The Walls Are Closing in on Tesla
planetearthandbeyond.co
planetearthandbeyond.co
>Back in 2016, Musk personally pushed for almost all vehicle functions, including the door handles, to be controlled by electric buttons or touchscreens. His own engineers and executives warned that this is a huge safety risk... They argued for traditional, fully mechanical door handles, but Musk vetoed them for purely aesthetic reasons. He even pushed for the mechanical override, meant to be used in such emergencies, to be hidden
EDIT: I found a source[0], but that characterization is pretty misleading. The article even say that in internal discussions, "Musk wasn’t alone in pushing for electric controls." All it says about Musk is that pushed for "virtually everything" to be electric, but it doesn't say he pushed anything about the door manual release (you know they'd include that in the article if they could).
As soon as they forgot this, their downfall began.
"The Dennises were traveling westbound on South 56th Street, toward the intersection with South Washington Street, in Tacoma, Washington, when their Tesla Model 3 suddenly and rapidly accelerated out of control, continuing to accelerate faster and faster for at least 5 seconds before crashing into a utility pole on the northwest corner of South 56th and South Washington streets shortly after 1:00 PM. 9. Video footage from a nearby business shows the Dennis Model 3 rapidly accelerating and swerving to avoid hitting other vehicles as it sped out of control. At no time did the Model 3s Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) system engage prior to it crashing into the utility pole.
Immediately upon impact the Model 3 burst into flames, in what was only the beginning of an extremely hot fire that immediately engulfed the Model 3 and would burn for many hours before responders from the fire department were able to extinguish it completely.
Several bystanders ran to the vehicle and attempted to assist Jeff and Wendy Dennis but the Model 3s door handles would not operate by design making it impossible for anyone to open the doors from the outside of the vehicle. Several good Samaritans even attempted to use a baseball bat to break the car windows to help the Dennisses out of the burning vehicle. However, the increasingly intense fire forced them to distance themselves from the rapidly growing fire. They could only watch helplessly from a distance as the severely injured Jeff and Wendy burned in the inferno. The Tesla as it struck the utility pole.
[photos]
Seconds after impact the Tesla exploded into flames."
https://ia801700.us.archive.org/25/items/gov.uscourts.wawd.3...
Italics are mine
HN commenters sometimes reply to stories about Tesla crashes by asserting that it was the driver's fault, Tesla batteries rarely catch fire, etc.
Perhaps this comment will draw some of those replies
Other cases mentioning "sudden uncommanded acceleration" include
Inkie Lee v. Tesla, Inc. (C.D. Cal. 2020)
Djemil v. Tesla Inc (W.D. Wash. 2021)
Thakrar v. Tesla, Inc. (N.D. Ill. 2022)
Leach v. Tesla, Inc. (N.D. Cal. 2023)
There are hundreds of wrongful death cases involving Tesla fires
Tesla fans are entitled to their opinions
So I wouldn’t be so sure as this piece is in Tesla’s downfall, and the emotive language doesn’t help this look like an objective analysis.
I also don’t like articles that take the industry consensus or expert opinion as a priori the correct opinion. Tesla wasn’t built by consensus; even the door handle example that is here touted as a negative almost certainly helped Tesla more than its harmed by being one of many unique features.
At least that’s what American capitalism has shown us.
I’ve also come to consider him to be a skilled business person. He negotiated a ridiculous low price for the Fremont ex-NUMMI plant. He secured funding to enable Tesla to survive the GFC. The list goes on. I’d argue that Elon’s biggest wins were business related, not technical. Not that there weren’t technical accomplishments, it’s just that the technological accomplishments were more incremental SV type stuff whereas the business accomplishments were more heroic. I also give Tesla credit for the success of model S. But I consider that to be a function of good execution, not of technology. If that would have flopped it would have been the end. But there were many possible ways for Tesla to die back then.
One of Elon’s key business skills is his ability to sell a narrative. I guess that goes hand in hand with the “bullshitter” thing. He seems to have a magical ability to hypnotize fanboys and investors into believing that Tesla is more than it actually is.
The auto industry is not very sexy from an investor point of view. It’s a mature market, very capital intensive, high risk, low margin. Yet somehow Tesla achieves an outsized market cap.
As humorously noted in the HBO Silicon Valley “no revenue” scene, investors reward you for future promises and punish you on actual delivery. But what if you could promise a future that remains perpetually in the future? And every delivery is not an end, but only a step along the way to this utopian/distopian vision? What if you “promise the moon”, er, I mean Mars? If you did this, then maybe you could have a perpetual pure play that never expires.
So back to the article. Is this the demise of Tesla? I don’t know if Tesla necessarily has “no path forward” as “just a car company”. But I think Elon’s ability to sell the “sci-fi future” is wearing out. Tesla has delivered on some difficult business cases with incremental technology, but the track record on the “impossible future“ stuff isn’t good. Also, the mainstream EV industry will become increasingly commoditized with new Chinese entrants, eroding margins. Tariffs keep you in saturated markets and don’t help you in growing markets. So maybe a bit of a demise for all?
Given that, objectively speaking I could not call Tesla irrelevant.
0 - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/tesla-tsla-q4-2025-vehicle-d...
1 - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global...
The market can remain irrational more than you can remain solvent. But the writing is on the wall for the valuation.
Same deal with Tesla: They have two core models (Y top, 3 next, all else a rounding error), while everyone else has a full range that sales are split across.
Tesla is indeed a niche maker, but their valuation does not reflect that fact.
Examples for Europe, 2025 vs. 2024:
Sweden: -68%
Belgium: -53%
Germany: -48%
France: -37%
Switzerland: -28%
Portugal: -22%
Italy: -18%
[1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/europe/2024-full-year-euro...
https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/tesla-full-2025-data-europe-t... https://www.reuters.com/business/tesla-registrations-slump-f...
Norway is just 5-6 million population. Does being number 1 in Norway even mean anything?
UK is near 70million. Germany 80million. What about the stats for those? How many Teslas were sold as percentage in UK?
What? Wow!
I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. I’ve heard silly things like - he doesn’t do anything, it’s all his employees or board or assistant - but reading the history that’s obviously false.
It does seem some people can’t cope with the idea that someone is often an asshat is also brilliant. And I’m afraid it’s true with Musk.
It's also worth keeping in mind that super smart people can say and do lots of really dumb things. Smart != wise.
I doubt it. He was born into money and was lucky enough to make some excellent purchasing decisions. His various talks and arguments on the internet show him to be fairly stupid in my opinion. I've heard tell that his successful businesses are mainly successful when the staff learn how to manage Musk and prevent his dumbest ideas.
Basically: he's extremely rich
Working hard and being very good at negotiating compensation packages and picking the right companies/products to be involved with (and a bit of luck) are all sufficient for exorbitant wealth though.
E.g. there are plenty of people just as smart as Bezos who didn't hitch their wagon to the "sell something easy on the web" idea at the right time
It was sufficiently awful, at first I couldn't even believe he'd done it. When I internalised that he was the kind of person to do that, it made it much easier to see his other flaws.
He meticulously worked on his image for decades.
Basically: yes, Musk is just like Stark. Half as smart as he thinks he is, has main-character syndrome and/or narcissism.
>According to Fergus, the character was inspired by an amalgam of real people — but none so much as Elon Musk.
I have a hypothesis that the Hedonic Treadmill[1] can cause actual harm to the human brain; I suspect that over time, in certain brains, extreme wealth erodes the reward centers such that some rich people can't help but be miserable, flailing for ever-elusive life satisfaction. It seems like a fairly serious bug in human software.
Yes.
People's true nature reveals once they stop caring about money.
To be fair, he was really good at faking.
I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive.
Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races.
Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia.
I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank.
You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome.
This doesn't mean I can't admire NASA, that I have to dismiss the Hoover Dam, that I think every act by Obama or Bush was heinous.
Likewise, I can look at Falcon 9/Heavy, at the progress with Starship, and applaud.
But.
His "Paint is Black" video, and what he claimed about it, was a lie. He himself is pretty awful, and already fits amongst the others you list given the revealed preferences shown by Grok, and by his reactions to criticism of Grok's behaviour.
The bonus-target market-cap of 8 trillion only makes sense with a very optimistic view of the AI Tesla's developing for both FSD and Optimus, and by "very optimistic" I mean "FSD turns them into a monopoly supplier of cars worldwide; or both FSD and Optimus together displace a significant fraction of the US low-skill jobs market while also getting a monopoly on industrial robots and a monopoly on cars in just the USA". It's the kind of thing I expect we'll be putting into history lessons next to Enron and Dutch Tulips, with laws passed to prevent whatever investigators find out to be the key mechanism behind it.
Even with SpaceX, it's impressive, but not because it actually hits Musk's goals, rather because everyone else in space is "over optimistic" about their schedules even harder than Telsa is.
"politics":
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Beyond the veracity of those numbers, it is a political decision whether or not the US should be spending $150B on foreigners or Americans.
And from what I remember, we weren't supposed to force others to follow our morals.
Yes, Harvard and The Lancet are just wildly political.
>Beyond the veracity of those numbers ...
In addition to being incompetent slouches.
Unfortunately, we can multiply any given figure by 0.01 and still get something that amounts to mass murder.
>... it is a political decision whether or not the US should be spending $150B on foreigners or Americans.
A proper political decision wouldn't have involved an abrupt rug pull on a bipartisan program that's been operating for the better part of a century.
There's this thing called continuity that's usually taken very seriously. Especially when hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives are hanging in the balance.
I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well:
"Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security."
I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-t...
Musk was even then a polarising figure, but given Tesla was arguably more “American” than even the self-proclaimed traditional American car companies, it seemed a weird, self-defeating, perhaps emotional, position for the administration to take.
I don't know either really, I'm just reporting remembered second-hand sources.
So, why were Ford, GM and Stellantis there but Tesla wasn't? Because Tesla was already making EVs only, because none of its workforce is a part of UAW (due to Tesla being anti-union) and because this EO had no impact on Tesla's workforce what so ever. Elon being butthurt about it doesn't change the fact that it would've made zero sense to have Tesla there.
You don't have to take my word for it, Jen Psaki directly addressed this at a press briefing:
> Asked if Tesla being a nonunion company was the reason it wasn’t included Thursday, Psaki replied, “Well, these are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/tesla-snub-white...
(The quote sounds simply like "we excluded Tesla because they are anti-union"...)
He did not leaned a little right. He had the same political opinions, but less of narcissist rage over not being admired.
Somewhere along the road he devolved into a petty and weird character, and then went off the deep end into full spectrum alt-right weirdness.
He is the same type of talented hype man as Jobs was, with the same sort of reality distortion field. Otherwise SpaceX reusable wouldn't have happened. And even Jensen Huang was supremely impressed how fast xAI built up data centers.
But there's also definitely been a change. He publicly endorsed Democrat candidates on numerous occasions, including against normie business-friendly Republicans. Think his metamorphosis in actual unfiltered views is best shifted from the "I absolutely support trans but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare" to his current campaigns...
Also, didn't Musk publicly quit Trump's advisory councils over exiting the Paris Agreement back in 2017? Why does that rift not qualify for your "separating politics" hypothesis?
If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.
Not OP ... but it would be consistent with observations. It is a party that admires lying and rewards it.
I remember he made some disparaging comments about other tech billionaires that while they were focused on ad revenue and social media engagement, he was out there working on the important stuff...
This is a website that took Hyperloop seriously because Musk casually threw it out there...
Is he - or any other man - deserving of this? No. But men just can't help worshipping other men. Christianity is another good example. As is the military, showing that most men are naturally drawn to placing themselves within a hierarchy of other men, with one at the top, even if it ends in their demise.