Tech Won't Save Us - Protesting Tesla Can Hurt Elon Musk w/ Ed Niedermeyer

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Ed Niedermeyer to discuss the trouble with Tesla’s business model and how that makes Elon Musk’s power vulnerable to protest and boycott.Ed Niedermeyer is the author Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors and a co-host of the Autonocast.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Find a Tesla Takedown protest in your area.Support the show

Not only do we not get the broad, affordable EV market that we thought we would, we got, you know, a fascist takeover of our country, right, funded by our own tax dollars. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ed Niedermeyer. Ed is the author of Ludicrous, the unfurnished story of Tesla Motors, and a co-host of the Autonicast. Ed, of course, has been on the show many times in the past to discuss Tesla and the latest developments with me so that, you know, you can have a good understanding of what is happening with this company. And now, as Elon Musk is rapidly remaking the American government with the approval of Donald Trump and his administration, I figured

it was time to have Ed back on the show, not just to discuss what is happening in this moment and what is happening with Tesla, you know, the difficulties that we have been seeing with this company for quite a while now, but also why those difficulties offer us an opportunity to challenge the power and the wealth that Elon Musk has been able to deploy. If we can start to chip away at that power, that might affect his ability to keep taking these actions that are so clearly against the interests of so many people, not just in the United States, but around the world. So this is a pretty wide-ranging discussion with Ed. We start by talking about what has been going on recently, and then we get into discussing Tesla specifically and the challenges that it has

been facing with its lack of new models. It's focused on hype over the fundamentals of the car business. And then we get into how much Elon Musk is actually dependent on the success, and in particular, the success of the share price of Tesla, and why challenging the fundamentals of the company, why chipping away at that narrative of Tesla's success and inevitability actually gives us an opportunity to really start affecting Musk's power generally, and that there are really opportunities to do that right now because of the state Tesla is in. So I always enjoy chatting with Ed, and I think you're really going to benefit from and enjoy this conversation

that we've had, because given all the negative things happening right now, I find it at least a bit of, you know, a hopeful and uplifting conversation as we get through these things. So if you do enjoy this episode, as always, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week so we can continue chronicling what is happening with tech's takeover of the U.S. government and, you government and this fascist project that it is trying to implement. You can join supporters like Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota, Robly in Aurora, Colorado, Paul in Brighton, UK, Roland in Zurich, and Eric

from Greater Boston by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ed, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's always good to be here. Absolutely. Especially given the times that we're in. I was like, I need to catch up with Ed. I need to see what's going on here.

It is fascinating, yeah, looking back at some of the conversations we've had and where this has all ended up, yeah. It feels like about every year, you know, you kind of pop onto the show to give us a little update on Tesla and that kind of part of the Elon Musk sphere. And how much crazier it's gotten since the last time we spoke. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it has certainly gotten crazier.

I think I would just have to start with like the obvious question, which is Elon Musk has positioned himself in the center of the American government. Recently, we saw him give this press conference like in the Oval Office with Trump sitting at the desk right next to him. What have you made of Elon Musk's rapid takeover of the US government and how central he has become to this administration? The number one thing is how similar it is to what we saw with Twitter. People should understand, you know, having covered Tesla since 2015, Tesla is a company that Elon Musk, he didn't start it, started, but he basically took control of it very early on and built it very much into a cult of personality, like all of his companies kind of operate as. And Twitter was the first time that he went into a company that had its own culture. And as a result, as soon as that deal happened,

and he was on the ground there, you know, we had real time reporting from sources directly. This is what he's doing. This is how he's doing things. And as someone who had covered him for a really long time, it was an amazing thing to be able to see that because I'll tell you, I mean, I have sources who won't let me print stuff. It's very difficult to get to sources, especially on the record for any of this stuff with Tesla, because again, it's this cult and loyalty to Elon is the number one value. And so I feel really lucky that we had this Tesla deal to kind of show like, this is what happens, especially when he goes into a company that he didn't create.

Now that we see what he's doing with government, it's play for play, essentially what we saw in books like Character Limit, which is great and extremely hardcore, also really good. That's the first thing that jumps out to me. And I would encourage people to read some of those books about Musk's. There's another one by Kurt Wagner, I want to say. There's three books about Musk going into Twitter. Highly recommend you read them because to me, what we're seeing in DC seems to be really similar to that. Do you see any similarities, I guess, to those early Tesla days and things that went on at Tesla to what is going on now as well? Or was Twitter the real best parallel there? So Twitter is the best parallel, again, because it was a fully formed culture and organization before he went in.

So the early days of Tesla, I mean, there was a power struggle between him and Martin Eberhardt in particular, sort of crew that was sort of there earlier on. But that kind of had its own features. And again, Tesla was a tiny, tiny little startup. They didn't even have the Roadster out at that point, basically. It all happened in the buildup to the Roadster. So I actually don't think it's super comparable. Also, Elon wasn't a totally different person. He's always been the same person, but he's become a

more extreme version of himself over time. And I think 2018 was a really important tipping point and all that. I think there are real differences to sort of the struggle for the early days of Tesla. And the Twitter deal is really kind of the more apt comparison. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. He's gained a lot of power and a lot of wealth since the takeover of Tesla and his kind of moving into that space. So it makes complete sense that he feels less shackled at this moment. There's less kind of holding him back from doing what he wants to do. But also he has had these extra years of reinforcing this notion that he knows exactly what he's doing, that he should be able to remake whatever he wants reinforcing this notion that he knows exactly what he's doing,

that he should be able to remake whatever he wants in the way that he thinks it should be done in a way that maybe was not so present or he didn't have that degree of ability to do whatever he wanted at the moment he took over Tesla. Yeah. So there is one Tesla parallel that I think is really important for people to understand here. One of the things I'm trying to do in the book I'm writing right now is explain the context of what else was going on in that technology space when he arrived, because I think it is a very apt comparison to what's happening now. When Autopilot was created,

Google had an actual self-driving development program. They actually developed a product called Autopilot that they decided not to do because it was dangerous. And Elon sort of took it and decided to do it anyway because he doesn't care if people get hurt or died using his technology. There are also sort of more traditional driver assistance systems that were like actually designed to assist the driver and not just fool them into thinking that it's self-driving. What he did was he created this autopilot brand, which was totally untethered to any of the things that were going on. You know, typically in businesses, you create these market segments so that people,

consumers can kind of understand what things are and how to buy them and what to buy for their different needs. And instead what Elon does is he creates a powerful brand that can then mean anything that he wants it to mean. And so out of the ambiguity of what is an autopilot for a road, this is the roots of how he can now say that Teslas have full self driving, but they're not actually self driving, right? He says them both at the same time. And this was sort of clarified with the whole Doge thing because he runs Doge, it's associated with him, but technically he works for the White House. So he's playing that sort of full self-driving game. But the real thing is what gets lost when he does this branding exercise. By creating Doge, he's captured the media coverage.

And what gets left out of every single story about this is that the US government has an auditing body, right? It's called the Government Accountability Office, and it's part of the legislative branch, not the executive branch that Musk is part of, because the legislative branch is, by the Constitution, the only one that's supposed to have the power of the purse, right? The founders were very, very clear on why that was an important thing, and it was because they didn't want an American Caesar, which is clearly what folks are trying to accomplish right now. We have an auditor that does this work. They do a very good job of it.

Maybe they're not perfect, but they do a very good job. What we've seen out of Doge is frankly crap. It's embarrassing. Like the stuff that the examples of that they're holding up of like, this is why we need to do this. You scratch all of it, like everything that Elon does. And it all turns out to be BS. What gets lost though, because of that dominant branding, people don't hear about the GAO. People don't know that the body already exists. That's already doing this

in a responsible and constitutional manner. One of the things that I'm really hoping that the media will start to do more is every time you do a story about Doge, let people know this function exists. It's not like we set up a government with trillions of dollars in budget and we didn't have auditors. Of course we have auditors. In fact, we have them in a very, again, specific way, right? It's nonpartisan. It's a part of the legislative branch. So that is very similar to what he did. Again, this is sort of later in Tesla. So this is kind of more of the Elon Musk that we see now. But I would say that's one of the most interesting parallels to sort of Tesla's history here. It seems very characteristic of the tech industry to do something like that. The government has this auditor office set up that

has this authority to go into these different parts of government, see if they're spending money, making sure that they're doing their jobs and delivering for taxpayers, basically. But the tech industry comes in, completely ignores that, pretends they need to set up their own thing, that they understand it better than anybody else, and then proceed to like totally tear things apart because they don't actually understand what is happening. They don't understand how the COBOL systems work that so much of government relies on, like all these different things. But they think that they're the geniuses that understand everything. And so, of course, they should be able to tear the government to pieces and remake it in the way that they think that it should work based on very specific kind of

software mindset that doesn't necessarily apply to the government for over 300 million people. Yeah. And you did this with tunneling with the Boring Company. They bought an off-the-shelf tunneling machine. I guess apparently they made some tweaks to it or something. Tunneling exists. There are businesses and brilliant people who committed their entire lives to doing this as well as they can. And yet, when was the last time you saw a tunneling company get any kind of media coverage? When was the last time you saw a tunneling company able to go and raise capital on the markets, right? Like, even though that's where the actual expertise is. Same with Neuralink, same, right? This is late stage Elon Musk. This is what he does. You know,

it's really important for people to understand what this guy does well and what he doesn't, right? Because the whole justification for him being in government, for him being an auditor of government, is that he's good at business. But it's not true. Look at the Twitter deal. It's not true. Look at Boring Company. It doesn't make money. Look at Neuralink. It doesn't make money. Look at Tesla. Its business is falling apart. We'll talk more about that too. None of them are Facebook. None of them are Amazon. Those companies have problems too, but the core of them make a lot of money. So he's not there because he's good at business. He's there because he's good at doing exactly what he's doing, which is putting a brand

out there, dominating media coverage and making people forget if they ever knew all the other actually smart, intelligent, committed, dedicated, knowledgeable people who've dedicated their whole lives to understanding these very specific, very complicated things. Those are the people that should be doing that work. Not the guy who his whole thing is pretending that he's better at everything than everyone. It's completely absurd. And we have to start there. Once you sort that out, then you can start to understand, okay, what do we do about this guy? I think that's a fantastic point. I think it's a good transition for us as well. As you mentioned,

we want to come back and discuss how we actually take on the power of Elon Musk, especially now that he has this outsized role. But I think part of understanding how we do that is actually understanding one of the companies that is so key to his power and to the wealth that he has been able to build up over these years. And of course, that is what we have been talking about for a long time now, you know, through these conversations that we've had on the show and through work that you've been doing. Tesla right now, I think it's fair to say is in a difficult place. We still see its share price go up and down based on things that Elon Musk says, but it seems like the fundamentals of the business are really struggling at the moment.

Can you give us an overview of what is happening with Tesla at the moment? Tesla built the brand that people are most familiar with, leading technology, all of the positive stuff of the Tesla brand. This was a result of one of the things that Elon is good at, which is attracting talent. This branding and storytelling thing that is his core ability, it doesn't just allow him to raise money on Wall Street. It allows him to bring in talent. The problem is, is that he also works that talent to death. He burns it out. He values loyalty more than their intelligence and their talent, right? And so they cycle out. So if you look at Tesla's history, there were times where they were getting all the top talent in whether it was manufacturing or design, engineering,

certainly in autopilot and self-driving, they had incredible talent and it's all gone. And Elon himself, he was never that active at Tesla, but he was more engaged and certainly hasn't been in a long time. And so what's happened is, is that this is a rudderless ship, essentially, right? It doesn't have a core culture that allows it to operate sort of autonomously in a productive, healthy way because it's a personality cult. That's its values, right? And it doesn't have the talent anymore. The people in leadership positions are just people who work their way up through that culture. The problem that every dictatorship eventually runs into where it's like you have yes men, right? Well, yes men will say yes, but are they actually good at doing anything else? So what Tesla has done is they've let their core business wither on the vine. So

the Model 3 started production in 2017. It's had a facelift. It's ancient. Model Y came out a little later, so it's a little further behind the curve. That facelift is just coming out. That's the core of its product lineup. The Model S and the Model X have also now had refreshes, and they are a tiny, tiny little niche. And what's really important to understand is that the Cybertruck is their first all-new platform since the 2017 Model 3, because the Model Y is very similar to the Model 3. And the Model Y was their last new product, which was 2020. So it's been years since they put out a new product.

The Cybertruck is a flop. They had a million reservations. It's aimed at the most lucrative automotive segment in the planet, full-size trucks in the US. They converted what, like two and a half percent of those reservations to actual sales. They ran out in their first year. So the first year of sales of the Cybertruck should be a high margin. And in theory, at least a high volume product. Tesla's overall sales and profit margins in 2024 went down. If you don't follow the auto industry, you know, there's a lot of ins and outs to sort of how it works and everything. But you have to understand bringing out a brand new, almost six figure product in a high volume, high margin segment.

And for your overall sales and profit margins to go down, it almost shouldn't be possible, especially with a company that has as strong a brand as Tesla has. This is a screaming red flag, right? This is their core business is screwed. They're talking about new models coming out, right? And supposedly sometime this year, they'll show some new models, but it'll be a couple of years before they can get those out and certainly making any kind of money. The clock starts once those new models start to come out. But until then, we have this moment where the core business that generates 90% of Tesla's revenue is right teetering on the edge, right?

The margins have been going down. They've been making less money, been lowering the price, making less money per car just to keep the sales volume flat. But they can't keep it up. China is going down. Europe is going down dramatically. If the US sales really go down, this company will become structurally unprofitable. And that's when things

get really interesting. I think that's a really good overview. And there are a few different things that I want to dig into there to flesh it out, right? On the part about the models, as you're saying, there are a number of vehicles that it really relies on for a lot of its sales, the Y and the 3 in particular, that have been around for a while that are getting a bit long in the tooth, even though they've had these little refreshes. We had these like internal stories at Tesla where it seemed to be that the vehicle designers and the teams were pushing for this more affordable model that was going to come next. And Elon Musk was really pushing back on that because he wanted to go do a robo taxi instead, you know, the type of thing that we saw them show off last year. Do we know how things have kind of shaken out at this point? And is there really

much hope that a cheaper model is really on the horizon and is actually going to work in a meaningful way, especially after seeing what happened with the Cybertruck? So no, I don't think so. The core thesis of the book that I wrote in 2019 was that Tesla, their culture makes it impossible for them to make truly affordable mass market vehicles. Here we are sitting all these years later, you know, it's true. They haven't been able to do it. And I don't think there's any reason to believe that they can. More importantly, and I think this is the other piece of this, what happened over the course of Tesla's history is essentially that the stock promotion outran the core business. And this

is something we see in a lot of Silicon Valley companies, right? Where founders, they have this big chunk of stock. And so for them, the financial incentives, if they can keep that valuation going up, even if the core business isn't doing really well, they're very heavily incentivized to do that. One of the things that has happened sort of quietly over the last couple of years

is that Elon Musk has realized there is nothing he can do on the making and selling cars side that is going to ever live up to the valuation that he's already achieved, let alone the one that he wants to still get to, right? $10 trillion, whatever. There is no amount of cars that you can make and sell, really, that will ever get you to that kind of valuation. It's just not possible. And so his focus is entirely on fraud. And so you see, instead of investing in lower cost cars to broaden the market, because again, Tesla had this huge head start.

If they were a good car company, they would have every opportunity to broaden the market, right? You have 80% market share like they did for a long time. The only way to grow is to make more affordable cars and broaden the market. It's basic logic. So he's not running a car company anymore. He's running a stock promotion scam, essentially, right? And we see that. He's using Tesla's capital not to invest in new products that will grow the market. He's using it to buy GPUs. That's

what capital markets want to see. I can explain why more GPUs is not going to solve their self driving problems, right? But it's also been eight years of promises. There's no reason to believe that he has any kind of credibility about delivering on that either. So I think from a management perspective, to the extent that he's even paying attention to Tesla at all, which I think is less than it's ever been in history, and you listen to the earnings call, it's clear he doesn't care about the core business. He doesn't talk about it. He doesn't take it seriously. There's nothing in the things that he says when he's talking about the business that give any reason to believe he's serious about building the core business, which again, 90% of the revenue

comes from. He is completely laser focused on this hype thing. The problem is after eight years, he has to deliver on it. So he's going to try and do that in Austin with this Robotaxi deployment. I'm very curious to see what happens with that. But I don't think there's anything he can do there that's going to fundamentally change the equation. And again, if the core business continues to rot, and especially if protests and boycotts

and divestment strategies can both push down the sales and the stock price, investors are not going to sit around forever to wait for magic beans that haven't hatched over the last eight years to magically hatch this year or next year or the year after. Yeah, I'm worried for the people of Austin and what it's going to look like when there's a bunch of those deployed on the streets. We'll see. There are two things from what you were talking about there that I want to drill down on, right? The first is the sales. As you're saying, Tesla had this head start. Tesla was the electric car company that everyone recognized. It had all of this goodwill because, you know, it was pushing forward on electric cars and all these traditional automakers weren't doing as much and all that kind of stuff. Now we see the traditional automakers are in the space. There are plenty of alternate models available. But also, because Tesla has not been able to produce this lower cost vehicle, this more mass market vehicle, Chinese companies outside of North America are really eating Tesla's lunch, especially in China, which it had really bet on as a major future market. The Chinese competition seems like a problem for all Western automakers. But if you're

thinking about the EV side of things, this is where they have really brought down the prices and made them affordable. And as those companies continue to grow internationally, Tesla is just kind of sidelined to being kind of a luxury niche automaker, not some kind of mass market automaker as people envisioned it to be in the past. I mean, that's absolutely true. I think for me, covering the auto industry, you know, we always thought of it as this global business, right? When I started writing about this stuff, it was all about sort of world cars. You build one car that you can sell, you know, you make little tweaks market to market, but you really try and get that global volume. I remember when Ford was talking a lot about that. Yeah, yeah. Ford was like with the Focus, right? That was their world car. Yeah.

And what we've seen is this dramatic shift away from that for a number of reasons, right? There are some sort of internal business logic reasons around localization of supply chains and currency issues and things like that. But now politically, the global car business is more divided than ever. Chinese carmakers now face tariffs in both Europe and the US. You're absolutely right. So China and Americans don't understand. Right now, the car business in China is where the US car business was in the teens and 20s and 30s, right? There's a whole back history to this of China trying to build an auto industry going back to the 90s by bringing in foreign car companies and putting them in these partnerships. And that didn't work. Fundamentally, the foreign automakers, the established auto

industry had this head start in internal combustion technology. In the 2000s, that strategy shifted. And instead of trying to catch up in gas car production, China really encouraged EV production, not just manufacturers, but the batteries, the supply chain, all the way down to pulling materials out of the ground and geopolitical relationships in Africa to make that happen. So China has dominated the entire EV stack, all of it, the whole thing, and they are light years ahead. It's just not GM and Ford and whatever that are the sort of laggards here. Tesla is also a laggard here, right? And it's because they're not investing in their product. And in fact, it's very similar to how GM ended up falling. GM, once upon a time, had 60% market share in the US of all cars, all cars, this huge dominant position. And they got complacent and lazy.

The Japanese at that time were investing in smaller engines, more efficient drivetrains, emissions control technologies, and reliability and durability, all of these things that cost money to develop, but then give you this technological advantage, right? This is how the Japanese automakers created this huge gap. And all of a sudden Detroit looked like these rusting barges and the Japanese cars were coming from, you know, from the future. This is where we are with the Chinese auto business. Now, politically, are we ever going to get to a point where in the U.S. Chinese cars are imported here? I don't know. You know, I don't know what happens to the EV market if they don't because US car companies aren't serving that demand.

So this is all because we put all of our eggs in Tesla's basket. We believe that as a matter of EV adoption policy, we had to put some cash on the hood of $100,000 Teslas and Elon Musk would magically make cheaper and cheaper cars, and he would do all the hard work of expanding this market. Well, we wasted a decade on that approach. It hasn't worked. Not only do we not get the broad, affordable EV market that we thought we would, we got a fascist takeover of our country, right? Funded by our own tax dollars. One of the things we have to do here, in addition to sort of resisting Elon Musk, getting real about what's happening in China and how much we're falling behind, but is getting real about our EV policy. Because we can't just outsource it to tech billionaires like Elon,

because we ran the experiment, we have the data, we know what happens, we got to try something different. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really interesting as well. Like, I feel like if there's any opportunity for Chinese automakers to come to North America, it might be under a Trump administration where they kind of say, listen, BYD, if you want to set up a factory here and employ American workers, we'll let you do that. But again, who knows if something like that would actually happen or if they'd be willing to do it. Because of course, that's eventually what they did with the Korean and Japanese automakers, right? Come over, build your factories here, hire our people, and you can sell your cars. Well, I'll say to our friends of the North, as our relationship, unfortunately,

gets increasingly strained, I think it would be interesting for Canadian friends to consider the possibility of welcoming the Chinese in. Because guess what? Once they have factories on the ground there, maybe sometime in the future, things change politically in the US and we'll have a more serious EV policy, in which case, all of a a sudden we'll be importing cars that are made in Canada. I think there's a really interesting strategic opportunity there for Canada that if I were in politics up there, I would certainly be considering that as a sort of long-term strategic possibility. Yeah, I've argued something similar. I think they should do exactly that while putting a big tariff on Teslas, of course. Yeah, yeah. The other interesting thing there,

I'll just add on that point before we move on is I was listening to this interview with the CEO of Ford, Jim Farley, I believe his name is. And he was saying he is watching the Australian market really closely because it's this Western market that's a lot like North America, but they don't make cars domestically anymore. So there's no tariff on Chinese imports. This is like a Western auto market that has the traditional Western players, but also like all these Chinese companies moving in as well. You know, you can really see how things might be playing out differently if the tariffs were not in place there. So I find that fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. Chile is one also. I mean, it's not it's it's

a little different as a market, but they have basically no import restrictions. And so, yeah, you see Chinese cars there. And the reality is, is that they're making great cars. The idea that Chinese manufacturing quality is any worse than ours is wildly outdated at this point. This is sort of the bind a little bit around this tariff thing, which I think will take some time to sort of sort out politically what the right approach will be. Again, just imagining some future political situation where, you know, we kind of get back to those sorts of like sane, pragmatic policy questions. So the other piece of what you were talking about there was, of course, the hype that Tesla is really built around. Like you wrote in Ludicrous, we have seen this for a long time with Tesla and Elon Musk, right? Making promises that could not

be fulfilled in order to boost the stock price, in order to get investors excited, all this kind of stuff. This is something they have been doing for a very long time. But it does feel like in this moment, like certainly there's still this focus on self-driving and like it's really going to happen this time. It's finally going to work properly after Elon Musk promising it for like a decade. But also like this shift in the past few years to being so focused on robots as like this big future market. I think Elon Musk has said like they would be selling hundreds of millions of robots or maybe even more than that, pretending that it's going to become this huge mass market thing, even bigger than the cars. But it just seems like complete bullshit. You know, I think this is really the point at which it becomes obvious what Elon is doing here, right? He's playing a confidence game. And so with a confidence game,

you have to always escalate the stakes, right? So this is one of the reasons he's in politics, is because he's trying to outrun the consequences of all the things that he's done so far, escalating the stakes and getting more power, getting more aspirational, right? The other thing that is happening, though, and has happened sort of very quietly is, you know, technology has become sort of the dominant religion in a lot of ways in our society. And I think that that becomes really obvious at the point that Elon Musk is saying he's going to create a race of mechanical beings that will upend everything we know about economics, that will create a sort of apocalyptic in the sort of biblical sense era of unlimited prosperity. This is not economic thinking. This is religious thinking. And I think the more he sort of escalates this stuff, the more it becomes clear what is going on here. So there is interesting stuff happening in humanoid robotics in general, right? There are interesting things happening with

like large behavior models. That is interesting. There is real stuff happening there. And if you're interested in that stuff, study it. The beauty of robotics is that it's the anti-Silicon Valley technology. There's a reason that robotics hasn't really ever done that well in Silicon Valley. They love the idea of robotics and the aesthetics of robots, but it doesn't fit the ethos because the Silicon Valley ethos is all software-based. It's all this idea of you write the software, right? And then it just scales endlessly, right? It's either very generalized or generalizable. And robots are becoming more generalizable because of the breakthroughs in, again, AI.

I hate using the term, but fundamentally robotics is a task-by-task thing. General purpose robots don't exist, but very, very simple robots do. You ask someone to draw a robot and they'll probably draw a humanoid that can kind of do anything. The science fiction robot, which is like one end of a spectrum, that's not real. It's fake. And we don't have the technology to create something that is human-like. We just don't. Look at LLMs. If LLMs are as unreliable, putting that in a metal body is not going to fundamentally create a human being. It just won't. The other end of the spectrum of automation is an arm with a tool on it in a cage. That is a real robot. And they do

jobs that are too dangerous and dirty. Robotics in general is about identifying tasks that can be automated and that it makes sense to automate. And the idea is every day you go and do your job, you find a way to do it a little bit more efficiently. That process iterates and iterates and iterates and iterates. And at some point, you know, you just agree, okay, for this job on this part of the assembly line or whatever it is, there is no way to make it more efficient. That's when you start thinking about putting a robot in there instead of a human. That's antithetical to how Silicon Valley does stuff. They want to create one thing that they can sell lots of sort of like cars, right? Which is a general solution. You sell a million cars

because they will solve all of your mobility needs. Those are the kinds of products that Silicon Valley likes because they're platforms, they have scale and they're generalizable and robotics fundamentally isn't like that. And so that's what Elon's doing. He's selling the venture capital version of what they would like robots to be.

But the reality is that Silicon Valley's track record in robotics is terrible. And the actual centers of competence in that are places like Carnegie Mellon and the Northeast around MIT and places like that away from Silicon Valley. That's where a lot of the real breakthroughs in robotics happen. And it's because those places are less infected by this sort of pathology of Silicon Valley venture capital. On that point, how is the market reacting to Tesla right now?

Because as you're saying, Tesla's share price is really disconnected from the actual cores and fundamentals of its business. Elon Musk has often used these big promises to ensure that the share price gets boosted far above what a traditional company would get based on the amount of money that it receives. And it often feels that the Tesla share price is almost like a bet on Elon Musk's continued power and relevance less than something actually about Tesla, the car company itself. So in this moment, and you've been saying that the sales declined year on year in 2024 at Tesla, and there's a lot of big promises, but nothing really clear about like future products. The Tesla Roadster, the new one has been promised for ages, the Tesla Semi, another vehicle that like, where is that? It was promised ages ago and not really being produced in any large numbers. The Cybertruck is a dud. So what is going on in the market? And is Tesla still doing well despite those issues? And to what degree is Elon Musk's current power in the

government shaping Tesla's share price? It's a great question. And I will say just as a preamble to my answer here that, you know, I've been focused on the fundamentals of Tesla as a business and been baffled by the stock price for about as long as I've been paying attention to it. People should understand that going in. I'm not a stock market guy, though I've been paying attention to what's happened on Tesla stock for a while. It's very hard to make sense of it. Here's what I can tell you, though. So around 2019, when my book 2020 pre-pandemic, when my book came out, Tesla was sort of struggling a little bit with the core business. It was showing some real signs of weakness. 2018 was sort of one of the last sort of near-death moments. There was a lot of chaos in Elon Musk's life personally. And then when the

pandemic happened, you had this like perfect storm around the core of their business, which was that EV hype was peaking. Meme stocks around EVs and the SPACs that were happening. It was just Tesla came out with the Model Y, which is its most mass market vehicle ever. And at the same time, the auto industry was structurally undersupplied. At that point, the argument that the core of their business was falling apart fell apart, right? It wasn't. It was doing great.

They were growing sales and profit margins. It was roaring. People like me kind of had to shut up a little bit. What's important to understand is if the core business is doing okay, then investors can look at that and say, yeah, so maybe there's only like a very small percent chance that they've delivered on the self-driving stuff and the AI stuff and the robotic stuff. But as long as the core business is doing okay, it's a lottery ticket. Why not?

What's the downside? So it's taken a few years for that to unwind, but it has now, right? And so this is why we see the core business is falling. Tesla did not take the profits they were making at that time and plow them back into the business. They took those profits and didn't invest in the products. Well, it's like the continued fight over whether Elon Musk is going to get a big 50 plus billion dollar payout, right? Yes. So investors have been able to kind of bounce between these two narratives, which is that Tesla as a car company is going to be so successful or the self-driving thing pays

off. And what we have now is finally the core business is doing worse even than it was in 2018. This is the worst that its businesses really sort of looked, especially in terms of trajectory. At the same time, they're also going backwards with their credibility on the self-driving stuff. And just for illustration on this, you know, in 2016, when the full self-driving thing started, level five autonomy, they launched the hardware and the product with this video that it was a demo, right? It was misleading in its own way, but it was a real car on real public roads. So it had some credibility to it. Fast forward to last year, they show off the cyber cab. They do their first ever driverless deployment. It's on a movie studio lot. It's a fake car in a fake city. Pedestrians are roped off from it. For all we know, it's all just teleoperated anyway. They were going backwards on credibility. And when you saw

that event happen, you saw the stock really start to weaken a little bit. What happened then was the election. The narratives that are actually tied to the company, right? There's the core business narrative. There's the AI self-driving robotics narrative. And then there's the sort of meme coin thesis, right? Which is exactly like you said, it's really just a sort of generic Elon token that you buy because you think Elon is ascendant versus on his way down. So we saw a big spike after the election because of that, I think that meme coin thing.

Nothing got better about either the business or the self-driving side. This is why the protest movement is important. This is why showing that there is a cost to what Elon's doing politically is important because it takes those things that are already weak and makes them more weak, especially the core business, to what Elon's doing politically is important because it takes those things that are already weak and makes them more weak, especially the core business, right? Elon's involvement in government is not delivering clear game-changing results for the businesses.

We'll see what they do in Austin. It's such a huge X factor. It's hard to even predict. I don't see how they can actually deploy the actual technology they have the way they say they're going to do and for there not to be lots of crashes and lots of problems because it's just not ready and not going to happen. Maybe they'll do a teleoperation there too, where all those cars will be remote control and all be a show. If that's the case, I think we'll be able to figure that out pretty quickly as well. Tesla stock is a binary bet that Elon's going to be able to put on a convincing show of driverless robotaxis in Austin. And I think that's a pretty easy one to bet against. Even if that goes off perfectly without a hitch and it's the real technology,

it's not fake, blah, blah, blah. How long does it take to turn that into a business, a profitable business that's actually changing the core economics of Tesla? A long time. We still have, no matter what, years where Tesla's core business is going to be in decline. And again, maybe there are some investors who want to just hang on through all that. They feel like they can hang on forever, but there are other investors who will not. And those are the ones that we have to kind of reach and knock out of the equation. You've been mentioning the protest movement and boycotts and things like that throughout the conversation. To what degree is Elon Musk's power and wealth

tied up in Tesla and how vulnerable does that make him? And you've probably alluded to the answer to the second part of that question through other things that you've been saying. But yeah, how do you think about those two things? So there's two pieces to this. One is rhetorical and sort of symbolic, which is that the whole justification for him being involved in government, as I mentioned earlier, is that he's good at business. That's not true.

And I think as Tesla continues to struggle and fail, and as people understand that Tesla is a stock promotion scheme, the wealth that he's worth on paper due to Tesla stock is not real, that it's not liquid. He can't just sell that and turn it into cash. So we need to make that point, right? That he's bad at business, right? And you can look at the Twitter deal. You can look at Tesla falling apart. You can look at the fact that Neuralink and the Boring Company don't make money. None of his companies make money, right? And that's number one, because on a rhetorical level, people just need to get past this myth that he's good at business because that is what justifies the narrative behind letting him run wild in our government. That's step one. Step two, though, involves actually hitting him back. And again, there too, people really need to understand that

he's vulnerable. And to understand this, it starts with the core business is not good at Tesla and the stock is overvalued. We've covered that pretty well. What people also need to understand, Elon Musk's paper wealth comes from essentially two places, right? So like Neuralink and Boring Company and that stuff is like private companies, very limited investor base, no business at all. They're cash sinks, not generators. There's SpaceX and there's Tesla. So Tesla is worth a trillion dollars. It's worth a lot more as a company than SpaceX, but Elon has a smaller percentage of it than he does of SpaceX. But the net effect is that those two companies are worth about half of his on-paper fortune. SpaceX is a private company. It's not liquid. He can't just sell his stock anytime he wants. It's a lot harder to raise money. It's not publicly traded. That's good for him because

it means that he doesn't have to publicize the financials, right? It's all secret. And this is why people assume, oh, well, even if Tesla goes down, he always has space. Don't assume that SpaceX is a good business. I'm not an expert in it. I've looked at it enough to suggest there are a lot of signs that it's not that good of a business.

We don't have access to those financials. Yeah. And just to add to what you're saying, that's my understanding as well. SpaceX is not as good of a business as one might actually assume. And of course, you know, it's very dependent on all those big government contracts that it keeps receiving. Well, so actually it's what it is, is if you build scale that you drive down the cost, right? And so if you drive down the cost, you broaden the market, right? Sort of like what you're supposed to be doing with EVs. But the problem is, is that the Falcon 9 did drive down the cost of launch, at least in theory,

but it didn't create enough demand for it. And so they have like 80% of the launch market, and yet half of their launches are launching their own Starlink satellites because they can't find paying customers for it. And that's Starlink loses money. So it's like saying, well, if I have a car business and I make 500,000 units, you know, I can sell them at this price. If I make a million units, I can sell them lower and the market will be bigger. But you build that factory for a million units and people aren't buying them at the lower price.

And so you have to sell them to yourself to a rental fleet that loses money. This is not a sustainable business. That's essentially what I think is happening at SpaceX. Again, we don't know because it's private. Back on track, Tesla, it's only half of his wealth on paper, but it's really the only place he has of getting cash. And there's two ways of doing it. He can sell the stock. He did it a little bit to fund the Twitter deal. But if he does more than that, it's like a monkey trap where as long as he owns a big chunk of Tesla, he's associated with Tesla and people buy it because he's involved. If he starts to sell,

it signals he's not confident in it. And a lot of people are going to take that signal and sell as a result of it. So he can't really sell. Plus, he'd have to pay taxes. And so what he does is he pledges those shares to get loans from big Wall Street banks, Morgan Stanley kind of being the big one. What that means is that A, he only can get so much cash out of it. It's not one to one, right? You have to pledge like any other loan. You have to pledge a good amount of collateral for the loan. And what it also means is that if the stock starts to go down, the value of his collateral goes down. And if he has cash out from those loans, he has to put collateral back in. This is what's called a margin call, right? And so what happens if the stock goes below the level that he needs it to be at, he gets margin

called. He has to, in very short notice, put more stock or cash into this. So what will happen is he'll have to sell the stock, which will drive the price down, which will continue to trigger margin calls while also signaling to everyone else that he's on his way out and that they need to get out while they can. It switches the dynamic from greed to fear. People don't understand. They look at the number on his wealth and they assume, A, that he can pull all that out in cash and throw it at elections and throw it at everything else. He can't.

The cash that he pulls out through these loans, he has like three private jets. Like his lifestyle is not cheap. So not only can he not pull the cash out, but if that stock starts to go down, if we trigger this fear cycle instead of a greed cycle, there are these traps built in because of his loans that will then create this like death spiral. And so one of the things that I'm really trying to get people to understand is again, A, on the rhetorical level, he's not good at business, but B, the big numbers, those are actually the vulnerability, not his strength. That's what makes him vulnerable. There is a real scenario where in theory, we could wipe out his wealth in a matter of days or weeks

if the right dynamic takes hold. And so then what do you see as the opportunities to really hurt Tesla and by extension Elon Musk in that way? What are the actions that people can take or what needs to be done to kind of sack this confidence in Tesla so that you kind of scare the market and investors away from it? The important thing for me is that people just understand that that is a viable strategy. What I want is to see people understand that strategy and start to align around it. The tactical level of how you implement that, I think there's a million ways. It shouldn't be up to me. You know what I mean? I have a book to write. I got other things going on. I'm happy to explain

the strategy of this, but I really think that Tesla takedown, by the way, check out the hashtag Tesla takedown. You'll get plugged into the community that's already opening their eyes to this and starting to work on this. What I want to make clear is we can start with protests. We can start every Saturday at 11 a.m. We can go down to our local Tesla store and we can go out there and we can let our friends and neighbors know that anything you do that puts a dollar into this company is directly supporting Elon Musk. And that if we starve this company of its revenue, and again, this is sales of new cars, servicing existing cars, and this is charging at superchargers. All of these things support this company. Every dollar that we take out of their revenue drives down the core fundamentals of their business even worse. And this is the important

thing, right? Boycotts have been done before. Frankly, the record in this country, in the US in particular, is not that great, unfortunately. And I'm aware of that. But this is different because we haven't had a boycott of a company that is this precarious before. And so part of it is this overvalued stock that's built on fraud and that we can switch from. It's only psychology keeping it up. There is no fundamental economics keeping this up. That's the important thing to understand. The other thing is sales were down like 11% in China and whatever sales they're getting, their competition is so tough. They're basically not making any money. Sales are down huge in Europe, like 40, 50% in some of those European markets, right?

Huge. So US is it. This is the last place. If we can drive down the sales here, the core fundamentals of that business fall apart. Elon doesn't have anything to get investors to believe that the core business will improve for years. He can show a new car tomorrow. It'll be two years at least before that is actually generating real meaningful cash flow or profit for the company. And so anything that starves Tesla of money, that makes the brand toxic, that lets people know that Elon Musk is vulnerable,

is aligned with the cause. And again, I don't want to tell people what to do. Whatever it is, whatever you want to do. If you want to go out on the street and protest, do that. If you think that's boomer cringe and you want to do some kind of online advocacy, you want to leave bad reviews. I mean, there's, again, I don't even want to tell people what to do because use your imagination. People know how to fuck shit up.

All I'm saying is, is that this opportunity exists. We don't get to vote for two years at all at the federal level. We didn't get to vote for Elon in the first place anyway. Our choices are literally doom scroll and feel helpless and fantasize about someone else taking care of this for us, or we can do something ourselves. And I'll tell you, you know, I had my eyes open in 2015 about this. For the longest time, I thought, oh, I'm just a little blogger. All I have to do is sort of, I think we talked about this on the show, you know, before in a past episode, put up the flare, let people know, hey, there's fraud going on here.

There's bad things going on here. The cavalry is going to arrive. The grownups will show up and take care of this. And it hasn't happened. It hasn't happened. Take it from me. I've been running that experiment for a decade, right? I have the data.

It doesn't work. There is no cavalry. No one's coming to rescue us. We do have this opportunity. Frankly, you know, people have other ideas. I'm all open to them. But strategically, I think this is the only way we do something about this. And there's a million ways that we can affect that, right? And again, it can be art. It can be protest. It can be online activism. It can be organizing. It can be just getting the word out and just talking to your neighbors about why they should sell the car. I think that gives us a lot of hope too, especially in a moment where we see all of these stories in the news constantly about

things going terribly, about the power that Elon Musk is wielding in government. And the idea that through the actions that we've taken by making this brand increasingly toxic, that that can actually have a meaningful impact on Elon Musk's power and wealth is something that actually feels like it gives some degree of power back to people to be able to find a way that's not just through the ballot box to actually be able to try to do something meaningful to combat the power of Elon Musk and everything that he is doing in this moment. And I feel like one of the potential points that we would have heard in the past about doing something like this is, oh, but that harms the EV transition,

that there's going to be an environmental impact if Tesla becomes toxic and you're going to scare people off electric cars. And I think you can see pretty clearly now that that is not a worry that we need to have. This government generally is trying to try to halt any kind of further transition to electric vehicles. And Elon Musk is part of that, even though he runs an electric car company. But also you have all these other automakers that are making options for you. So the idea that Tesla is the one that you really need to rely on for any kind of EV transition, if you're really invested in that, it doesn't really hold much water anymore. There's a thing here, you know, there are good people who bought Teslas and have them and literally can't afford to get rid of them. And I feel for those people. I think it's really

important to understand that good people are very much being hurt in the status quo, right? We have people being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, to Panama, to all these places, put in camps, Gaza, the environment, science funding, all these things. Good people are getting hurt, people losing their jobs, losing their livelihoods, losing government functions, losing life-saving benefits. Lots and lots of good people are getting hurt by doing nothing. I don't want to be cavalier about good people who own Teslas who have to face the anger and wrath or maybe even the property destruction from their neighbors because they're angry about this. I don't want to trivialize that. I don't want to say it's a good thing that good people deserve to have bad things happen to them.

But we are in a situation where we're very much out of options here, right? We just don't have other ways of affecting a totalitarian takeover of our government. If the only bad thing that happens to a good person as a result of this strategy is that good people who can't afford to get rid of their Teslas face social pressure or whatever else. It just is not the worst thing that could possibly happen. There is no scenario here where bad things don't happen to good people. And so what I would say too to people, if you really can't afford to get rid of your Tesla, like if you are literally just sort of stuck, and by the way, don't just assume. Look at what's actually out there in terms of the alternatives. There are great lease deals on non-Tesla EVs,

right? Great deals on used ones. The alternatives are probably cheaper than you think. But if you can't, if you really can't, if you really are stuck, if you looked at all the alternatives and you are stuck, what you can do is turn your Tesla into part of the protest. The important thing that matters here is we can't have Teslas be normalized. If your Tesla is just out there as a normal car going about its business, You know, you are supporting the idea that that's okay. And we have to fight that. We just have to. We just don't have any alternative to it.

Turn it into an art car. Turn it into a protest car. One bumper sticker is great, but like plaster the thing with bumper stickers. You know what I mean? Let people know that when they see a Tesla, that they cannot see a Tesla without it being associated with the toxicity. I sort of joked before, every Tesla kind of has a swastika on it already, whether you can see it or not. The other thing I just kind of want to say too is, you know, I think there's alternatives or

opportunities too for like, for example, financial advisors. When Tesla was getting built up, you saw people like Ross Gerber and these guys who would like, they realized this is a marketing opportunity for them. They say, invest with me, you know, my investment service. And, you know, I'll make sure that you're exposed to Tesla stock, but also Elon Musk's other companies, to a variety of financial products. When he was on the upswing, there were people taking advantage of that. What I really want to see, because the stock is really where this is going to happen, and what I want to see as financial advisors, here's a way to invest in the S&P 500, except for Elon Musk's companies. Here's a way to invest in technology sector, except for Tesla companies. This is a financial opportunity for these folks. That's one of the things that I really want to see

start to get off the ground here, because this is not just traditional activism, right? This is a different kind of politics, and there's lots of ways for different people to come at it from different perspectives, with different tools, but all to work together toward the same result, which is really just restoring the constitutional order. Once we do that, we can get back to disagreeing about what our visions are for what we do with that constitutional order. But we just have to get back to that right now. And everyone has some way of helping us do that. And I just think we should embrace all of those ways.

Yeah, I'd certainly accept seeing Elon Musk in a cell next to Elizabeth Holmes as well. That would be an okay outcome too. It would, yeah. No, like I think what you've laid out is that there are a bunch of different options that people can pursue, right? And the fact that Teslas are already becoming kind of tarnished. I read a post on a Tesla forum recently where someone was saying like, I've already had two people do Hitler salutes to me and my wife won't get in the car anymore. Like, what do I do? And it's like, yeah, like this is what this brand is becoming associated with.

There are a lot of people who supported Elon Musk or didn't even necessarily support Elon Musk, but wanted to like aid this EV transition. And Tesla seemed like the company to do that with who are now waking up to this reality that they've gotten involved in and probably want to do something different. Well, and the other thing that people need to understand

is that this is not going to get better. This is such an important point. If you want to sell your Tesla, you've got to do it now because this is only going to get worse. Like the values are only going to go down. The other thing is, is that the idea that like, oh, well, you know, you can just keep it going. Teslas are incredibly unreliable. And when they do break down, they're incredibly expensive to fix. The second you're out of warranty, you're going to be paying thousands of dollars at a time directly into Elon Musk's pocket just to keep this thing going. You are literally better off financially to sell this thing, sell your Model 3, get a Toyota

Corolla or something. Get something that is used, reliable, efficient, and ride that because they're reliable and the parts are cheap. You especially won't be putting that money into Elon Musk's pocket. So the idea that sitting on your Tesla for longer financially makes more sense is just wrong. And I would really, really caution people against that line of logic because it's just not true. Such a fantastic conversation, as always, just to catch up on Tesla, but also to know that people do have power to try to push back on this. And a key way to do that is to target one of the primary companies

that support Musk's wealth and his power. And that this is actually a really achievable thing that can be done. It's not something that is completely difficult to do because the company is already struggling and it just needs a few more pushes to really kind of push it over the edge. Any final words before we end off?

If this were a few years ago and Tesla still had this sort of bright future ahead of it, and there was this, oh, well, you know, do the Model 3 and the Model Y, and then there'll be an affordable one. And the illusion is shattered. The opportunity is so real now in ways that it wasn't even a couple of years ago. The other thing I do, I kind of want to leave people with because, you know, I see, and you know, it's a little bit of a third rail thing, but I see a lot of people posting, it's called Luigi posting. And I just want to say, to me, there's a real similarity to the logic of that kind of fantasy a little bit and sort of how we got in this problem in the first

place. It's about appointing one person to solve a big social problem for us. And we did this with Elon Musk and electric cars. We said, this guy is going to solve this problem for us. And look what it got us. It didn't solve the problem for us, and it made things worse. What I really hope people understand is that instead of getting into these sorts of fantasies that someone else is going to come and solve this problem, that we reconnect with our own power because we have it. And just because the formal ways that we have of exercising our political power have been essentially taken away from us, and that we won't have access to them for two more years in this country, that doesn't mean that we have no political power.

We just have to find other ways to exercise it. And we have to do it collectively. And that's why I think this is not just an opportunity to take down Elon Musk. It's an opportunity to rethink politics and to rethink our own power and reconnect to our own power so that when we do destroy his wealth and bankrupt him and hopefully end him up in a prison cell somewhere, that that won't be the end of it. It will open our eyes to how much power we really have and the creativity that we need to bring to exercising that power. Again, it's not just getting this one guy out of the way, but that's a foundation for a

better future in a much more broad and comprehensive way. And so I really hope people think about it in those terms. Show up every, at least here in Portland, Oregon, I'm going to be at the Tesla store every Saturday at 11 a.m. for the near future, even though I'm on a book deadline and I've got a million other things. Also be there. I hope you all show up. That's not where this ends. It's where it starts. But connect with people there. Connect with people online. Get involved and really tap into that power that we all have when we work together because this is much more doable than anybody really realizes.

Really well said. And a positive uplifting point to end this on. When we talk about Elon Musk and the power that he's wielding right now, it can often be very negative. People can feel really depressed and like they have no power here. But I think this conversation shows that, yeah, there are levers that we can take. And those are most effective when we act together to try to make sure that they have a real impact. Ed, as always, great to talk to you. Thanks so much. Yeah, always a pleasure, Paris.

Ed Niedermeyer is the author of Ludicrous and a co-host of the Autonicast. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.