to the pivot away from cars and toward automation
But seeing as how they haven’t launched a decent car in a decade, and have utterly failed to launch true FSD as promised, I have no confidence that they can succeed in a new market given they are demonstrably shit at their core competency
The amount of apologia exists for Musk actions is just mind boggling. It seems to me that people want all the good from the hype Musk brings, but if things go wrong - Why don't people think of the poor workers?
You live by the sword, you die by the sword. If people were so smart where were they when Musk was hyping autonomous vehicles being just around the corner for years? Or the fact that the board of directors kept raising his compensation to insane levels because he kept threatening them that he'll walk out? The company chose to do this. People didn't. Now that he is tanking the valuation, we don't need to separate out Tesla and Musk. They are one and the same.
The Model Y is going on 8 years old, S and X are being shutdown. That leaves you with the 3 and Y. Cybertruck will be shutdown soon. What new models have they announced?
The Cybertruck, while unappealing to some, is the only vehicle on the road that doesn't look the same as every other one.
For all of Elon Musk's objectionable-eccentricities, at least this legacy will remain: He dared to make a vehicle (the Cybertruck) that looks like it's actually from the future; not designed by another salaryman-engineering-graduate with a copy of AutoCAD and a wind-tunnel (which is what everything else on the road looks like).
Power the next-generation of Cybertruck with hydrogen, and bundle a solar-electrolysis charging-station with it, and I'd buy one before breakfast.
Tesla has an P/E Ratio of 332 (in comparison, Apple has 31.3) - the stock price is not based on measurable numbers so I don't think that the unsold EVs will have any consequences for the valuation.
When reality finally sets in it will not be pretty.
As a thought experiment could you have a publicly traded company with zero revenue and zero assets. It’s literally paper. What would stop its stock from “mooning” if the Keynesian beauty contest or the global stock casino decided it should?
What mechanism pushes the other way? Nobody pays dividends anymore.
The figures quoted here are old, since EV sales have gotten a massive boost from spiking oil prices. The actual figures aren't out yet but anecdotal evidence at least in Australia suggests sales in March (across all brands, not just Tesla) doubled from February.
That said, for Tesla this is only a bandaid, since they have absolutely nothing in the consumer pipeline beyond the current increasingly uncompetitive offerings. Chinese brands like BYD, on the other hand, are laughing all the way to the bank.
Most of the Tesla discourse is quite jaded I think - especially from people who aren't regular car users or with a US-centric political bent.
I suspect a lot of this dip is simply because the Juniper series for Model Y was just announced, with specific 2026 improvements and most savvy buyers are just withholding and you'll see a spike in 2026 numbers up.
Obviously the oil spike, while not a relatively massive price hike historically, is clearly accelerating the pace of electrification, similarly to how COVID accelerated the use of zoom and other remote work platforms. But also similarly, it will probably be the case that gas is still used for some needs, just not nearly as many as today. People still do prefer their gas ranges, and its not as if natural gas is a great pollutant. But electricity is easier to manage than ever now, given battery capacity.
Induction requires your cookware to sit flat against the surface or it won’t heat up (and the range will shut off after a certain time). With natural gas the flames rise through convection and wrap around the contours of the pan. This means many traditional pieces of cookware with round bottoms simply will not work on induction but work fine on natural gas.
Induction also requires the cookware to be ferromagnetic. This rules out a lot of traditional cookware materials such as clay, copper, brass, and stone. Many of these traditional materials are also accompanied by traditional shapes (round bottoms, gently sloped sides) that take advantage of the convection properties of open flame cooking.
Many recipes rely on these traditional vessels for optimal cooking performance. Woks, for example, work much better with a round bottom so liquids can pool in the middle, letting you use less oil for stir frying but still allowing ingredients to spend time in the pooled oil.
The temperature profile of a round-bottom wok over gas flame is also superior to a flat-bottom wok on induction: the traditional wok has a bright hot spot at the bottom (where all the oil is pooling) in addition to heat up all around the sloped sides, for rapidly reducing liquids that come out of foods and cooking sauces (soy sauce, shaoxing wine) with an arc-splash technique. The flat-bottom wok on induction has a uniformly hot surface on the bottom but the sides remain cool, causing all liquids in contact with the sides to run down to the bottom and begin boiling, just like when you try to stir-fry in a frying pan.
Candy-making is another cooking process that benefits greatly from the convection of natural gas combustion, since molten sugar will crystallize around the sides of a pan if they are not hot enough. Traditional candy-making is done in thin-walled, tin-lined copper pans. These pans don't work at all on induction (no ferromagnetic materials) but even if placed on a ferrous plate they would not perform well due to lack of heating of the sides.
There's a misconception that Chinese food requires a 50,000 BTU burner causing "wok hei" to be right. The truth is that Chinese cuisine is huge and varied. Some regional dishes do actually require that. Most do not and can be cooked at home.
An equivalent induction stove would be around 5000W, which I think exists. The problem with inductioning a wok is the tossing motion removes the wok from the heat, unlike over a big flame. It probably doesn't matter, but maybe it does.
The main difference is that the gas instantly turns off, whereas with induction, the stove surface the pan sits on is just as hot as the pan, because the pan heats it up via contact, so it's almost like electric in that way. I kind of doubt this matters except in certain specialty things like candy making. I'd consider myself a very proficient chef at the level of a new culinary school graduate (minus the restauranteering modules), and in practice any stove type is just fine. I'm not going to rip out my gas stove though; it came with the house and adds resale value.
Woks aren't the only shape of cookware with a non-flat bottom and/or a non-ferrous construction. There are clay pots with many different shapes [1], Korean stone bowls [2], Indian copper cookware [3], Moroccan tagines [4], and many others.
My caveman traditional cooking requires a fire on the floor, or I do bbq and bury my food with coals. Modern cities are bad because I can't do that in my apartment.
Modern cities are bad because people like yourself agitate for legislation to infringe on my personal home life that has essentially zero externalities. We don't need to make cooking a political issue; it's such a stupid thing to create a wedge about. Just leave the gas stove owners alone for God's sake. Natural gas tax already exists for this purpose and some choose to pay the premium.
No one made that argument here. If you’re okay with the trade offs to air quality, go for it. I used to be, then I switched and realised induction really just is better at home
I mean, if you are looking at unventilated kitchens, you are going to get bad values cooking. Pretty much period. Yes, by products of burning gas are bad. But by products of cooking are already bad. Ventilate your kitchen.
Induction is also faster to boil water, easier to clean since it's just flat glass, and safer since an induction stove without a pot/pan stays room temperature (in fact, they usually can detect if a pot/pan is present and automatically turn themselves off)
Induction is also particularly nice for certain types of cooking because many induction stoves can be set to a specific temperature instead of just to a power level.
Agreed that folks should look more favorably on induction. I did not mean my comment as a defense of gas. Just pointing out that most of the pollution from cooking is one where you want a good range hood that vents to the outside. And you need to clean it.
Our last house did not have a vent to the outside and it was eye opening to realize how much grease throughout the entire house was from that.
Right, I was not intending this as a defense of gas ranges. More surprised that they would baseline with a non-ventilated kitchen. Cooking, itself, will pollute your air to a surprising degree.
Just reported, yes, that's globally and throughout the past 12 months so that's a 10% work force reduction overall.
In the same period they're posting record sales, it's possible that's mostly a reduction in bleeding edge sales promotion staff, influencers, etc now they have better recognition.
Two press takes on likely the same company press release material.
I posted two links that both say that, of course both appear to mirror the same primary source.
You'd have to drill into both cleantechnica and the BYD presser for the exact details and caveats that come with all such reporting.
Revenue and deliveries reach new highs
BYD reported 8039.6 billion yuan (1,123 billion USD) in revenue for 2025, alongside 4.60 million vehicle deliveries, according to the NBD. Overseas deliveries reached approximately 1.05 million units, according to Sina reporting, marking the first time the company surpassed the 1-million-unit mark in exports.
Mostly unrelated (my surprise that BYD had nearly a million employees) - but a fun vibe coded game would be to give a company, maybe some stats about it, and then you try to guess the number of employees.
Well, it's being reported as a surge in interest, whether that is followed by increased sales or not will be seen in the next month or two once these cars are delivered. But anecdotally, second hand EVs which were flooding car lots everywhere have substantially thinned out. There are still some, but a lot less than a month ago.
Also lol, you're funny implying that ICE cars aren't overpriced tablets on wheels either. It's all cars nowadays. And UK's cheapest car right now happens to be a pretty decent EV anyway, a Dacia Spring.
Could be. People are not very logical and schools don't teach math anymore.
It is somewhat complex subject. Taking in account actual use, cost of fuel and maintenance and then comparing it to purchase price and depreciation is bit of a work. And I don't think too many people do that when they should.
So according to the article, it had 48k extra cars during a quarter in 2024 and now the new record of 50k in Q1 2026, after they sold 358,023 out of 408,386.
Great things to have on balance sheets. With inflation their value can only go up. And as they are level 6 self-driving capable as is soon they can be sold for massively more money. Really they should stock pile hundreds of thousands more.
You're completely right. I've got an idea for an investment strategy. We start a company, and issue shares. We use the money to buy Teslas, and hold them as assets. As the value goes up, the value of the company will rise. Then we issue more shares, at a higher valuation, and use the money to buy more Teslas. Infinite money glitch. I call it a Drivable Asset Treasury company.
Tesla's FSD problem isn't the technology, it's the positioning. It's genuinely good at what it does but selling it as "Full Self-Driving" set an expectation it can't meet. If they had framed it as the best safety feature, always aware co-driver watching out for you, people would trust it far more and adoption would be much higher.
Good point, full self driving probably felt like marketing win back then... but now it is a liability.
Rebranding now would just highlight all missed promises
The article mentioned the tax incentive, and I’ve seen many do the same. I’ve rarely ever heard anyone talk seriously about how much the USA spends on oil subsidies.
What do you have to do to get people to realize that SOB is basically a Nazi? Nobody seems to care that he’s a racist POS supporting extreme right-wing causes.
I think q1 is a weak quarter for sales so it might be that inventory build is normal in this quarter. Economic weakness and high energy prices will not help sales though.
One would be in my driveway but we cancelled it right when it was about to be delivered when Elon began his decline into madness. Know your audience and your buyers man. Maybe hide your alt right nonsense when your buyers love the earth and the environment.
If your moral development is at the level where you need to use neighborhood yard signs to make your argument, should you really be trying to educate people on the internet yet?
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