If you look at places like Reddit where the organizing is happening, they don't differentiate between left-leaning buyers of years past, and in fact call them out for being complicit by not selling their (paid for?) car. It's scorched earth and is not limited to new buyers.

Sounds dramatic (scorched earth! my lord), but the posts I've seen are like, "here's the anti-tesla flyer that was left on my friend's tesla" and then a bunch of upvoted comments replying that it's dumb and counterproductive to target people who bought their teslas years ago.

> by not selling their (paid for?) car.

It's even more confusing, who are they supposed to sell it to, if no one should drive these cars (and how big of a loss are they expected to take in order to sell it)?

If a foreign government that the US was acting hostile towards was so inclined, they could highly tariff Tesla sales/service and offer buy-outs to make existing owners whole where they simply crush and recycle the cars to deny Tesla any service revenue.

Reddit might not be representative of the larger shift. I am sure there is plenty of hatred, and even violence that makes the news, and that stuff is bad, but I mostly see people politely nudging those they know that own Teslas to sell them.

Which makes sense. The company sold to left-leaning, environmentally conscious buyers, and the CEO has now rebranded Tesla to basically the worst thing for that demographic. Sales are down, resale values are dropping, and insurance rates are rising. And there is no real opportunity on the horizon to save the company and/or the brand (robotaxis without LiDAR..?)

Maybe it looks like scorched earth on reddit, but in reality it's just a lot of people realizing the brand has self-destructed.

Scorched earth strategies can be effective depending on your goals.

> It's scorched earth and is not limited to new buyers.

This whole thing is about destroying already bought vehicles to intimidate potential new buyers, and thus lowering future sales. Not that I support the vandalism, but I think that's the kind of logic they are applying here.

Build quality is so bad, those old cars will destroy themselves. Wonder how many of the original 2018 model 3 are still on the road. The other day I saw a comment chastising a person complaining about their 120k Model 3 battery failing and how its already at end of life. I was gobsmacked.

I also see reports of some Tesla making it to 500k miles. Honestly there is so much nonsense on both sides and you can't even trust any numbers coming out of Tesla because they have distorted the truth so many times.

You probably wanna read up on recent Toyota fiasco (100k engines recalled because they are self destroying).

Listen every company will make mistakes at some point in their life. Toyota has earned so much of a reputation of quality over many decades that it has become a meme and is reflected in resale values and insurance rates. Tesla continues to produce sub standard quality and thanks to their actions they have burned their reputation with everyone other than their shareholders so they don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. How many times are they going to promise this or that and say that they have fixed their quality only to find out they have lied yet again?

He's got less than 20% of Tesla now, but he owns nearly half of SpaceX... bet you he'd be so so sooooooooo much richer if that went public too

With rational investors I doubt it. Space launch market size is like 20 billion. One launch is 70 million and they had 133 of them in 2024. Times two (currently at half market share) this would be 18 billion.

That does not take into account that they are increasing the market size themselves with Starlink.

And with Starlink it remains to be seen if that can be profitable. I doubt it. The Starlink satellites deorbit every 5 years and need to be replaced (CapEx+++).

This is compared to the trillion+ EV market.

Shotwell has claimed that Starlink is cash-flow-positive. They also have >5 million subscribers. ARPU is likely > $1000.

Both Starlink and Starship are >$5B programs. SpaceX has not raised nor borrowed near enough money to fund both of those programs, indicating that they've got sufficient cash flow to mostly self-fund both of them as well as pay the salaries of >13,000 employees.

Also the stock was effectively a meme stock. So now the jig is up, the stock deflates like no other.

That's the funny thing here.

In case of Musk, if those protests work and as you say 'the jig is up', he can go from the richest man on earth to bankrupt in a space of months.

He is very 'cash poor' and has pledged a lot of Tesla shares as collateral to fund his other businesses.

If Tesla is priced as an automaker (shares would be in the ±10-20$), Musk will be bankrupt.

Hence why they've now said they're a robot company. Yet any bullish targets now are more likely to be based on Musk awarding himself large government contracts than technical advancements.

Didn't he cancel a large Tesla contract from the government?

> Musk will be bankrupt.

Then what? “We win” somehow? Nailed it?

Who cares?

Yes we do. A lot of people, for a lot of different reasons.

For me, it will be the end of the biggest con, the stock market has ever seen. And I can't wait to read about the details behind it, once the dust settles.

What makes Tesla exactly a con? Their cars are amazing appliances, literally nothing in market like it, for less than a Toyota. FSD is largely delivered. Space internet for everyone (soon potentially also with Freedom™ now that Trump is involved in demonopolising space or whatever it's called) with a phone. Where is the con???

A lot of things, I will just cite one - "FSD is largely delivered". Really ? Can you tell us, where Full-Self Driving is really fully self-driving ? Like being able to summon your car from Los Angeles to New York, like Elon claimed one will be able to do in 2017 !

Tesla sold millions of cars that were supposedly going to become Robotaxis with a simple software update, somewhere in 2019. SIX YEARS AGO. Tesla even showed screenshots of a ride-sharing app. SIX YEARS AGO. Now it's obvious to anyone, that those cars will never become Robotaxis, as Tesla pivots to trying to fake a Roboataxi service this year, with remote operators.

But the greatest con of course, was towards investors. Of course nobody is complaining now, since the stock is still a meme stock. Just wait a bit more...

You can buy supervised FSD right now. It works extremely well to the point testers are bored out of their minds - their channels became worthless since it barely makes any mistakes.

It's overpriced and not available where I live, but I'd love one. It doesn't do everything under the sun as promised, but I'd rather drive less than more. The basic 10 year old Autopilot is already huge help.

I'd say it's about 80% delivered. Far from a con.

Yeah, that's the problem with a real Full Self Driving. It's either 100%, or it's not. 80% doesn't make the cut.

Do you seriously believe the company was valued at >1T$ because investors believed that an "FSD 80% delivered" is enough ?

Tesla and Elon claimed ALMOST 10 YEARS AGO, that the car will drive itself from Los Angeles to New York. Just think how insane this is, even today. And then look up the state of their technology 10 years ago.

Of course self driving will be solved one day. Probably not by Tesla. But it doesn't matter - they were selling this stuff for almost 10 years already, knowing perfectly well it doesn't work. But hey, next version will blow your mind !

Every single company claimed something and haven’t delivered. Why single out one that actually delivered most of claims?

I’m tine if you call it “some self driving”, I don’t care. I’m not going to put my car as a taxi, that’s stupid.

Before the inauguration, Tesla was trading at a P/E 30 times bigger than Toyota. Now it's about half that (110).

Some say Tesla shouldn't be valued as a car stock; it should instead be valued as a Tech stock. Well, Tesla traded at a P/E about 4-5 times that of NVIDIA which itself had a high P/E compared to the other Magnificent 7 which in turn have a high P/E compared to the stock market in general.

What exactly is Tesla so great at that they deserve this enormous valuation? Its P/E has gone down to ~110 now, bit this is still incredibly high compared to e.g. NVIDIA which is trading at a P/E of ~40.

That's too generous to Toyota IMO. Their cars are insufferable.

The so-what is showing future fascist shit bags that there is a real price to pay for acting like a twat.

Then we all point and laugh, at least that's what I'll be doing.

I mean, yes, it would be neat to have new heads of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and DOGE. Measurably beneficial to many.

At the very least it would be the most entertaining bankruptcy of all time.

Yes, that is part of the appropriate outcome for throwing around Nazi salutes. It shouldn't be limited to that, though.

what else do you believe the appropriate outcome includes?

Elon Musk’s power is based on his wealth. A bankrupt Elon Musk will no longer be able to influence politics in several nations. He won’t be able to buy the US presidency. He won’t be able to threaten primaries against US representatives. He’d lose Twitter. He’d most likely no longer be running the so-called Doge.

So yes, we would very much win and there are a lot of people who care.

What sucks is that the cars* are actually very, very good cars. I've owned three of them so far, and I love driving and owning them. They take almost no maintenance, and I've only had one problem that needed me to take it into the shop, and it was for a recall that was totally handled in a day, and they gave me a loaner.

Legitimately, Teslas have been the best cars I've ever owned, but thanks to Elon, I will never buy another one, so long as he runs the company.

* - not you, Cybertruck

Tesla can continue to operate without Musk.

I wish it would.

wrong. the people in question are not "protesting" anything. they are committing violent destruction of property against random people who happened to buy an EV. calling them "protesters" only does a disservice to those who actually are. these people are criminals to catch and lock away, nothing more.

What makes you think Elon cares about wealth?

He's been telling about Mars for _2 decades_ and people somehow think he's a nazi about to pull off ethnic cleansing.

There’s a saying about watching what people do, not what they say, that seems to apply well to Musk. The proof that Elon cares about wealth is that he keeps doing everything in his power to gain more of it (well, up until recently, but only because he found he can access power directly instead of indirectly through more wealth).