Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Musk’s DOGE Antics Could Be the Downfall of Tesla

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Over the past few weeks, Tesla has been crumbling. The company's stock, which was once considered invincible, has now plunged to around $250 a share, down from nearly double that in December. Sales are plummeting, dealerships are overrun with protests, and Teslas on the street are being subject to petty vandalism. All of this is happening because of Elon Musk. Since Trump took office and appointed Musk as the head of the very poorly named Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has facilitated the undue firing of tens of thousands of government employees. Now, it's looking like Tesla is in trouble and Musk's involvement in politics and increasingly radical actions could be the company's downfall. Journalist Miles Klee has been covering it all, and today he joins me to break down the Tesla takedown movement began, why it matters, and if Tesla could ultimately be Musk's achilles heel. SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER: https://www.usermag.coSUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/taylorlorenz

I have taken a ride as a passenger and a Tesla with full self-driving engaged. The car tried to kill us, I would say, at least a half a dozen times. Over the past several weeks, Tesla has been crumbling. The company's stock, which was once considered invincible, has now plunged to around $250 a share, down from nearly double that in December. Sales are plummeting, dealerships are overrun with protests, and Tesla's on the street are being subject to petty vandalism. All of this is happening because of Elon Musk.

Since Trump took office and appointed Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, Musk has facilitated the undue firing of tens of thousands of government employees. Many of these federal workers held critical jobs like doing infectious disease research or working as air traffic controllers. But now it's looking like Tesla is in trouble and Musk's involvement in politics could be the company's ultimate downfall. Rolling Stone journalist Miles Klee has been covering it all. And today he joins me to talk about the Tesla takedown movement, It Matters and if Tesla could ultimately be Musk's Achilles Heel. Miles, welcome to power user.

It's great to be here. Thanks. All right. So to start off, can you talk to me about Elon Musk's relationship with Tesla? What role does he currently hold in Tesla? Musk is CEO of the company and he has worked very hard to make himself synonymous with the company. He was not someone who was originally there, but when he came aboard as an investor and eventually took control of it, he was able to secure an agreement that called him a co-founder. gets to call himself a co-founder of the company. But in practice, that's not exactly what happened. But he did come in with an agenda of we could have the electric vehicle revolution. We got to save

the climate, all very kind of normy lib positions, you could say. That made the cars very popular with Democratic voters and left-leaning voters. And certainly here in California, there are a lot of Tesla's on the road because people thought of them as clean and efficient and kind of futuristic in a way. Yeah, it seems like Tesla for most of its time on this. earth. The company has been perceived as liberal. Like you mentioned throughout Trump's first presidency and even back in the Obama days, Tesla was seen as this liberal sort of beacon of hope in the car industry. And Elon Musk was this champion of the environment. And I feel like actually his position in Tesla really kind of made him seem quite liberal for years because people perceived him as this

warrior for the climate movement. Definitely. And it was perceived as like a total win from a liberal standpoint, but it also was seen as a great moment and kind of recovery for American manufacturing of cars because it was the first new American car manufacturer in decades. So that was seen as a success story, almost even a Republican win, you could say, or at least they would claim that as a Republican win, is that when you have these manufacturing jobs like here in the U.S. and we're building actually like the future of automotive technology, I don't know, that's a big deal that almost like a bipartisan consensus, right, you can claim a win across the board, even if, say, voters in red states aren't necessarily lined up to buy electric vehicles and

they remain sort of a coastal elite thing. Yeah, but he was such a champion, like you said, of almost both parties. To Republicans, he's bringing back manufacturing to liberals. He's a pioneer of clean energy and fighting climate change. Of course, that's not really what Tesla was doing and we can get into that. And then things start to change, right? Like, I think during Biden's first presidency, we saw Musk pivot towards conservatism and start to come out against a lot of these. And then he's liberal values that he previously held. And we saw him buy Twitter. And I think he was only able to buy Twitter because of leveraging Tesla stock, correct? Yeah, it was because he owns about 13% of Tesla at this point. I believe that he's able to secure billions in loans against that really, really valuable

stake, which also gives him pretty effective control of the company, despite being beholden to the board. He was removed at this chairman of the board back in 2018 because he had posted a now infamous tweet, claiming that he was going to take the company private at $420 a share and that he had had funding secured and none of that was true. And so the SEC slapped him down for market manipulation. He paid a huge fine. The company paid a huge fine. He was taken down as the chair of the board, but he retained this immense control over the company. And that was an interesting moment because it was when you first started to see him really chafe at some of these federal regulatory agencies that he's now dismantling. And I'm sure we'll get to that. He started to beef with the SEC,

the FAA, all kinds of regulators that he would ultimately go on to purge. So Trump gets elected. Obviously, Elon plays a massive role, donates millions to his campaign in large part, this wealth generated by Tesla. And I feel like since Trump has been in power, he's also used his position in the government to advocate for Tesla. Can you talk about the various ways that he has sought to, I guess, help the company profit since he came to power through Doge and since his role in the Trump administration became a little bit larger. Tesla has come under regulatory scrutiny, just like any of his companies would. They're massive companies that are, eventually changing aspects of our lives. And in Tesla's case, that's his quote-unquote full self-driving

technology. This is where he wants to make Tesla's autonomous vehicles, robotaxies, if you will, that will be able to drive you anywhere with no driver assistance. Now, that has not really happened, and he has been promising it for more than a decade at this point. So it starts to seem like something where the stock is overvalued because he just keeps promising this over and over. SEC was looking into that as fraud, essentially. So that and national, highway transportation regulators also looking at kind of the safety of some of these features. So these are government regulators that he is not happy with and would like to do something about. And that's kind of what we're going to be seeing, you know, as Doge pushes forward, that he will

probably go after some of those agencies like the FAA, which he's already tangled with because of the fines and other things they've imposed on SpaceX for things like just pieces of garbage from his exploited rockets falling all over the ground. would you say Elon Musk is already leveraging his role in government to benefit Tesla? We've seen that the White House was eager to bend over backwards and turn the driveway of the presidential residence into a Tesla lot for Trump to play act at chopping in a sort of improvised Tesla showroom. That display was something that I think in administration's past would have been mind-blowing just in its open-faced corruption. It seems to just be business as usual for Trump, but Trump is out there pretty regular. now just posting about how great Teslas are. This is despite back when Elon said Trump shouldn't

run again and should just sail into the sunset, Trump trashed the cars, the rockets, all of that stuff. But now he's kind of like a salesman in chief for this stuff. So it's clear that because of the backlash that Tesla is getting, thanks to Musk's political activities, Trump is trying to do everything he can to make sure that the company remains successful. Let's talk about that backlash. When did consumers' sentiments start to change? You mentioned that there's a bunch of Tesla's around L.A. I saw one recently in Los Felais that had one of those stickers of like, I bought this before Elon went crazy, something like that. And a lot of Tesla owners seem self-conscious now, especially in liberal-leaning cities that they even drive these cars. So when did consumer sentiment really start to change

towards the company? I think you saw those stickers really start to take off even in the aftermath of Musk taking over Twitter. Now, this was when a lot of people who are more plugged in, noticed and realized that he was starting to spread right-wing misinformation and really dabble in this extremist content and get really crazy with it. There were moments he was promoting stuff like the racist great replacement conspiracy theory. It was getting pretty extreme. So people who were in the know started putting those bumper stickers on. And then I think another group of people realized what they were dealing with when he came out fully for Trump in summer 2024 right after the attempted assassination said he was forming a.

super PAC, he put about a quarter of a billion dollars on the table to help Trump and other Republicans get elected. At the same time, he was really amping up the misinformation on his own platform. So I think more people understood what he was about then. Then after Trump got elected, there was even more backlash against Musk. That was when you saw an even bigger mass migration off of X. And then it was only when Trump got into office and Doge was formed and immediately went to work just gutting the federal government that a lot, a lot more people really woke up to the fact, including Trump voters, really woke up to the fact that this guy was a direct threat to their livelihoods. And that was when Tesla Takedown started. That would have been in February,

so about a month after Trump's inauguration, this turned into an actual mobilized mass movement. What is Tesla Takedown? Who started this movement and how is it operating? So the actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, who you'll know from the Bill and Ted franchise, saw a post on Blue Sky from a sociologist friend of his, in general, talking about how Tesla was a vulnerable point for Musk. It's the source of his wealth. It's the reason he was allowed to have such an outsized role in the election. It's the reason he has the power in Washington he has today. If his Tesla stake is worth substantially less than he is substantially weakened, and if the company ultimately were to fail, It would be pretty disastrous for his empire. The whole thing could sort of unravel. So Tesla take down the concept is encouraging people to boycott the company. Don't buy Tesla's. Sell one if you have it.

Dump your shares in the stock. Do what you have to, even to divest. If you have some kind of retirement fund or ETF or anything you're invested in, Tesla might be part of that portfolio. So you can switch out of that. And they are protesting to withdraw support completely from the company to weaken it and to weaken Musk's power. process. They're also protesting at Tesla showrooms and places where Tesla's are sold, right? And I think

you've been to some of those protests. Can you talk about that a little bit? What is like the scene on the ground at these Tesla dealerships? So I went to one in LA last week. It was raining, but they still had a good 20, 25 people there, which if you're from LA, you'll know that's pretty impressive for anyone to come out in the rain. They were getting a ton of support from people passing by, a lot of honking. Even a bus driver honked for them, which I thought was pretty funny. They had a lot of signs calling Musk a Nazi calling out Doge for its attacks on the government, calling out Musk for being an unelected kind of bureaucrat with immense power. And the people I talked to there said they really wanted to raise awareness of what he was doing. People on the ground were telling me that they had spoken

to others who had showed up to the protest who didn't even know what Doge was. So they're really all about education in terms of current events. As you mentioned, a lot of people have the stickers saying, you know, they didn't know that Elon was so crazy, so and so. Some people will know going back to 2018 and earlier, how crazy he's been. A lot of it is just a lack of information about what he's been doing and saying for these past few years. So the protesters were really focused on that. They also wanted to talk to Tesla drivers who showed up.

And there were Tesla owners who drove into the dealership who were looking to sell their car because of this movement and because of their disagreement with Musk and the Trump regime. Is there any sign that these protests are having effects on Tesla? I mean, you mentioned some people trying to sell their Tesla. I've seen also people vandalizing Teslas. Already, it seems like the cyber truck was a bit of a flaw. How much do you think this backlash is affecting the actual company? I think the cyber truck was sort of a failure on its own merits.

But when it comes to the other Teslas, yes, people are trying to sell them. Tesla in late November after the election actually changed their lease policy so that you can't transfer the lease. Some people are sort of stuck with it if they're leasing. Oh, my God. Other people have actually rebatched their Teslas. which means that they have removed either the Tesla logos or letterings and replaced them with, it could be a BMW badge, it could be a Toyota, just to make it look like a different car to sort of disguise it. So there's clearly some embarrassment there. Tesla did have its biggest one day stock market loss recently plunged about 16%.

That day, Musk lost about $23 billion off of his net worth. The stock's kind of fluctuated since then, right after then, was when, Trump had the Tesla showcase in the White House front lawn. It was clearly an effort to sort of prop up the stock there. And it didn't have quite the ameliorating effects that they maybe wanted. But the stock is kind of wobbled since there. It certainly still has a long way to fall. But you are seeing significant damage to the value of the brand just because there was a huge stock rally right after the election with the assumption that Musk's alliance with Trump would be very good for Tesla. stock shot up to above $400 a share. And it's since plummeted all the way back down to where it was. They've lost that entire gain since the inauguration. So losing about, the company lost about 40, 45% of its value in that time in two months, which is not great.

So I think it's fair to say that there's been an effect. Tesla's also been under fire from people that are workers' rights advocacy organizations for their labor practices. Obviously, environmentalists have also railed against it because of the fact that they're not actually that environmentally forward, as they claim. Have any of those groups in playing a role in this protest? Who are most of the people that are involved in this Tesla take-down movement? There's a pretty broad coalition. Ever since the Tesla takedown site went up, there's just a lot of advocacy groups, particularly on the left and certainly workers' organizations. It's notable that

Musk, yeah, has sort of been engaged in, you could say, union-busting type behavior. And for that reason, And he has also been going after the National Labor Relations Board, which is a very important regulator in this space. So, you know, workers' movements are definitely attuned to what he's doing, not just at his own companies, where there have been complaints of union busting and sexual harassment and all sorts of other things kind of being swept under the rug. But, of course, he's now trying to fire tens of thousands of people in the federal government. So the federal government employee unions are also aware of this stuff, and I think plugged into the Tesla. down as well. I feel like this anti-Tesla sentiment also creates opportunities for competitors to push their own EV vehicles or kind of, I don't know, seize some of those customers. Are we seeing anything from

the other automakers or other businesses that are seeking to capture some of Tesla's market? Like, are they taking advantage of this at all? I think over in China, this was already a problem for Tesla, honestly. Their competition was really heating up while Musk was focused on this robotaxy thing. Basically, he could have made a cheaper Tesla for the down market. Tesla was already really in a lot of trouble with its competition. In China, there's BYD, which is way ahead of them, a way cheaper car. He focused on making the cyber truck instead of a cheaper Tesla model that would have really opened up the market for them. So they lost out there.

They're losing sales in Europe. Their sales were down for the first time this past quarter. So the competition was already there. I think the rivals are still thinking about how they want to pursue this opportunity and how they want to position themselves. But certainly when you go to these protests, there are people at the protest who have these other new EVs and they're very excited about them. And when Tesla owners come through, they say, you've got to check out my electric Toyota or Mazda or whatever it is because they're just raving about it.

And they say Tesla's just not the only one in the game anymore. It was so dominant for so long that I think Musk got a little complacent and a little too tied up in these fever dreams of turning it into an AI company, making humanoid robots. Yeah. What is the deal with those Tesla robots? Because I know Kim Kardashian is on the cover of some magazine with one of them today. Are these actual Tesla robots or are they just like giant toys? Famously, when he debuted this, it was just a guy in a body suit sort of dancing as a robot.

Eventually they did create actual Optimus robots and then the big event where he unveiled the prototype of the Robotaxie, which who knows if that will ever actually exist. They had Optimus spots serving at the bar and stuff like that. So that looked kind of impressive, but sure enough, those turns out. out to be just operated remotely by people. Oh my God. So when you see that, that's just basically a movie special effect. It's nothing more complicated than that.

A lot of people have pointed out in the robotic space that the reason we don't have humanoid robots working in the factory is you don't need like a human shape to do it. For example, if you need something done in the factory that's just an arm, you just have the arm. That's how it's always been done. That's what Tesla already has. So when Musk talks about how there's going to be a million optimist bots and there'll be your butler or whatever. And there's usually some nonsense demonstration where it's playing the

piano. And there's basically no viable application for this technology. And he's kind of just obsessed with the appearance of the future with no sort of practical value. It seems like it's just further trying to brand himself as this like futurist and this big thinker and this genius that's going to envision this feature where robots are our slaves. And we all have Butler robots in our house. As you mentioned, it makes no sense. But it does seem like critical. criticism gets him. I mean, you can tell online even how reactive he gets when he sees criticism about himself on X. Is there any evidence that these protests and that the recent Tesla's stock plunge is affecting Musk? He doesn't seem well, and I think it's known that he really

struggles with exposure to criticism. I mean, he posted what I think is now one of his most iconic tweets, which was I'm verbally abused every day on this platform. Who can relate? They were considering a wellness check on him after he got booed at a Dave Chappelle show. He doesn't take criticism well. In a recent Fox News interview, he was asked how on Earth he is still running his multiple giant companies while working at his head of Doge. And he really takes a big pause and he says with great difficulty and he looks really upset. And then he was just on Hannity the other night pretty close to tears saying that the left needs to have more empathy for him. And meanwhile, he's on X every day calling them the R slur and all that kind of stuff.

So he's very much a guy who can dish it out, but not take it, I guess. And I don't know if he's maybe having regrets about getting into politics. It's funny because the conventional wisdom for billionaires has always been, well, you kind of give equally to both sides. You don't know who's going to get into power. You just get along with whoever it is. But he got so pissed at Biden's SEC and FAA and all this stuff that eventually he just thought that he could just strong arm, you know, Republican policy.

And to a certain extent, he's been right. But I think he's maybe understanding now that that's not really a long-term play. He might be able to get away with a lot in these first few months, but it could really come back to haunt him. What do you think he's going to do to try to counter these efforts? I mean, do you see him fighting back in any way? Are they discounting Tesla's to try to sell more? Is anything happening to try to stymie the losses? They are offering all kinds of incentives on Teslas.

And they were in the past year, like I said, they already knew and saw the writing on the wall with respect to their competitors. So they have been throwing those zero percent APR offers around. I think they started discounting the cyber truck because they have a huge amount of those unsold. They claimed they had a million reservations for it. And I think like only 30,000 people or so follow through on that. And then Tesla's more generally, they just have an insane overstock last year. A bunch of reports went around because you could see these giant Tesla lots from space, all these unsold Teslas that they have just been unable to unload. From space?

Yeah, satellite imagery would just show their immense overstock of Tesla's. And that's not just cyber trucks. That's all the models. So that was a problem even before this political move. And it almost feels in retrospect like the alliance with Trump was kind of desperate and it was pretty risky. You would have to say even if he hadn't won, it would have been maybe even worse for him now. but the toxicity of being associated with the regime has been pretty bad too. So do you think that, you know, his foray into politics and association with Trump will ultimately lead to Tesla's downfall?

It could accelerate it. Like I've been saying, the company was facing all these kinds of headwinds and problems. It really has not delivered on all these promises that he's been making for years and years. They are really behind in the robotaxie fight. You can already see cars in markets like L.A. that are, you know, like a Waymo that is using LIDAR and radar to drive everywhere safely. Tesla has rejected all that stuff. He wants to just do video only. When you say video only, you mean his display.

Instead of using LIDAR to sense things around, he just uses video, right? Right. Tesla is just a camera-only system. So it's just taking, I believe, eight cameras on the vehicle, just taking all that visual information and putting that through a software program, which is AI trained. My favorite example of just what a disaster that system is, is Mark Roper recently posted a video. I don't know if you saw it where he created this test for the Tesla that was basically like the equivalent of, you know, Wiley Coyote, like drawing a tunnel onto like a brick wall. They made this big foam brick wall and they just screen printed the image of a road onto it.

And the Tesla, like you said, because it relies on video, just drove straight through the wall because it couldn't perceive the difference between a giant image of a road and an actual road, which is terrifying. No, it doesn't even know that there's an object there. And I will say I have taken a ride as a passenger and a Tesla with full self-driving engaged just around the freeways here in LA, which is not the easiest driving, granted. But the car tried to kill us, I would say, at least a half a dozen times. And we specifically did a demonstration where this group, the Dawn Project, which is a software

safety advocacy group that tests the Tesla over and over, showed me how it will just blow past a stopped school bus and will, we'll, hit a kid as it's crossing the street. It was a dummy mannequin, thankfully, just a demonstration, but pretty scary. And especially when you're in the car and it tries to make some maneuver like an illegal left or it tries to merge into something that somebody else that's in the lane next to you doesn't seem like it's that great of a system and it doesn't feel like they're going to work out the kinks that, you know, must keeps promising they will while continually just talking about AI and robots instead of the car, because the car business is really not doing.

so great, so he doesn't like to talk about that much. Yeah, it seems like this Achilles heel for him, like you mentioned, but at the same time, Musk is just always somehow able to pull it off. I mean, I saw recently that Twitter is now once again worth $44 billion, which is why he paid for it after the valuation plummeted, I think, even down to $10 billion. It lost the majority of its value. And now, you know, he's used his position and he's used his political connections and all of this to mainstream it and force it back up. I mean, could he ultimately use the Trump government to do the same, to give himself enough tax breaks or something, I don't know, to like basically use the levers of the government to force a success. Absolutely. I think that you've maybe

already seen one in SpaceX being involved in bringing the astronauts down from the International Space Station. And even as they are purportedly cutting wasteful government spending, SpaceX is going to get billions and billions more in government contracts. So he has these other companies, So you got these other plays. Yes, maybe Tesla will take some hits. Maybe Neurrelink will completely fail. And there will be lawsuits from people who got a chip in their brain that completely makes them crazy.

I don't know, maybe Grok will be worth billions of dollars one day. But he's clearly diversified in a sense. So Tesla is just kind of the most synonymous brand and his point of greatest vulnerability at this moment. So I think that's why the protest movement has really focused on that. But with stuff like SpaceX's garbage, just raining down on other, nations and creating environmental havoc, I think it's possible that we'll see some movements against other parts of his business empire as well. For people that don't own a Tesla and can't

sell their car or don't own stock in Tesla, how can they make an impact in this movement? I mean, are there local protests? What is some way that they can affect change? So the Tesla takedown website is really thorough and well organized. You can go on there and it's very easy to find the next local protest near you. There's a lot going on in the big cities, of course, but you can even use it to organize your own and get other people in your area together, wherever the closest Tesla center is. I think that it will also be useful to talk to Tesla owners in your lives, perhaps. I think that people continue to be tuned out to a certain extent, and maybe if they're aware of the damage of some of these cuts that are being made in the federal government to, you know, USAID,

people who are now being denied their medicine abroad, their treatment, and, you know, people are honestly dying. So it's easy to be in a bubble in the U.S. even as all this goes on. So you can talk to your parents or friends who own a Tesla, maybe change their mind about supporting the company. All right, Miles, well, thank you so much for chatting with me. Thank you. All right, that's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of power user on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. And don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, user mag. That's usermag.com, usermag.com. If you like this show, give us a rating and review on Apple, podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen, every single review makes a huge difference.

We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.