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.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
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").
andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.38...
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.
There really isn’t a good excuse.
>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.
I can sort of see that being annoying.
What caused Elon to lose his ability to manage it is subject for debate, I personally believe he discovered drugs in 2019 and the rest is history.
He just took a wrong turn and seems hell bent on staying on it.
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.
- we had internet (and still do) in planes that have nothing to do with starlink
I think long-term drug use changed his brain and turned him bad.
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.
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.
I think we got a few steps beyond "reasonable beliefs".
I mean, perhaps it is reasonable for you, but then we will find very little common ground.
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.
That's interesting - have you got a link?
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.
One critical correction though: BYD makes 16% of the world's batteries. And makes cars. So there is vertical integration in play. https://cnevpost.com/2026/02/04/global-ev-battery-market-sha...
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.
Not for union manufacturers. $1500 of the cost of every GM car is healthcare.
BYD was a battery company first and expanded into cars
Tesla had that, all Musk had to do was refrain himself from waving his hand around in that certain fashion.
New registrations in Sweden for the past 3 years, Sweden alone would've probably absorbed about 14000 cars of that unsold stock.
2023 20388 341835 0,0596428101276932 (5.96%)
2024 21894 314485 0,0696185827622939 (6.96%)
2025 7254 314426 0,0230706112089967 (2.31%)
2026 2849 72525 0,0392830058600483 (3.93%)
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
For example: “Meta released a new product, they (Meta) are calling it …”
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.
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.
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.
How can (generally) dropping sales and having 50,000 unsold cars on stock be the right move?
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
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.
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.
Mhhh, makes sense.
The tariffs though is a great point. Definitely a boon for Tesla from good old Papa Trump. It's grotesque.