I first blogged on here about my mixed feelings about buying a Tesla in 2021. (You can read that post here and my other post about Elon Musk here .) Although I had misgivings then about the behavior of Elon Musk, I went ahead and bought a Tesla Model 3 anyway a few months later, mainly because of its superior charging infrastructure compared to other electric vehicles.
And then a few months after I got my car, Musk bought Twitter, and the world caved in. Now I'm in the odd position of driving a car that I love and feeling self conscious about it at the same time.
In the days before the Twitter takeover, the feeling on Musk was that, despite his erratic, impulsive behavior, Tesla kept making money while he was running it so he was some kind of eccentric genius. (He has publicly made numerous promises that haven't come true in the past decade). At one point in 2021, Tesla was the most profitable car company in the world. But recently it has been tanking: the rollout of the long awaited and delayed Cyber truck has been mostly a disaster: first there were production issues, build issues and range issues, and then there was a massive recall needed (the largest in Tesla's history) for safety reasons. Speaking of safety, continued investigations of Tesla's so called "full self driving" option have plagued the company. And a recent article in the website Jalopnik pointed out that after Tesla let car owners try out FSD for a month for free, only 2% of Tesla owners who tried it out actually purchased it for their cars.
In a way, that FSD trial shows just what's wrong with the company: while I myself was excited to try it out for a month for free, it made several errors (including trying to turn into an oncoming car!), and it doesn't even work on overcast days. Even though the cost of FSD was recently lowered from $12,000 to $8,000, that's still eight grand more than I would ever pay for it. The whole self driving thing seems to be one of Musk's obsessions, but I don't think the company should bother. Look at how Apple spent billions of dollars and years of research trying to create the ultimate self driving car before just straight up surrendering. Despite Musk's obsession, truly autonomous self driving cars for the average driver are still a long ways off from being a reality.
But self driving is just the tip of the iceberg with Musk. On his social media company X he has posted and reposted numerous conservative messages and he has even appeared to endorse the right wing "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which states that Jewish puppet masters are attempting to replace white Americans with Mexican people. Not only is this offensive garbage, it's also stupid for him to do from a business standpoint, with his posts driving potential customers towards other electric vehicle offerings. (A survey by market intelligence firm Caliber found Tesla's "consideration score" among potential US buyers dropped 8% between January and February 2024,) Not surprisingly in polarized America, most EV customers are progressive voters who find the once mostly progressive Musk's current conservative postings offensive. And while right wingers have started praising Musk's recent conversion to their side, they still aren't rushing out to buy Teslas.
Along with his conservative conversion, Musk has made some other questionable choices as of late: he recently fired all the workers at Tesla in charge of building superchargers, despite the fact that the supercharger network is one of the company's strengths. And along with his desire for full self driving cars, he's also determined to make self driving robot taxis a thing, despite the fact that several already existing self driving taxi companies have been struggling. He has even envisioned a future in which Tesla owners will allow other people to use their cars as self driving taxis when they aren't using them (hard pass from me on that!). He has also seemingly abandoned his oft made promise of introducing a Tesla model that would sell for only 25 thousand dollars. While this would almost surely be profitable and throw down the gauntlet of making an affordable EV to other car manufactures, possibly revolutionizing the entire EV market, he doesn't think affordability is as sexy as robot taxis.
The results of his recent behavior have been devastating for the company, which has seen its value drop from 1.2 trillion dollars in 2021 to 661 billion now while 10% of the company's workforce has been laid off. And yet despite this, Musk is expecting the Tesla board to reinstate a 65 billion dollar pay package for him that was recently rejected by a judge. Giving a huge pile of money to the CEO of a company with tanking stock value doesn't exactly send the best message!
While it appears that the Tesla board of directors are unable to force Musk out as CEO, they can certainly nudge him towards stepping down, given that he is clearly costing them all money and seems determined to continue doing so. Perhaps they can suggest that one person shouldn't run so many companies (along with Tesla and X he also has Space X, Neuralink and whatever the hell the Boring company is!) and push him towards moving on. I would love for the grownups to take over Tesla, so that they can just make good quality cars without worrying about self driving robo taxis and ugly cyber trucks.
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