Today, Explained - Teslump

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Protests against Tesla embody the outrage against Elon Musk’s DOGE-e behavior. But Musk doesn't seem to care. And given his position in the federal government, he may not have to. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A burned Tesla Cybertruck being inspected after four Cybertrucks were set on fire at a storage lot Sunday night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, do you have a Tesla? You want to get rid of it? Give it to me. Guess who's getting a Tesla? President Trump truth socialed today. I'm going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American. The problem is this.

Let me start by saying I do not condone unlawful activities whatsoever. These Tesla charging stations were intentionally set on fire. You can see. Oh, my gosh. A Tesla Cybertruck is on fire. Police tell us some of the cars had offensive and hateful comments painted on them. Seattle fire on the scene. It's the vandals. It's also that the stock is tanking. Americans are furious at Elon Musk and they're taking it out on his autos. Coming up on Today Explained.

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Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Money. Oh, so it's a hustle. Yeah, it's a hustle. Today explained with Andrew Hawkins. He's transportation editor at The Verge. All right, Andrew, let's go back in time to before the inauguration. Messrs. Trump and Elon are tight, but they're not yet co-presidents. What was happening with Tesla late last year? It was really just a phenomenal rally immediately after the election. The Wall Street investors

just really rewarding Musk for what they saw as making the correct bet in that election. And what has been happening since? Well, it's been basically the opposite. Tesla has pretty much wiped out all of its gains since the election. What is Elon's involvement in Doge due to Tesla stock? We've seen a huge run up between the election and the inauguration. And then since the inauguration, we've seen Tesla being punished. The downdraft coming as CEO Elon Musk takes on a more prominent and polarizing role in Washington than originally

thought. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround since last year. Okay, so that's the stock market. What's been happening to people who own Teslas? You have all of these people who own Teslas, and there are millions of Teslas out on the road today, many of them in the United States, who are deeply regretting their purchases because of Musk's hard right turn, his associations with the Trump administration, but just more than that, right?

It's his persona, his trolling online, throwing Nazi salutes at the inauguration, denigrating DEI and trans people. And I think a lot of Tesla owners now are seeing that and are just shocked, right? Because especially if you consider the type of person that would buy a Tesla, for years, it was largely, it was coastal elites, liberal progressive minded people,

people who believed in climate change, who thought that by buying an electric car, they were decreasing their own carbon footprint. And now they are left with this totem to Musk's hard right turn that's just sitting in their driveways. And I think a lot of them are deeply disappointed. Some have even started selling their vehicles. We saw, I think last month, a musician, Sheryl Crow very publicly sold her Tesla and posted about it on Instagram. We saw, I think last month, a musician, Cheryl Crowe, very publicly sold her Tesla and posted about it on Instagram.

Time to say goodbye. I think Cheryl Crowe either gave the car to NPR or donated the money to NPR. Like she was like, I'm gonna double barrel this guy's just in case. Box Media is over here too, Cheryl. We'd love to have your donation. Hey, girl. So not everybody can afford to donate their car to NPR. What have we seen from people who are like, I don't agree with this gentleman's politics, but I do need to

keep driving this. So you've got a whole kind of like aftermarket accessory market that's sprung up. Bumper stickers saying, you know, I bought this car before Elon went crazy. I hate him too, are some of the slogans that people are putting on the backs of their vehicles. You know, trying to sort of send the signal out into the world that, yes, I'm driving a Tesla, but that does not mean that I necessarily support Elon Musk, support his agenda. I'm certainly not a Trump supporter. We've seen there's been a number of incidents now of people with Tesla vehicles, Tesla owners being targeted for harassment, for vandalism. The Cybertruck in particular has become a favorite target of people who

are opposed to Elon Musk and to Doge. Good morning. Your Cybertruck is stupid and I fucking hate it. So I just found out that everyone hates the Cybertruck. I mean like I kind of thought that some people didn't like it but I found out the hard way that people really don't like it. And it's called Cybertruck like it sounds like a 1980s Wesley Snipes movie. People will not just point and give us thumbs down, you know, it became like people screaming out of the car, some more middle fingers, you know, trying to cut us off. Think of all of the things you could have spent $140,000 on and you chose a bloated DeLorean.

$40,000 on and you chose a bloated DeLorean. Why do you think the Cybertruck has become the favorite of vandals? There's really just no other better symbol for Musk and his kind of transformation from this guy who's going to save the world through electric cars and through rockets and we're gonna live on Mars and all of these sort of like high-minded ideals that people associated with him early on. And we got all of these vehicles, the Model 3 and the Model Y were sort of rounded and cute and very sort of aerodynamic

and full of tech that people seem to really like. And then the next vehicle was the Cybertruck and it's the stainless steel, low poly, angry triangle. I've heard a lot of people describe it as, sort of the bulletproof, Musk himself described it as like the perfect vehicle for the dystopia, the dystopian future. You never know when the apocalypse

could come along at any moment. And at here at Tesla, we have the finest in apocalypse technology. You could have just said it's ugly, but I'm glad that you gave us the context too. All right. So listen, once upon a time, you and I know as people who did, you know, high school history, Americans used to, in order to get things done politically. Americans used to boycott, they used to protest, they used to refuse to buy products. Are we seeing anything organized, for example,

or is it just, you know, Joe Smith here is giving his Tesla away, Cheryl's given hers to NPR? Like, is there momentum behind this? Yeah, absolutely there is. There's, you know, it started in early February with a handful of demonstrations and protests outside of Tesla showrooms, occasionally supercharging stations, small gatherings of people coming out with signs and demonstrating their opposition to Musk into this takeover of the federal

government. Two, three, four, let's take the email out the door. And since then, over the past month and a half, it's really just kind of exploded. In New York, there were arrests after a demonstration at a Tesla showroom. Last week in Oregon, the windows of a dealership were shattered by bullets.

And in Massachusetts, a Tesla charging station went up in flames. The destruction of property here at the Tesla Center in Salem is only one example and a pattern of vandalism against Teslas across the nation. And now we're seeing, you know, there's been hundreds of these protests now and overseas as well in Europe and other countries. There have been demonstrations and, you know, Tesla has really become a target for people who are watching what's happening on a day-to-day basis,

listening to Musk talk about feeding agencies like USAID into the woodchipper. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! Federal employees being forced to list their accomplishments or being forced to take buyouts, chaos in national parks as park rangers are being laid off. They're fearful of a rise in sort of this oligarchic type movement. And it's really kind of a fascinating thing to me too,

because I think during the first Trump administration, right, it was all about sort of a huge show of force. There was the Women's March, and it was in DC, and then in New York and other places. And it was about, you know, sort of thousands, tens of thousands of people coming out all at once in demonstrating that this was, you know, an election that they disagreed with. Now we're seeing sort of much smaller protests,

but spread out all across the country. And it's because these Tesla showrooms are really just sort of like the perfect target, I think, for people in their effort to sort of demonstrate that they are opposed to Musk and what he's doing. Is any of this actually denting sales numbers? So I think it's a little bit too soon to tell whether or not

the protests are affecting sales. But I will say that Tesla ended 2024 with its first drop in sales in, I think, over a decade. And that's because a number of things. There's more competition, right? A lot of the legacy automakers are starting to make electric vehicles. Now Tesla's not the only game anymore,

and so their market share has been dropping. But it's also because, specifically in China, the competition has become really fierce. There's also a lot of other things that are going on. Tesla's lineup is pretty stale. It's, you know, the most of its vehicles that it sells are the Model 3 and the Model Y, and they haven't really been updated until just recently.

Incentives are going away, right? Trump said he's getting rid of all the EV incentives that Biden put in place. So it's not looking pretty good for Tesla in the near term in terms of like being able to get that stock price up and getting the sales to pick back up as well. Have you seen any sign that he is worried about this? I listened to the earnings calls that they have every quarter. It's been fascinating lately because the topics

that he'll talk about have become less and less about cars and more and more about AI and robotics. And it seems clear to me that he's not interested in owning and running the car company anymore. What he really wants to do is to be the CEO of an AI and robotics company. And I think that we're seeing that because the company is obviously trying to pivot to self driving cars to robo taxis. They've got this cyber cab that they unveiled last year, and are planning to start production on in 2026. They've got these humanoid optimist robots that they claim it must claims were is going to be you know, a trillion dollar business and they're

going to replace warehouse labor and they're going to be home help aides. He wants it to become this new mission and it's not clear that that's going to be a success for him. And so he believes his future is in AI and robotics. It seems like Tesla is now kind of like the redheaded stepchild. It's not as important to me. So he's still very rich. He's even more powerful by Donald Trump's

side. Is it possible that Tesla doesn't really matter very much to him? That Tesla being hit in this fashion with the protests and the dented sales and it changing from being like a status card to being like, oh God, it's like a civic. Maybe it doesn't matter to him at all. I mean, I think that's a really great question because it is certainly the case that as the world's richest man, how much money does he need to lose for this kind of stuff to matter, right?

So he can, I think that that is sort of the crux, right? He can lose $121 billion in the span of several weeks and it doesn't really dent that much. It doesn't really phase him that much. And now he has this inside track on the federal government, this important position in the Trump administration as this special advisor, unelected, unaccountable to anyone basically, except to Trump.

It's clear to me that this maybe was the ultimate goal, right, that he's now, he has his hands on the levers of power in a way that he never has before. It's hard to imagine what kind of effect there would need to be in order to get him to change his tactics when he has amassed so much wealth and power over the past year and a half or so, to the point where maybe

just none of this really matters. The Verge's Andrew Hawkins. Coming up, what's it like to be a CEO and also an elected vice president? It's never been done before. Elon's Washington Adventure. Stay tuned. Support for Today Explained comes from NPR. NPR has many shows, but today we're going to talk about a little program called Fresh Air. Fresh Air host Terry Gross got a National Humanities Medal from President Obama a couple years back.

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Today Explained, Fez Siddiqi is here. He covers Doge for the Washington Post. Fez, in the time before Doge, before Elon Musk came to Washington, what kind of business did he have with the federal government? Elon Musk has a long history of relationships with the federal government. Both of his major companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have dealt with the government for years. Over the past decade, Musk's company, SpaceX and Tesla were together awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts. That is according to spending data. NASA called and told us that we'd won a $1.5 billion contract.

And I couldn't even hold the phone. I was like, I just look, I just blurted out, I love you guys. SpaceX has received billions in federal contract awards. Tesla is regulated in some ways by the federal government. Its autonomous vehicle ambitions are handled by the federal government. SpaceX is regulated by the FAA. It obviously has an extensive relationship with NASA. X, Twitter, the social media company that he bought, has a history with the Federal Trade Commission. Musk has a long and documented history with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued tech billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday, accusing him of securities fraud linked to his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, now known as X. Remember in 2018, Elon Musk, Tesla and the SEC agreed to have some of his tweets pre-approved by lawyers at Tesla. And Neuralink, his brain chip implant company, has interactions with the Food and Drug Administration. So there is just an extensive history of interaction between Elon Musk and the federal government. So all of that is prior to Elon coming to DC and doing Doge.

Since he's been in Washington, how has he used his newfound influence to benefit his businesses? What do we know? So Elon Musk's empire, the economic engine of Elon Musk's empire is Tesla's stock. At times it has made up more than $100 billion of his net worth. Since election day, and especially in those initial weeks and months leading up to the inauguration, Musk benefited enormously financially to the tune of over $100 billion, largely on the belief that Musk's proximity to the White House would benefit his

businesses. There was this idea that suddenly Tesla, which has been entrenched in this years-long battle over its autonomous vehicle ambitions, you know, with federal regulators, that suddenly the pathway would clear for Tesla to be able to launch these vehicles on the road. And there was this feeling that suddenly all of the regulatory friction, the inertia, that would all clear up and that would be of enormous benefit to Tesla. So Elon Musk comes to Washington and his company's stock skyrockets. One might say, well, Elon Musk didn't do that, the market did that because the market said, hey, this guy is now a Washington insider.

This is going to be great for shareholders. Let's buy Tesla stock. Are there examples of Elon makes a move and as a result, his company, one of his company gets XYZ? So we've reported on the fact that the FAA was reviewing a communications contract, an aviation communications contract previously awarded to Verizon and other company and examining, potentially awarding some of that work to Starlink, one of Elon Musk's companies or part of SpaceX. And this was happening at the same time that SpaceX employees were operating out of the FAA.

happening at the same time that SpaceX employees were operating out of the FAA. So there's this question of, okay, so isn't it the market that's benefiting Elon's businesses, not Elon himself, but the market is benefiting those businesses on the belief that Elon's proximity to power will clear the pathway for him to unleash all of these ambitions. So you talk to employees within the FAA. They're aware of what's going on here, that this contract may go from Verizon to Starlink. What did they tell you? There was just this feeling of hesitance and discomfort

over the idea, one, that the individuals working for a company regulated by their agency are now working from within their agency. And two, just sort of like a disbelief that something like this would be happening potentially out in the open. It feels sort of so brash and brazen. In the first half of the show, we heard that,

as you laid out, Tesla's share price spikes after the election, but then it plummets as people get frustrated with Elon running around Washington and Tesla's cyber trucks are attacked. So right now his stock is up and down. And so if we say, well, is Tesla really going to benefit? Maybe the answer is to be determined. But are there other ways other than the stock price that Tesla will benefit from Elon having this close relationship

with the Trump administration? So Tesla for years has tried to unleash a fully autonomous car on the roads. When you get in, you'll see like it's really quite a wild experience to just be in a car with no steering wheel, no pedals, no controls, and it feels great. And the autonomous vehicles that you see on the road are these sort of rolling science experiments. This parking lot full of driverless Waymo cars has had multiple incidents where suddenly

the vehicles become confused and start honking all at each other. It's circling around a parking lot. I got my seatbelt on, I can't get out the car. Has this been hacked? What's going on? I feel like I'm in the movies. Tesla's are consumer vehicles. They would have faced so much pushback against this idea under, you know, a different regulatory apparatus. In the one they're seeing now,

Tesla is valued as a tech company that is going to be able to realize this ambition and put these cars on the road and deliver them to consumers under the promise of autonomy. And so the company's product roadmap benefits from this belief that there's not gonna be regulatory interference. And the company essentially gets to sell investors on a story that it's operating outside of

the established principles of the business they're in. So Fez, we are less than two months out from inauguration day. And clearly there's been a lot of movement for Elon Musk's companies and in the market reaction to them. What does he stand to gain over the next three years and 10 months? Yeah, I mean, there is sort of an unlimited ceiling on what he stands to gain. Of course, there's so much at stake for him at the same time. What we're seeing, what we've seen over the past five or so days is sort of unprecedented.

I mean, I've doge reigned in essentially with Trump telling cabinet secretaries that they're in charge of, you know, cuts to their workforces, not Doge. We've seen one of Elon Musk's rockets, the Starship, explode. Oh, is that a SpaceX launch? It looked like a launch. SpaceX's massive second-generation Starship unfortunately had another failure on orbit that sent it spinning out of control. Awesome! They said it did blow up.

Oh, it did blow up. Oh, it did blow up? That's what Chad is saying. That wasn't normal. X has had what looks like its biggest disruption in years. It's in the middle of a major outage. Tesla's stock is being pummeled. And so there's just this sense that

Elon actually stands to potentially lose a lot. The flip side of that is, financially, at times post-election, his wealth has been up by more than $100 billion, and there's no ceiling on that kind of thing. His proximity to power puts him in not only a position of great influence over, again, the leader of the free world, but it also gives him the ability to benefit his businesses,

whether directly or indirectly, in all kinds of ways. Fez Siddiqui covers Doge for the Washington Post. He's also author of the forthcoming book, hubris maximus, the shattering of Elon Musk out in April. Devin Schwartz produced today's show, Jolie Meyers edited Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd are our engineers and Laura Bullard checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today reported that 1 in 4 people experience sensory sensitivities, making everyday experiences like a trip to the dentist especially difficult. In fact, 26% of sensory-sensitive individuals avoid dental visits entirely.

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everyone feels safe. Watch Sensory Overload now streaming on Hulu. Listen, we all love a good hustle. We all love a rise and grind mentality. But let's be real, you could do all that and still be super comfy, right? Right. Nothing says comfort quite like a pair of Crocs. Since 2002, they've been disrupting the footwear industry with their iconic clogged silhouette. And now you can choose from more than 800 styles to find the pair of Crocs that is perfect for you, like the Echo Wave,

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