Bulwark Takes - Elon’s Weakness Exposed

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

JVL and Hannah Yoest talk Tesla design and more. JVL goes into the recent decline in Telsa sale worldwide. How Tesla is resale values are terrible. How Trump voters like Tesla but would never buy an EV.

Hello, everyone. It's the JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Hannah Yost, and graphic design is her passion. Hannah, do you own a Tesla? No, but my brother does, so. Oh, interesting. So, we have some interesting things going on here. You and I like to talk about brands and design and the messages that are sort of inherent in all of these things. And Elon Musk has done this very bold thing over the last year where he has tried to be as polarizing and antagonistic as possible towards the type of people who buy electric cars and and to curry favor with the kinds of people

who hate electric cars and drive ford raptors and now we're starting to see the that we've done the the reaping and the sowing part is happening now and it's delicious because we're getting final 2024 numbers and early year-on-year January sales numbers. And Tesla sales are in the toilet. California, the most important EV market in the United States. In 2024, EV sales from all brands not named Tesla went up by 1.4%. Tesla sales down by 11.6%. Kind of a problem. Germany. Germany is Europe's biggest car market. Last month, Tesla sales in Germany down by 60%. That's 6-0. In France, year over year, last month, down 63%. This probably has nothing to do with Elon Musk going out and doing Nazi

salutes and talking about the AFD. Sales only down 8% in the UK, January and in China down 11.5%. So it seems to me that he is testing the proposition of like if i give the finger to my customers will they stop buying my cars they're saying yes we will what do you think about all this it's okay because the pickup truck pickup truck drivers will save him for sure they're all gonna buy cyber trucks and that is the future well what is, does your brother have a Cybertruck? No. God, no. He's got the X-Wing one. And he got it before they knew that he was crazy.

And he thought it was cool. Do you know that there's an Etsy? There's like an Etsy thing now for people who bought their Teslas pre-Insanity Musk. And where they're like, i'm sorry i bought this because the thing is if you own a tesla now uh and you want to unload it another marker is that the depreciation on them is horrific and yeah this is and this is uh there's another guy on youtube um mr regular who does regular car reviews i don't know if you're a devotee. But here's the thing which he says a lot.

He goes, depreciation reveals all. And it's kind of true. Depreciation rates do tell you what the market actually thinks of something. And when you rank car brands by depreciation, Tesla is last. Below Jaguar. Below Chrysler. It's very bad. It's very bad.

It's not good. So have you ever seen a brand do this before? Because normally, brands, when they get rabbit ears for, like like we offended some tiny little market segment they like rush to try to do repair work and like no i'm so we're so sorry we didn't mean that and elon is like just like fuck you fuck you fuck you you woke elites go to college look my nuts the closest you've got is Kanye. Really. Yeah. If you think about it. And really, this is like a thing you see with celebrities who get canceled.

Really, it's that they have to have like a push to go to the other side. Kind of like Russell Brand. It's like he's not really MAGA, but he was canceled for all sorts of horrible things. And so he went to find a new family. So he spent- Yeah, had to lean into it. Yeah, that's what they do. And that's, I think, partly what's going on.

And you can do that when you are selling like subscriptions to some Catholic website or something. When you're selling a mass market item, like an automobile, it's a little harder. It's a little harder when half of the marketplace, half of the total addressable market just says from the jump, I'm not going to drive a Tesla. I'm not driving a white power mobile. What are you talking about? Yeah.

How much of it, though, is that there's all press is good press, even if it is bad press. How much do you think just like his name recognition now is so much even if it is in bad press how much do you how much do you think just like his name recognition now is so much bigger than it was like more people know about the cyber trunk than ever would have if he had just stayed in his little lane yeah i don't think that all press is good press when it comes to to mass market items like this like there is there is such a you can do hard negative in such a way that it, it becomes absolutely toxic to your product and to your sales. Um, there's a, we were talking about this right before we went on. There's a horrible, horrible example of this, which is that

in 1996, uh, the company value jet, which is a low cost air carrier, had one of the most horrific airline crashes ever. Like it crashed into the Florida Everglades. It killed everybody on board. Alligators were eating the bodies. It was honestly sickening. And and the name Value Jet became so toxic, the company just changed its name. They're like, yeah, we're AirTran now. ValueJet, yeah, that company was garbage, dude.

I don't remember what they were. Oh, they were terrible. And Tesla can't do that exactly. But that's kind of the direction it's headed in. And here's the other thing. So there's a group that does research on the politics of EVs and the EV politics project. And they did a study, they put it out. And as a baseline, they went through Trump and Harris voters asking them, do you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of various car brands,d volkswagen toyota etc and this is kind of interesting i

wouldn't have guessed this uh people basically have the exact same views of all of those car brands like whether you're a trump voter or a harris voter like you hear toyota and you're like yeah good there's only one car brand that that's not true of. And it looks like it looks like this. So, you know, 59 percent of Harris voters view Tesla unfavorably. Sixty four percent of Trump voters who have favorably. And then when you go do the breakdowns and here's here's the other graphic that I want to talk about, what you see is that this is closely tied to their opinion of Elon Musk. And when you break down what is your opinion of Elon Musk, the people who like him best are men who drive internal combustion engine vehicles, which are pickup trucks, and who are not open to buying an EV in the future. Well, that's why he's got the cyber truck is to kind of try and

i want to see the first person to drive a cyber truck up to a job site well he's probably gonna have a confederate flag off the back of it the there's one brand that had something similar without like the fascism um poppy do you know this the the beverage brand no but in fact i just saw their first commercial last night during the super bowl so i did not see this but they started out as like a kombucha apple cider vinegar company under the name mother and they rebranded moving away from like the wellness space to being called poppy and to be a probiotic soda so now they are trying to like capture the market for like rebranding all soda and it's it's

they since they have strayed so far from their core identity it's not necessarily working and they've all they've also been met with like some scandal because there's not actually enough probiotic in their mix to make a meaningful difference so there's like a little bit of like is it actually real yeah that's very strange yeah i the only thing about tesla is as a design matter they're they're like brutalist cars. They're the automotive equivalent of those like night, early 1970s concrete square buildings, which would, you know, pop up all over American cities. And well, that's just the new one though. The old ones like looked like cool, sexy sport cars. And now he's like,

like pushed it towards this more dystopian, retro future look. Yeah, it does feel dystopian. I mean, you look at a Model 3 and you're like, yeah, that's a car I want to get. It's like, oh, that's the car I have to have.

He's marketing that way. He's like, these windows won't break, even when the zombies come for you and like showing the throwing the the metal balls at the windows and they don't break and it's like well no they're supposed to break for safety measures so that you don't drown in your car and you can get out of it if it's if you're in an emergency situation so the other thing he does though is he doesn't refresh them really. So, you know, other car makers are typically on like a three year cycle with model refreshes.

And, you know, cars are a little bit like fashion. It's always changing. And Musk's view seems to have been we can do all the improvements with over the air software updates. Software is just what we'll do. We'll do with. And so the cars all look the same same i think they start looking stale well he offers you the customization on the inside you can like do any upsells you want it like you can swap out the leather and all of that nonsense but it's not actually a meaningful change it's a weird weird thing and yet the stock trades at, what is the P.E. ratio on Tesla stock?

It is 177. So typically you get high P.E. ratios in tech, not in like actual physical manufacturer. But Tesla's P.E. ratio is still five times that of Apple, the most valuable company in the world. It is 15 times the PE ratio of Toyota, despite the fact that Toyota sells 10 times as many cars a year as Tesla does. It's amazing. And so I wrote a thing about this this week, saying that actually, if you want to hurt Trump, you got to hurt Elonon and one of the ways to hurt elon is tesla because tesla is this big attack surface and it's big soft target it's wildly overvalued to begin with and we already see it going backwards economically do you think that

it's going to wind up with a stigma attached to it? Where a normal person who's like, yeah, I want to buy an EV. I think it's time to make the switch to electric. And they look around, they see, A, that the used market is just flooded with Teslas, which it is. And they look and say, do I want to have to explain to my friend that I'm buying it? No, no, I don't think that the AFD is good. I don't think the AFD is just misunderstood. I don't know. No,

I'm really, it's, it's not, it's not about Germans moving on from their history. That's not why I bought this. I bought it because the, I think they finally fixed their problems with panel gaps because the Tesla manufacturing process is absolute dog shit.

There's a joke here about volkswagen but i'm not quite clever enough to make it do what do you what do people do with that like do they like go yeah i'm gonna grit my teeth and buy this thing even though everybody will assume i'm a racist well why would you there's rivian right now is making a much more competitive EV. And all of all of the automakers are like really pushing their EVs. But there's also what you mentioned, the the bumper stickers that you can buy. That's like we bought this before we knew he was crazy.

And there's been several posts go viral, especially in California, showing like multiple cars having it now. And Business Insider just did a like a short reported piece on this talking to people of like so like can you separate tesla from elon and it's kind of funny because it's a very similar conversation to in the art space they talk about like separating the art from the artist it's like people being like oh well if i if we follow this logic then i'd have to check in on every ceo ever before i make purchasing thing. It's like, no, you don't. This is a very extreme case where he is clearly off his rocker and Tesla is what gives him power. It's his little nest egg where his wealth is mostly consolidated. And they take credit. All of these leftists like to say that they made a change and they made an impact because they boycotted Starbucks.

And it's like, did you really like if you're going to meaningfully boycott something, boycott Tesla and go buy it? Like if you're in the market for an idiot, why would you why would you support him when there are better options? Yeah, that's the thing. Like if Tesla was like far and away the best ev in the space then it'd be a question but it really isn't anymore it's very much like the the mid version now it's a bad value proposition and even i where are you on the art and artist thing uh i go back and forth i have a hard time with that one but i feel like this is a very clear cut one where it's like no they're they're tied to each other in a way that maybe some artists and their art are not. It's different than just saying like, oh, all CEOs are assholes because he's not just a CEO.

He's the majority owner of the company. Right. So it isn't he's not most CEOs are hired guns. He is he owns Tesla. Tesla is him. And so you're contributing to his wealth and control of the company by supporting it. With movies, like if you look at Woody Allen, like the argument in favor of it, of like separating them, is that other art forums, they offer a universal, like there's a kernel of truth in it that speaks to the universal experience and actually is a meaningful contribution to society that overshadows their personal issues there is nothing that he has put out with that there is no tesla product that overshadows his personal issues they are deeply tied to each other and that it is a it is an emblematic of him and his moral rot.

And the art is supposed to, like, teach you something about the world. And the question is, like, well, can you take valuable lessons from it? Like, it's just a car. Yeah. You just don't want to get groceries in it. Like, you can get groceries in anything. Yeah. Do you like the Tesla logola logo yeah that's fine kind of kind of threatening and menacing now kind of changes as time goes on it does doesn't it it's it's going

from like cool future to fascist funny how context gives that to design. All right, Hannah. Well, I'm going to go out and buy an EV that's not a Tesla. And hopefully we can... This can be the first step in organizing a nationwide boycott of the white power mobiles and driving a stake through the heart of our new oligarchs. Guys, hit subscribe, follow the channel. We'll be back at some point soon.

Good luck, America.