Tesla was hit by a wave of protests, sales are crashing, insiders are waking up
electrek.co
electrek.co
I have no faith they can deliver on FSD/optimus/AI/cheap model. But with SEC kneecapped, I think the next rabbit out of Elon’s hat will be spectacular.
While the self driving works surprisingly well in 2025, it's been 11 years since the promised date and you still get the occasional assisted suicide attempt via Tesla in the news. (Near fatal crashes while not paying attention because of "self driving")
Additionally there are those who attended the other rallies yesterday not at the dealerships but at other locations holding signs declaring their opinion towards Musk.
Hell, I just paid off my Tesla and I’m thinking of dumping it because I don’t want to be seen as someone who supports him.
The brand is 100% tarnished.
Only when sales/stock price take a long sustained hit will there be anything done.
They only care about their money.
He'll sue everyone for not buying his cars or have the DoJ go after the protesters claiming some sort of illegal boycott...
We never even make the local community news. Maybe if I can get Musk to join the HOA we could get some exposure.
>Many people don't like what the owners of Chick-fil-A are up to but apparently they do really good chicken at fair price so people keep buying it anyway. I would guess that Tesla is losing the premium they can put to their prices and that is pushing Tesla value to a transactional value. No more apologists for the build quality or features that are pay now get it next year(every year, next year), if Tesla makes good cars and sell them at good price people will buy and if they don't people won't
I still think its true, if Tesla makes good cars they will sell at fair value(no more premium to save the planet). In Turkey for example, no one is protesting Tesla even though there were huge protests in support of Palestine. Musk is literally in the US government, literally was the biggest supporter of Trump who announced ethnic cleansing intentions and no one in Turkey associate the brand with this stuff. For some reason they associate Coca-Cola, Starbucks, McDonald's, Burger King etc but never Tesla. Influencers close to the organizations doing the protests even work with Tesla on promotional content. I tried mentioning this to see what they think in automotive forums, it gained no traction. Tesla's are good value in Turkey thanks to the tax breaks on electric cars, no one wants to hear the political aspects.
I don't know specifically what's going on in Turkey, but I have seen that January sales in Europe had dropped an average of 50%. That kind of sales decline should make anyone sit up and take notice.
Would that even help at this point? The association between musk and tesla would still remain - e.g. musk’s ownership of tesla shares is a pop culture topic at this point.
For Tesla as a company? It's be a huge wound but the reputation would improve in all metrics if Musk stepped down. Employee morale would go up, there's probably be less corner cutting with build quality, they may actually be able to adopt LiDAR and have a proper FSD one day, and they can start to rebuild their foreign relations
So your answer depends on if you think a company is bound to its shareholders or to their customers and workers. Sadly there's a clear answer in America.
We'll see how things turn out for Musk in a few years.
At least Starlink, and hence Spacex, won't be affected too much, the service is too valuable for the US military, various industries (aviation, maritime) and also private customers as long as no credible alternative is in sight.
The first mafiosi patron running a protection racket into the ground.
Tesla and other stocks are not valuated based on the economics. They are meme stocks. Inflated because of gen y/z bros. Uber was the same way a few years ago when Travis was there. For as long as they are doing something "cool" like Tesla Robots, the stock will get attention, nvm that the robots were fake.
Without Elon, Starlink would get a more microscopic examination and it would likely not have investors' drive that a stalwart would bring.
Hypocrisy everywhere.
Edit: If you (or anyone) want further explanation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299 and the links there. If, after that, you have a question that I haven't already answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Though in the case of Musk he still might have had similar turmoil given the valuation of TSLA dwindling in 2024 and his antics on X. I don't know if a campaign against a tech person in the news should be suppressed just because people are "tired" of seeing it (meanwhile, AI posted a dozen times per day).
Is it too late to build in a simple regex filter for accounts?
We have varying phases of new hyped tech get many low quality articles that don't inspire curiosity but nonetheless satisfy some people's need to circle around the same talking points. I just find it unfortunate that the moment any overhyped tech is linked to "the real world" that we start to dismiss it.
I suppose the answer isn't surprising given the population's disposition of acting like computer scientists and not software engineers, but is techs effect on actual people not intellectually curious? Are we fine just tinkering with ideas and throwing pandora's box out for the rest of the world to handle?
>s simply a question of having a forum with that purpose rather than another.
Well I don't have any data, but at this point I don't think this is happening organically. That's my main concern. It's no coincidence this only seems to happen with negative press for a certain person, when months ago pretty much all news on this subject would not be flagged (hence the first part of my comment).
You do have the data, but if your data says otherwise, there's not much I can do. I'll just keep doing what I'm already doing and try to fight the suppression.
Curiosity is sustained and long term. Curiosity is being willing to understand things completely.
What you're arguing for is novelty and distraction. That is shallow thinking, not curious thinking.
A month ago after Musk's fascist salutes you said, "This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are. They come in an endless sequence, and they aren't what HN is supposed to be for. They're also not that hard to resist; it's not as if this is a borderline call."
You were clearly wrong. It hasn't vanished. You should be curious about that.
In four months Y Combinator will hold an AI Startup School event with speakers including Musk: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus
Bias is a real problem in AI systems. Will you be at the event? What questions will you put to Musk about his biases and how they will be reflected in Grok?
Be curious. Ask those questions.
Commenters who want to fight about these topics are not operating in curiosity mode, seeking to learn from each other. They're operating in battle mode, seeking to destroy each other, vent rage, and deploy verbal weapons such as snark, name-calling, and talking points at the enemy. None of that is what HN is for, as should be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html or spent much time here.
> You were clearly wrong. It hasn't vanished
HN has been around for 15+ years. A month isn't long at all. My expectation is still that this will subside, and when it does, it will sink into a swamp of amnesia, the same as has happened in the past.
They won't forget Musk's fascist salutes either. If anything, Musk's salutes have been more public, have done more brand damage, and have revealed worse character.
Musk and Zuckerberg are showing you who and what they are.
Pay attention.
I was talking about something else though. My claim is that the HN baseline will return to the status quo ante, just as it has after past political tsunamis, and that when it does, the current fever for every political story to be on the frontpage will fade into oblivion. I may be wrong about that, but we will have to wait to find out.
> showing you who and what they are. Pay attention.
That's a trope, indeed already a cliché, of internet political arguments. It would be in your interest to avoid those because although on a surface level they intensify a comment, at a deeper level they make it less persuasive (to the persuadable reader). I know you didn't ask for commenting advice and normally I wouldn't go there, but HN's guidelines specifically ask commenters to omit internet tropes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You are wrong.
> That's a trope, indeed already a cliché
Dude, that you think you might be right demonstrates that you haven't been paying attention.
Musk doesn't just have form, he's going for the record.
There will be a stink around Y Combinator's AI Startup School event. Musk will bring the stink with him.
And the source of that stink may be as simple as attendees having family members sacked by DOGE. Or it might be because he's of such weak character that he lies about being good at video games. Or perhaps it will be America's sell out of Ukraine, something Musk has advocated for:
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126714896/elon-musk-ukraine-...
There's lots to choose from.
As for whether this is something worth being curious about, definitely.
I think they'll be fine once the new model is out.
Tesla production had so many problems before. Lots of jobs were lost because of this. Guess who remembers those job cuts? Me. Part of me believes anyone with slightly more discipline could have done a better job.
His lack of discipline and departure from conventional wisdom is the reason Tesla, SpaceX exist today. Without his patience and capital they would all be footnotes of failed companies in their respective industries.
I think you could probably make the argument that those industries might not even be serious if Musk’s risks and patience didn’t demonstrate their viability.
> His lack of discipline and departure from conventional wisdom is the reason ...
... he is good at startups. Without his resources (network of talent located in Tesla and SpaceX), none of those startups would do anywhere as well. But Tesla and SpaceX would do better!
You can't buy a Chinese car even if you wanted to because we have like 200% tarriffs on them. Great response to competition, America.
I do think the opinion of this clashes with your stance on not wanting to buy "communist" country products though.
Jonathan Swift