When I was walking back to my car the other day after class, I saw a white Tesla Model 3 parked behind Spingold with two bumper stickers on it. The first read: “Vintage Tesla: Pre Madness Edition,” and the second read “Tax the Rich; Feed the Poor.” Now, I know absolutely nothing about the owner of this car, aside from the fact that they are presumably somehow involved with Brandeis University. I don’t know their political stances, their tax bracket, or when exactly in the supposed “pre-madness era” they purchased their vehicle. What I do know, though, is that it’s hilariously ironic to have a “tax the rich” slogan slapped on the back of a car brand synonymous with enormous wealth and status. I found the juxtaposition of the two bumper stickers—combined with the context of what Tesla both used to and currently symbolizes—quite funny, so I snapped a photo before moving on with my day.
Prior to the current Tesla debate, I hadn’t thought that it was possible for a brand’s image to flip so definitively in such a short amount of time. In the matter of a few months, a Tesla has gone from a sleek, innovative, progressive car driven by Old Money Democrats to a racist, fascist, Swastika-covered garbage can driven by the MAGA King himself. It’s certainly quite the riveting U-turn.
Now that Elon Musk’s name is synonymous with the far right, it’s only natural that Tesla owners would feel uncomfortable trekking out in the most recognizable manifestation of his power. I would hazard that many Tesla buyers are struggling with this conundrum. Do they sell their car? Do they never drive it again? Do they burn it? A lot of people, such as the unknown Brandeis employee, student or visitor who parked their white Tesla Model 3 in T Lot, seem to have begrudgingly settled for the path of least resistance, slapping a bumper sticker on the back to assure all nearby drivers and passerby that they bought their car long before Elon was insane.
After all, Tesla was supposed to be the solution, the magical E.V. that would single-handedly outwit the gas-powered motor industry. Prior to The Current Political Situation, there was no reason for somebody to feel bad cavorting around in a Model X, Y or 3, right? Liberals, as we all know, never put their faces in the sand. They never act solely out of their own self-interest. That means the mere suggestion that the bright red warning lights have always been blaring for Musk and Tesla is simply ludicrous.
Sure, ludicrous … but only if you haven’t been paying attention.
I will start with a very simple question, one that, if Musk has always been as hunky-dory as we seem to be pretending, should be exceedingly easy to answer. When exactly was Elon’s “pre-madness era”? If Tesla owners are claiming that they bought their car before he started gouging on Cocoa Puffs, then it must be simple to figure out when he was last a laudable figure. 2024? 2020? 2018? 2010? In actuality, nobody seems to know. People are too scared of the real question that underpins the debate over Elon’s sanity timeline to give it too much thought. “Was it ever OK to buy a Tesla?” is an important question, though, one with many layers and nuances that say far less about the DOGE Commander in Chief than they do about the people who at one point or another supported him enough to buy one of his cars. To get to the root of the issue, though, we need to start at the very beginning and work our way up to where we are now.
Tesla Motors was first incorporated in late 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning with the dream of bringing electric-powered vehicles to the mass market. Musk became involved in the operation in early 2004, helping to lead the company’s Series A Venture Capital funding. He became the chairman of the board of directors and, with his personal investment of $6.5 million, Tesla’s largest shareholder. In 2007, after Musk had proven himself by leading further successful rounds of funding, Eberhard was asked to step down as CEO, and in 2008, after an interim period, Musk succeeded him in the position. It was at this time that Tesla began production on its very first product, a sports car: the Tesla Roadster. All of this to say that even if you were to have bought the very first Roadster that rolled off the assembly line, you still would have been buying an Elon Musk car. He may not have first envisioned the company, but it was now his brand. The logical next question, then, is who exactly was Elon Musk in 2008?
Born in South Africa to a wealthy family in 1971, Musk had a relatively easy childhood. Although he was a good student, he was largely unimpressive, receiving average grades throughout secondary school. He did not want to participate in mandatory military service under the apartheid regime (his family was vehemently opposed to their policies), and so he petitioned for Canadian citizenship through his mother when he turned 18. Such a move would also, incidentally, make it easier for him to reach his eventual goal of immigrating to the United States.
He got his first taste of Silicon Valley through summer internships while studying at the Wharton School, and he took to the culture instantly. Although he was accepted into a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, he chose not to enroll, instead opting to get in on the Internet boom of the late 1990s. His legal status during this time is exceedingly questionable, as his failure to enroll at Stanford would have imperiled his student visa. He attests that his visa transitioned into an H1-B; however, this is contradicted by accounts from former coworkers and associates.
Musk showed signs of great entrepreneurial verve, founding his first company, Zip2—an online GPS and map-printing application—with the help of seed funding from his father. After Zip2 was acquired by Compaq (Musk received $22 million for his seven percent share), he started again with X.com (not to be confused with the site formerly known as Twitter). X was an online financial services company, one of the first of its kind to be federally insured. However, Musk was regarded as inexperienced by investors, and his insistence on using Microsoft technology instead of Unix led to infrastructure malfunctions. As a result, he was ousted as CEO in 1999. Under Musk’s replacement, Peter Thiel, the company focused on the PayPal service, which up until that point had been their most popular feature. The renamed PayPal was later acquired in 2002 by eBay, and as the largest shareholder, Musk received $175.8 million for the deal.
Concurrently, Musk was also working on developing SpaceX. Originally conceived as a company that would bring plant life to Mars, Musk pivoted to the promise of affordable rockets after attempts to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles from Russian companies proved futile. Investing $100 million of his own fortune into the venture, Musk named himself CEO and chief engineer. By 2008, despite multiple attempts, SpaceX had yet to produce a single working rocket.
This was who Elon Musk was when Tesla first delivered the Roadster. A seasoned entrepreneur, yes, but had he actually been the arbiter of his own successes? Was he responsible for the monumental success of PayPal or was Peter Thiel? Had he revolutionized GPS technology with Zip2, or had his inexperience been a detriment to the company? Was SpaceX truly the future of exploration, or was it an expensive passion project that hadn’t delivered a single successful test? These are open questions for a reason, since there’s no way of knowing for certain one way or the other. I wasn’t there in 1999 or 2000 or 2008, so all I can do is guess at the answers. What we can see, however, is numerous parallels to who he has continued to be in 2025. He’s ambitious above all else, as demonstrated in his petition for Canadian citizenship, immigration to America and streak of building companies from scratch. He seeks power and acclaim, as shown in his consistent attempts to be seen as a CEO, a founder and a visionary. He is stubborn to the point of absurdity, insisting on using incompatible software to comply with personally held affection for Microsoft. He is inconsistent in his climate policy, pouring millions into electric vehicles while simultaneously investing hundreds of millions into rockets. He supports the proliferation of life beyond Earth, and has always dreamed of reaching Mars. He is a liar, both in regards to his goals and what he has done to achieve them. This characteristic is most prominent in regards to his legal status directly after his undergraduate studies.
If you bought a Tesla in 2008, this was who you were supporting. Certainly not a man who seemed deranged or unpredictable or unaccountable, but one who clearly had the demonstrated capacity to be so. This was still the early days of E.V.s, though, when the lithium-ion battery was brand new to the market and Tesla was an arresting new player. The internet was small, and Elon Musk was not as well-known, and no other car company was doing what he was doing, and so you would not be remiss to point out that it might have been too much to ask a consumer to read this much into his story. Plus, if you were buying a Tesla in 2008, you were likely a billionaire yourself (the Roadster retailed at $98,000), or at the very least a close personal friend of Musk … so the ethics were probably not at the forefront of your mind.
Let’s jump forward a bit, then, to 2016. Specifically, April 1, 2016, the day that Tesla announced the Model 3, its first car designed for the average consumer. A lot had changed for Musk and Tesla between 2008 and 2016. Firstly, the Tesla Roadster, their former flagship vehicle, had ceased production in 2011. In its place, the Model S (a sedan, starting price $75,000) and the Model X (an SUV, starting price $80,000) ushered in the new fleet, bolstered by Tesla’s Autopilot self-driving technology. Tesla was now a publicly traded company. Elon Musk had become a billionaire. All of this would imply that Things Were Happening at Tesla; however, these grand achievements hid a dark underbelly of malpractice and corporate greed.
Yes, the Model S and Model X had launched, but not wholly successfully. Along the way, Musk had missed some 20 self-imposed projected rollout dates for both models. These delays not only negatively affected Tesla’s stock price, but also tarnished its reputation. Add on to this that in 2014 their Fremont Factory had three times as many OSHA violations as the 10 largest U.S. auto plants combined, and the picture was far from rosy.
The cars that Tesla did churn out had numerous safety failings. The Model S, which had won various automotive awards upon its first release, received criticism from regulators over suspension issues that caused premature failures. Fires were a recurring pattern, and there was even a six-week span when three separate blazes in Model S’ occurred due to battery malfunctions on the road. The Model X didn’t escape notice either. It was recalled in 2016 after testing revealed that the backs of the car’s third row seats would give away in a crash. Owners who experienced safety issues (and even those who requested basic vehicle repairs) were forced to sign NDAs in exchange for fixes at Tesla dealerships, a bizarre and sinister practice not at all normalized in the industry.
The Tesla Autopilot feature, which Musk had touted at launch as being “probably better than a person right now” also led to devastating consequences. Tesla aficionado and former Navy SEAL Joshua Brown was killed while driving his Model S when the system failed to detect a tractor trailer cutting in front of his car. Critics had long warned that Tesla had been premature in rolling out the feature in their cars, accusing the company of treating their buyers like “guinea pigs.” Although Musk expressed his condolences for Mr. Brown, he insisted that the self-driving mechanism had never been marketed as a wholesale replacement to a human driver, but rather an augmentation for dealing with sudden and unexpected circumstances.
And all of this is even before we get to the allegations of fraud.
In 2013, Bloomberg questioned whether the automaker had violated Generally Accepted Accounting Principles reporting standards. The company was accused of using creative accounting to show positive cash flow and quarterly profits where there were none. Additionally, from 2012 to 2014, Tesla earned over $295 million in tax credits for a battery-swapping technology that had never been made available to customers.
It was also around this time that Musk’s behavior started to enjoy increasingly negative media attention. He continued to command an army of diehard fans, of course, but he was often under fire for his inflammatory statements. His high standards for employees had never been a secret, but his demands for the impossible or even “the impossible on top of the impossible” started to lose their motivational veneer.
One of the most interesting incidents from this period is one that largely goes undiscussed today. SolarCity was another company that had been envisioned by Musk in the early 2000s, a solar energy provider and installer built on similar values as Tesla. Founded by Musk’s cousins Lydon and Peter Rive, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States by 2013. However, the company faced issues, and by 2016 was at the brink of liquidation. In a completely unexpected move, Musk optioned that Tesla should buy out SolarCity for $2 billion. It was such a ridiculous (and slightly amoral) idea that most economists dismissed it as a folly of the week and something that would never actually happen. The speculation alone over the deal’s announcement caused Tesla stock to drop 10%.
What exactly were the problems with the proposed buyout? Well, for starters, Musk was the majority stakeholder in both companies, and had a familial interest in SolarCity besides. The deal would assuredly expand his net worth and increase and consolidate his power at both companies. Although some measures were taken to limit the impact of this conflict of interest (both Musk and the Rives recused themselves from the deliberations, meaning that the shareholders would need to approve of the merger), they ignored standard procedure in these cases. Normally, an independent counsel would be formed to investigate the benefits and negatives of the sale, and the findings would later be presented to the interested parties. The recusals were just barely substantial enough of a concession to qualify the buyout as legal under Delaware law, where the action was filed, but the optics did not play well. The deliberations were decried as a “shameful example of corporate governance at its worst,” and Musk himself was denounced as a “corporate governmental mess” and a “huckster.” The deal eventually did go through (“Tesla Motors” became “Tesla, Inc.” to reflect the diversification of their enterprise), but various shareholder groups later filed a lawsuit saying that the buyout had been carried out with the sole purpose of benefiting Musk at the expense of the company’s interests. Additionally, shareholders claimed that they had been deliberately misled about the financial status of SolarCity and that Musk had purposely overpaid for the acquisition.
There was one more key development that happened roughly around this time, just after the election of President Trump: the first documented public meeting between him and Elon Musk. Musk became acquainted with the Trump administration through his work advocating for clean energy. Trump, largely opposed to solar and electric power, had needed substantial persuasion not to outright attack the Green sector. Musk had at least two separate meetings with the President in 2016 and 2017, and began to closely advise Trump on the manufacturing industry.
With this updated portrait of Tesla and Musk coming into light, I will reintroduce my original question: “was 2016 an OK time to have bought a Tesla?” Many of the factors that would have made it easier for a consumer to ignore the warning signs in 2008 were now long gone. Elon Musk was a much more recognizable name, and his face was synonymous with the Tesla brand. If you were buying a Tesla, you were doing so with the knowledge that you were most definitely buying an Elon Musk car. It’s also not as easy to argue that no other car company was doing what Tesla was doing. The Chevy Bolt had hit the market, and at a much lower price point than the Model S and Model X. The BMW i3 had been out and about for a number of years, and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV had started to make its way across the Atlantic, bolstered by successful launches across Europe. Hybrid cars were on the rise as well, with literally hundreds of options available to consumers. Tesla was not the end-all-be-all in electric vehicles that it had once been touted as, and with numerous automakers promising to soon deliver affordable E.V.s, it seemed as though its iron grip on the market was soon to fade. The negatives also kept on piling up. The safety violations, the NDAs, the saddeningly avoidable death of Joshua Brown, the accusations of fraud, the increasingly loud signs that Musk didn’t respect his employees, the corrupt SolarCity deal … and his growing proclivity to whisper in President Trump’s ear. If you were OK buying a Tesla in 2016 (as a note, the white Model 3 that started all of this was not even in production by then), you were signing up to be OK with all of that. It certainly wasn’t fascism, but was it really worth turning a blind eye to so that you could show off your cool car?
Let’s bite the bullet and just get to the really bad stuff. Boom, it’s 2022, the pandemic is starting to wind down, and businesses are trying their best to bounce back from COVID. Let’s check in on what Elon Musk was doing over the last six years, shall we?
After more delays, the Model 3 finally went into production in July 2017. Unfortunately, like with the Model S and Model X before it, the sailing was far from smooth. Musk termed the car’s shaky start as “manufacturing hell,” and Tesla’s credit rating plummeted. Some analysts fretted about whether the company would run out of money by the end of the year. Car crashes still abounded, and another death in California led to renewed scrutiny of the Autopilot feature.
In November 2017, Musk unveiled a battery-powered semi-truck as well a two-seat Roadster, vowing to begin producing the truck by 2019. This was despite the numerous kinks still abounding in the Model 3 assembly process, as well as the fact that they had no factory equipped to handle the demands of the semi-truck. Production totals remained an issue for the company. Musk had originally predicted Model 3 sales to push Tesla over 500,000 cars a year by 2018. In 2017, he lowered this prediction to 100,000 cars. By the end of that year, Tesla had only constructed 2,425 units of the Model 3.
As 2017 bled into 2018, the company’s woes under Musk did not lesson. Tesla lost $397 million in the first quarter of 2018, despite the fact that revenue more than doubled in that timeframe. The deficit later rose to $771 million, tripling the loss they had reported for the same period just a year earlier. After an earnings announcement in April 2018, Musk butted heads with analysts on a call when they poked him about falling stock prices. “Boring bonehead questions are not cool,” Musk was quoted as saying, after being asked about capital requirements.
Musk’s inability to take criticism became a constant beat for him in the news. He would get angry at people who questioned him, or fire back at public figures via his incredibly active Twitter account if they said something mean about him. He would regularly offer outlandish solutions to problems that he had no jurisdiction over (like that time he said that he would somehow solve L.A. traffic congestion), and his rambles would occasionally veer towards proposing curtailing the freedom of the press (like that time he said that readers should be able to hand out credibility scores to journalists, editors and publications). He would call out employees who he thought were “sabotaging” Tesla in company emails and showed paranoid tendencies in his proclivity to villainize “outside forces” who “want Tesla to die.” His inclinations towards Mars, not a far-gone pipe dream, still drove his ambition, and he promised that he would one day build a city on the red planet. Musk had decided that the truth was only as bad as whatever he could get away with. And boy, did he lean hard into that in the later part of the year.
One of the biggest stories in the summer of 2018 was the Thai cave rescue. In June, 12 members of a youth football team aged 11 to 16 had become trapped with their coach in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand. The process of trying to retrieve the group eventually took 18 days and involved nearly 10,000 people. It was a harrowing story, one that captured the eyes of the entire world. Since everybody was paying attention, of course it had been inevitable that Elon Musk would throw in his two cents. He butted in early on, tweeting that he planned to build a “tiny, kid-sized submarine” that would aid in the rescue mission. Although certainly well-meant, the idea was not practical, since the cave would have been too narrow and rocky for a submarine to safely fit through. When Musk was informed of this, he lashed back, saying that those involved were not subject matter experts. British caver Vernon Unsworth, who had been one of the first to respond to the crisis, suggested in an interview that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts,” which the Tesla CEO responded to by suggesting this man who had helped to save the soccer team’s lives was a “child rapist” and a “pedo guy.” Although Musk apologized for his comments after the extremely public backlash and extremely terrible week at the stock market that followed, this was yet another sign of his embrace of social media as an unfiltered soapbox.
That same soapbox would get Musk in trouble yet again not even a month later. On August 7, 2018, he tweeted “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The audacity of the plan dumbfounded traders, as did the nonchalant way that Musk chose to announce it. He provided no context and no further explanation behind his decision. It was unclear whether he actually had the funding for such a move, or how Tesla would be able to afford debt payments for outstanding loans if they went private. The biggest question of all, though, was whether or not the tweet violated securities regulations. The answer, as it turned out, was a resounding yes. A week after the initial tweet (and the stock fallout that it caused), federal regulators served Tesla with a subpoena. It quickly became clear just how poorly thought-out the plan of privatization had been. The question of illegality was tethered to whether or not the funding for the move was indeed secured, as Musk had said it was. This served as the basis for a fraud case, the consequences of which would be severe not only for him but Tesla as a whole. He eventually settled with the agency for a $20 million fine and was forced to step aside as chairman for three years. Musk kept the company public, but he made many comments disparaging the SEC over the course of the debacle, lambasting them on Twitter as the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission.” Additionally, he questioned their purpose as an organization and continued to be as uncooperative as possible with the investigation and ensuing court case. When asked later about the cost of the initial tweet, Musk simply said that it had been “worth it,” whatever that was supposed to mean.
The issues with fraud didn’t end there, unfortunately. In Sept. 2018, Tesla disclosed that they were the subject of an FBI investigation regarding their Model 3 production figures. Authorities were investigating whether the company had misled investors with their lofty projections for Model 3 production (remember those 100,000 cars that were supposed to have been on the road by 2017?) that they had known would be impossible to meet. The knife went deeper after Consumer Reports stopped recommending the Model S when surveys showed that the car had a history of squeaking, rattling and leaking.
Two months later, in completely different but equally terrible news for Tesla, the New York Times broke a story about the racist work culture at the Fremont campus. Black employees had been regularly taunted with the n-word and Swastikas had been graffitied in the bathrooms. African-American workers had been threatened and demeaned by superiors and actively prevented from advancing further within the company. Despite sending complaints to Human Resources, the victims had been ignored, given baseline assurances that did nothing to change the system or gaslit until either being fired or quitting themselves. This sort of behavior was and is completely inexcusable, especially descending from a CEO claiming to have fled South Africa specifically because he did not want to support a racist state.
Tesla rang in 2019 with layoffs, reducing its full-time work force by 7% in an attempt to lower the cost of producing its Model 3. The move made no difference, though, because by February Consumer Reports had dropped the Model 3 from its recommended list after readers reported “cracked windows, chipped paint, and problems with the car’s large touch screen.” Again, Tesla shares fell, and again Musk promised that the company was *this* close to becoming consistently profitable. He got in hot water with the SEC for tweeting that Tesla would make “around 500,000” cars in 2019 … a wildly inaccurate claim that had not been reviewed before it was posted. Musk’s explanation for the flub? He had “forgotten to read the Tesla earnings transcript.” As insane as it is for a CEO to not consult the books before making production claims, maybe it was for the best seeing as the company had lost an astounding $702 million in the first quarter of 2019. In one brief spot of good news, though, certain configurations of the Model 3 were retailing for $35,000 after two years on the market, finally becoming the broadly affordable vehicle that Musk had promised when the car concept had first been unveiled.
In November, Musk introduced the Cybertruck, his personal pet project, an electric pickup truck that Tesla hoped would rival the Ford F-150. Quite infamously, the demonstration did not go well. When its designer threw a metal ball at one of the (supposedly bullet-proof) windows, the glass cracked on impact. When he tried again on another window, that one cracked as well. Still, production was promised to begin in 2021, and despite the snafu with the presentation, spirits were high. Tesla was worth more than every other major automaker, it had reported profits for two quarters in a row and stock was surging. A new factory had just opened in China, and another in Germany was being planned. In addition to the Cybertruck, Tesla was also hoping to break ground on their second SUV, the Model Y. Musk’s tweets had been slightly reigned in after the most recent brush with the SEC. Everything seemed to be coming up Tesla. But then the pandemic hit.
For Musk, the most unfortunate thing about the pandemic was the timing. The Model Y had just started production, and investors were banking on its success to continue ensuring Tesla remained profitable. So when the stay-at-home order first hit in March, just as the Model Y was starting to take shape, Musk refused to comply. He defied local ordinances to shut down production, telling employees that if they wanted to stay home, they would need to use up their PTO in order to do so or face losing their benefits. He described the pandemic as “dumb” and said getting COVID was “no worse than the common cold.” He consistently pointed to the “federal government’s direction”—that is to say, President Trump’s complete refusal to believe in the pandemic—as his defence for keeping the Fremont factory open. He also supported Trump’s claims that the pandemic would be gone by April, predicting on Twitter that there would be zero new cases by the end of the month.
On a conference call in May, Musk went so far as to call COVID regulations “fascist” and that the state government was “breaking people’s freedoms.” When Alameda County refused to move Tesla’s return-to-work day up to May 8 from May 18, Musk sued in federal court and threatened to migrate Tesla headquarters to Texas or Nevada. He has since followed through on this, setting up all operations around a new factory in Austin.
Musk’s tweets also become erratic again. He insinuated that Tesla stock was somehow “too high” and that he was considering selling “all physical possessions,” including his house. He wrote “take the red pill,” a reference originally associated with The Matrix that had long since been co-opted by far-right agents. The specific interpretations of “red pilling” vary, but the phrase is generally used to signal one’s realization that feminism is a scam meant to create “masculine women.” Red Pill forums are usually populated by misogynists and racists, and the more extreme ones are funnels for the involuntarily celibate (“incel”) community.
It’s no wonder, then, that a man who embraced anti-feminist sentiments would so soon after come under fire for sexual harassment in the workplace. In 2021, seven women came forward with sexual harassment and discrimination claims, accusing Tesla of fostering a culture of rampant sexism and discrimination. They said that they were subjected to catcalling, unwanted advances and touching, sometimes resorting to setting up physical barriers around themselves to prevent these attentions. The women had felt helpless at the company, knowing that Human Resources would not be of assistance since superiors were oftentimes perpetrators. Although nobody named Musk explicitly as a harasser, it’s clear that his rude comments and values contributed to the pattern of female degradation. This litigation continued into May 2022, when a California judge ruled that the case could move to court, rejecting Tesla’s request for a closed door arbitration.
I could continue with another time jump. I could talk about everything that Musk has done in the meantime. I could talk about his Twitter acquisition and the chaos that followed. I could talk about his ongoing playground feud with Sam Altman. I could talk about just how awful the Cybertruck ended up being. I could talk about his disownment of his daughter. I could talk about his quest to “repopulate the human species.” I could talk about his falling out with Grimes. I could talk about the Nazi salute. I could talk about DOGE, and the millions of lives that he has ruined beyond repair with the glee and abandon of a child messing around with toys. But that wouldn’t really illustrate my point. Because we all know that Elon has been doing a lot of crazy things since 2022. What has gone ignored for far too long is the laundry list of crazy things that he did way, way before that.
I haven’t even scratched the surface on it, honestly. I haven’t talked about Tesla’s union busting or the animal testing at Neuralink. I haven’t talked about the numerous environmental violations at factories. I haven’t talked about the privacy concerns. I haven’t talked about all of the reasons that the “one screen fits all” user interface is a terrible idea that will no doubt result in more avoidable accidents. I’ve only referenced a few of the many, many product recalls that have been put out on their vehicles in the mere seventeen years that they have been producing cars.
So I’m going to end the story here, just shy of Nov. 15, 2022: the day that Donald Trump formally declared his intention to run for the Presidency of the United States of America for a third time.
But let’s still rewind it back again, just for fun. If you bought your Tesla before that fateful day (arguably the last point when people could happily ignore Elon and his worrying antics) it meant that you were OK supporting a man that lied about the number of units his company was producing, who called an international hero a pedophile on a whim, who flirted with SEC regulations like he was on a date, who used social media as a weapon, who fired workers without having surefire plans to actually increase profit, who, even after nearly two decades of tinkering, continually delivered cars with massive safety oversights, who fostered a culture of racism and sexism in his workplace, who allowed his personal passion projects guide developmental visions more so than actual pragmatic reasoning, who denied the COVID-19 pandemic and who slowly but surely publicly aligned himself with the very same politicians that you most likely detested heart and soul.
And for what? A half-baked car with no door handles that gave you the assurance of status. Because that’s the real reason that we’re starting to see the iceberg crumble on Tesla. The status symbol is gone. As long as owning a Tesla meant that you could ascend to that upper echelon, the brand was safe.
The environmental costs and benefits of a Tesla haven’t changed since 2003, not significantly at least. The cars are still produced in the same way, in the same factories, running on batteries that rely on the same abuses of child labor that they always did. Musk hasn’t changed, either. Hopefully I’ve demonstrated that effectively. What has changed though, is that the reality of Musk and his company requires more effort to ignore than it ever did before. And that’s caused the perceived standing of Tesla to drop. The people who bought Teslas didn’t really do it to save the planet. Sure, that was definitely part of the reason, I don’t want to discount that, but if that had been the sole motivating factor they could have quickly found far better options by either looking elsewhere or exploring public transit options. They bought a Tesla for what it meant to have a Tesla, for the opportunity to show off just how good of a person they were, how special they were, how rich they were. It used to be a mark of privilege to own a Tesla, but now it’s become anything but. That’s what it boils down to.
And let me say one more thing, both to the owner of that white Model 3 I saw in T Lot as well as to any other Tesla owner currently hemming and hawing over what to do with their car. If you think that you have a “vintage Tesla,” one of those from the “pre-madness era,” then you’re a fool. If you have the audacity to claim that you support taxing the rich while driving a vehicle that actively prints money for the wealthiest person in the history of the Earth, then you’re a fool, too.
Whether you’re proud or ashamed of your Tesla, you still need to show your support for the causes that you claim to care about. It doesn’t matter that it was never OK for you to have bought your car. What matters is what you do now that you’ve come to terms with that fact. And please, I implore you, the answer is not another fucking bumper sticker.
