When the Teslas originally came out, many people who were liberals got them because they felt that buying an electric vehicle was the right thing to do to fight climate change. Tesla’s were one of the first EVs on the market and it branded itself as a cool, futuristic car and because it was quite expensive, rich celebrities were among the early purchasers and others may have felt that having one also made them cool.
But things have changed. Elon Musk is now seen as a truly awful person who is using his proximity and access to the ear of Trump to advance his personal agenda of destroying the government by slashing agencies and laying off thousands of federal workers. It should come as no surprise that his actions are likely to result in increased profits for private businesses, including his own. This is, after all, one of their main goals, to siphon off expenditures used to provide government services for private profit. The companies eying the money that will come their way can hardly contain their glee.
Musk’s plans have already excited Silicon Valley mainstays such as Palantir, whose executives praised Doge on an earnings call last week and talked about how the disruption by the billionaire’s strike squad was good for the company. Palantir already has won hundreds of millions of dollars in US military contracta in recent years for AI-related projects.
“I think Doge is going to bring meritocracy and transparency to government, and that’s exactly what our commercial business is,” Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, said on the call. Sankar claimed the cost cutting would target straggling software projects, which he called “sacred cows of the deep state”.
“This is a revolution, some people are gonna get their heads cut off,” Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, added. “We’re expecting to see unexpected things and to win.”
Other CEOs and tech executives have similarly praised Musk and told investors that Doge’s plans represent an opportunity for their companies. Brian Armstrong, CEO of the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase lauded Doge last week for its “great progress” and suggested putting government expenditures on blockchain technology. Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman spoke favorably of the effort on recent earnings calls, while the Predator drone-maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems wrote a letter directly to Musk last month asking him to speed up the way the Pentagon handles defense contracts.
As companies seek to benefit from Doge’s reshaping of the government, Musk also has extensive contracts worth billions of dollar s through his own companies like SpaceX that are potentially set to expand under the new administration.
But as Musk’s venality has become apparent, public sentiment is shifting dramatically against Tesla, the car that is synonymous with his name, and protestors have targeted its sales rooms.
Protesters gathered outside Tesla dealerships across the US on Saturday in response to Elon Musk’s efforts to shred government spending under the president, Donald Trump.
Groups of demonstrators up to 100-strong gathered outside the electric carmaker’s showrooms in cities including New York, Seattle, Kansas City and across California. Organisers said the protests took place in dozens of locations.
While the protests were scattered, they highlighted the risks to the car company of Musk’s close association with Trump’s radical rightwing agenda. Many of the protesters carried placards likening the Trump administration to Nazis – a characterisation that Musk has previously emphatically denied.
Tesla’s sales have slumped, as Musk’s sympathies with neo-Nazis and white supremacists have become increasingly obvious.
Tesla reported its first ever annual decline in sales in 2024, amid tough times for the global car industry. It is not yet clear whether Musk’s rightwing politics contributed to that decline, and the company could conceivably make up for lost leftwing customers with new enthusiasts on the right.
Some commentators have linked a steep decline in Tesla sales in Germany with his December declaration of support for the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). German Tesla sales fell 60% year-on-year in January, although delivery schedules can be affected by other factors beyond demand.
Singer Sheryl Crow posted a video of herself saying goodbye to her Tesla after she sold it and gave the proceeds to NPR.
A new protest group called 50501 has arisen, frustrated by the Democratic party’s lack of decisive action against Musk-Trump.
In Washington, Indivisible and other groups on the left have organized protests, moving from agency to agency and following Musk’s team at the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) as it tries to gut programs and services.
The protests are meant to voice anger against Musk and Trump, but also to pressure Democrats into working in tandem with groups such as Indivisible as an opposition party, Levin said. Democratic elected officials have not led the resistance, he argued, so the resistance is pushing them to action.
…Beyond DC, a nascent protest movement – organized on social media by people who were tired of waiting for direction on how to voice their discontent with Trump – began in late January with a Reddit post that set a date chosen at random, 5 February, for a 50-state protest. Now called 50501 (for 50 states, 50 protests, one day), the group claims people turned out in 80 cities that day. Established left-leaning groups first viewed the protest plans with wariness, given the organizers’ inexperience.
…Levin said his organization was initially “really frustrated” that Democratic leadership was not responding strongly to the funding freeze that caused confusion and chaos. The group held a “Nobody Elected Elon” protest at the treasury department, and elected Democratic members of Congress made an appearance.
Pranksters are using the internet to mock the Musk-Trump efforts.
Elon Musk and his team of 19-24 year old tech minions have been bulldozing through federal agencies, hacking into sensitive data, shutting down USAID, threatening federal workers with termination, and a host of other illegal and questionable activities. Protests against Musk and DOGE erupted in cities nationwide.
Now, the hiring site join.doge.gov has become a focal point for the outrage as people submit mock applications.
Hitler, Mussolini and Franco all “submitted” applications. One comment quipped “There’s a lot of out-of-work fascists since WWII.” Under qualifications, their applications mentioned things like “good at getting rid of bureaucratic red tape” and “leader in downsizing populations.”
Cruella De Vil (using the email hatespuppys@disneyvillainsunited.com) let Musk know that she has experience in breaking up Black/white relationships, views DOG(E)s as part of her brand, and has conducted round-ups before. Ebenezer Scrooge, though ineligible for being a British citizen, nonetheless lauded his world-famous “penny-pinching” and “ruthless cost-saving measures” and “willingness to work on holidays.” The Grinch wrote, “I stole Christmas. What more do you need?”
…Similar protest emails have been sent to the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, which is trying to get reports of noncompliance with their anti-trans efforts. Sending messages to defendingwomen@opm.gov, people are attempting to use a flood of complaints to prevent snitching from targeting federal workers upholding trans inclusion.
After the Trump administration warned federal employees of “adverse consequences” for not reporting colleagues resisting orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, citizens began submitting false reports to the special email account: DEIAtruth@opm.gov. Here’s one example: “A man named Donald Trump is doing affirmative action for billionaires and oligarchs against the mandate to stop hiring minority groups.”
One type of protest that I hope we don’t see is people setting fire to Teslas. This is because the cars are prone to catching fire with passengers trapped inside when their batteries are damaged, because the doors that are operated electrically get shut down and cannot be opened while the manual override is not intuitive to access. Many people have been incinerated this way. Once the car catches fire, it is extremely difficult to put out.
Tesla electric vehicles (EVs), like many other EVs, use lithium-ion battery packs, which pose unique challenges when they catch fire, making them difficult to extinguish and complicating rescue efforts. The nature of these fires, known as “thermal runaway,” occurs when a single battery cell overheats and causes a chain reaction with other cells. This reaction generates extremely high temperatures, reaching up to 900C (1,650F), and releases flammable gases, making these fires intense and difficult to control.
Once a Tesla’s battery pack ignites, it requires a massive amount of water to cool down and extinguish the flames. Firefighters often need tens of thousands of gallons of water, and even then, the fire may reignite due to residual heat and the battery’s chemical reactions. Conventional firefighting methods are not always effective, which sometimes forces emergency responders to monitor the vehicle for hours or even days to prevent re-ignition.
In an accident involving a Tesla fire, victims inside the vehicle may find it difficult to escape. Tesla’s doors rely on electric mechanisms, which may become inoperative if the battery is compromised or if there’s a power failure. In such cases, manual release mechanisms are the only option, but they are not always intuitive or easy to locate under pressure or in an emergency scenario.
From the outside, rescuers face additional hurdles. High-voltage systems in Tesla vehicles pose a risk of electric shock, and damaged battery packs can release toxic gases like carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Without the proper training and equipment, first responders may struggle to access the vehicle safely, especially if they are unsure whether the power systems are still active.
I bought my internal combustion engine car in 2013. I am perfectly happy with it and so am not in the market for a new car but even if I was, I would never buy a Tesla. There must be many people like me.
I was going to buy the Model 3, but I hated Elon Musk so much, I decided to go out and test drive all the competitors instead. It turns out the sticker price for all the competitive models is the same, but the only difference is the federal rebate. Hyundai offered a factory rebate that matched the federal rebate, so I bought the Ioniq 6 instead. It’s a great car with specs that match Tesla in apples to apples comparisons. Musk seems to think that he doesn’t need rebates any more, but the market has already caught up to him, and the people who like EVs the most now despise him personally. Tesla will suffer in the coming years.
all of the companies whose CEOs are quoted up there reveling in the looting of america are just demonstrating how completely blind they are to the future. all that matters is the next quarter. a devastated america where 99% of the population lives like people in the phillippines cannot afford their fucking products.
and then who becomes the new USA, the new “biggest consumer in the world”? china? is US labor about to be the new “made in taiwan”? i’m not looking forward to being more economically pressed than i already am, but maybe it’s high time conservative voters in this country find out what it’s like to actually be the median citizen of the world. it fucking blows.
jello biafra’s “no more cocoons” spoken word album laid out his vision of the political future, which included the almost musical refrain of the phrase “corporate martial law.” that’s what apartheid junior and all his neo-nazi ceo fuckface pals want -- a return to the days of union busting with gatling gun turrets.
if the only way to break the power of the new US corporate fascism is the literal end of civilization, guess i’m looking forward to that. fingers crossed the solarpunk idealists pull a different kind of revolution out of a hat in a hurry.
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i should probably avoid reading articles like this, lol
i’ll go ahead and make my 3rd comment. the most darkly hilarious thing we will see in the coming age is even more ruinous incompetence in the military industrial complex. please, DoD, i’m beggin ya. start using blockchain technology and AI for everything. get your armored teslas. you thought the boondoggles and disasters of various multi billion dollar aerospace projects were a good time, this’ll put that to shame. US intelligence is about to be a wide-open book. i’ll look forward to buying dossiers of all the secret fetishes of five-star generals from serbian goat-farmers in years to come. by then the US dollar will probably have been replaced with meme coins, so how much you figure it’ll run me? 5 million cruzeiro doges? shit, that’s what a pack of gum will cost. totally worth it.
Dr VanNostrand @ 1
I always expected Tesla to get their ass kicked once companies that were already in the business of manufacturing cars started building EVs. I have seen F150 Lightning work trucks but I bet I will never see a Cybertruck work truck. The latter looks like something designed by an alien who had no concept of what pickup trucks were used for. In addition to the difficulty of unlocking the doors, some Tesla models have doors that open upwards, so it is impossible to open them if the car is upside down. There is at least one Telsa that had no instrument panel in front of the diver only a touch screen in center. It reminded me of a 1969 Mini that I once owned. The Mini had better ergonomics. Telsla’s autopilot relies solely on cameras while the driver assist on any competently designed car uses sonar or radar in addition to cameras to detect hazards. I prefer a car designed by automotive engineers over one designed by computer “engineers”.
Well if a bunch die hard gas defenders are converted to EV supporters, that would be a silver lining in this whole fiasco, I guess…
Tesla: drive a swasticar.
I first saw the Tesla at a community event in 2012/2013 timeframe, when they had one to look at. It was the first all-electric (vs. hybrid) car I’d seen up close and I thought it looked futuristic and cool, but I had just bought a non-electric car--the one I’m still driving and it’s doing fine. I might buy an electric car when mine dies, but it won’t be a Tesla.
Bebe Melange @2
“all that matters is the next quarter”
Disney beat you to it. The 1990s animatronic series “Dinosaurs” (before the Chixchulub crater was discovered) had the CEO where the protagonist worked do various things that caused the exinction of dinosaurs.
The ‘nuclear winter’ caused record sales of snow showels leading to “the best third quarter profits ever”. When asked about the future he replied “that is a fourth quarter problem”!
ESP in action!
BTW if GM organisms in “biorefineries” can provide butanol or biodiesel at competitive costs, I see no reason to phase out the internal combustion engine, especially if the biofuels are ‘slot-in’ fuels that can use existing engines.
An analog would be the use of carbon monoxide powered cars during WWII (although those had poor power and required a big cylindrical tank for anoxic burning of wood. Troublesome).
You’ve got Musk’s motives wrong -- he isn’t trying to reduce waste or siphon resources or wealth -- he’s trying to remove oversight of his businesses and cripple government run competitors (such as NASA). When Mussolini formalised fascist ideology he first called it corporatism (until someone suggested renaming it after the fasc for better P.R) -- Musk (now using the government to favour his corporate interests) is literally a fascist (NO HYPERBOLE INVOKED).
That’s a very big “if”… Vinod Khosla pumped a huge amount of money into research in this area without success. It’s a very difficult problem, thermodynamically speaking. The energy has to come from somewhere.
A few months ago, I was stopped at a stop light.
The car in front of me was a Tesla.
The bumper sticker read, “I bought this car before we knew Elon Musk was crazy.”
I’ve since seen it on a few other Teslas.
Tesla car sales worldwide are dropping a lot because of Elon Musk.
adding to #7, comments about the new Tesla:
-- “All good as long as it comes with free sick bags for life.”
-- “It’s too low. Kids will just complain the could nazi the screen.”
-- “$60k for a Nazi car, hard pass.”
-- “Why’s it shaped like a swastika?”
-- “I heard it only comes in white. They’re gonna refresh the model SS next!”
-- “Like supporting fascism? Buy a Tesla.”
I own one as I’ve mentioned before here. I got it before Musk bought twitter and wasted other people’s money. His online antics gave me pause before I bought the car but it seemed the racism complaints at his company had some time to get sorted out by then. The only other objectionable thing I knew about him at the time was him publicly stating cringe shitlord takes on random current events.
The competition didn’t seem very well organized and when I picked mine up I lived in an apartment (which has only very recently changed) so the supercharger network was something I needed. I didn’t want another internal combustion engine because OPEC were being assholes when I bought it and I figured I’d keep my next car for over 10 years just like the one I was replacing. I didn’t want to still be buying gas in 2032.
I wouldn’t buy one now. Elon Musk has always seemed a bit stuck on his own genius (which is a quality he very clearly lacks). That sort of hubris online and maybe while engaging with companies he owns is unfortunately sort of common. If my criteria for car companies excluded them because their executives or owners had such qualities I’d probably be looking at biking everywhere (a non-starter here).
But it’s not hard at all to pick a company that isn’t run by someone actively destroying the country on a daily basis. The others at least do it in slow motion.
I can’t believe I’m doing a John Morales, but here I go. I’m not really defending Musk here, it’s just a point of fact.
Elon didn’t waste anyone’s money with Twitter. My (and everyone else’s) shares were bought at the premium price he was compelled by law to pay. Dude tried to extract value from that business, but did not succeed. Dude was ‘in debt’ (although his net worth was enough to pay this debt actually doing it in a timely manner would be problematic: it’s complicated).
Now there are folks who have invested in Tesla. His Board of Directors awarded him 54 billion USD as a salary or bonus or whatever. That $ could have been used to capitalize the cheaper Tesla car promised, bribe politicians who are still sucking hard on Carbon’s shrinking udders to keep electric car subsidies, or better battery technologies. Value investors in Tesla meant to be part of the future just like investors in automobile manufacturers did a hundred years ago. So *that* was a waste of other people’s money.
I was one of those crowing when it appeared Musk had wasted $44b. Ho ho ho he’ll never make that money back. I’m not laughing now. Only now is it apparent that he didn’t spend $44b to buy Twitter because Twitter was a business that he could extract money from. He spent $44b to buy Twitter because it, among other things, would put him where he is today. He didn’t “buy Twitter” for that money. He bought the US government. And if you think that was a waste of money, you’re not paying attention. If you ask me, he got control of the USA for cheap.
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@9:
Eh? Dinosaurs ran from 1991 to 1994. Chixchulub was discovered, kinda, in 1978, and per Wikipedia Hildebrand, Penfield, Boynton, Camargo, and others published their paper identifying the crater in 1991. So… close.
Also top reference: the ending of that episode, and the series, which was in 1994, was shockingly brilliant and, considering it was a kids’ show with animatronic puppets, quite incredibly bleak. It stuck with me for a long time.