Has Musk Just Saved Tesla?

Well…

Photo by Jannes Glas on Unsplash

Tesla is on a full-force collision course with obsolescence. Anyone who isn’t drugged up on Musk’s transparently false propaganda can see that. Many point to Musk’s sudden venture into the world of politics as the reason behind Tesla’s impending irrelevance. Musk’s actions in supporting Trump and promoting DOGE have sparked massive Tesla boycotts worldwide, profoundly impacting the company’s bottom line to the point where Tesla is no longer profitable. Major Tesla shareholders have been begging him to quit DOGE and come back and save Tesla for months now, and it seems Musk has finally listened. But is it too little, too late?

In true Musk fashion, he has been paying lip service to leaving the political world for a while now. In April, he announced that he would resign from DOGE and spend more time at Tesla, yet he still retains significant control over the group. Now, he has announced that he will substantially cut his political spending, which is a marked shift when you consider that he was the Republicans’ largest donor in 2024. It remains to be seen whether he will actually walk the walk when it comes to leaving DOGE or cutting political spending, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Would Musk’s departure from the political world save Tesla?

Well, Musk can’t really leave the political world. This is due to many reasons, including his significant impact on politics and his ambitious plans for AI.

Take Grok for example; it recently went on a tirade. It kept saying that there was a white genocide in South Africa, even though there absolutely wasn’t, and denying the Holocaust, which absolutely did happen, even when questions weren’t about those topics. This totally false rhetoric perfectly matches Musk’s own far-right nationalist rhetoric; he has previously claimed that a white genocide occurred in South Africa and has shown deeply antisemitic views multiple times. So, when xAI announced that Grok began saying these things because an unauthorised “rogue employee” had changed Grok’s code, it was pretty obvious which employee of xAI had done this.

This isn’t the only time Grok has made statements like these. Musk wants Grok to be the only “anti-woke” AI, which is mostly just a xenophobic dog whistle that allows the AI to say utterly heinous, offensive, and harmful things to push his far-right agenda — as is applicable for anyone who uses “woke” as a pejorative. And, thanks to moments like this “white genocide” bullshit, that fact is obvious to almost everyone. As such, it isn’t enough for Musk to step away from DOGE or cut political spending to resurrect his brand image. His AI is still painting him out to be a neo-Nazi with too much power.

Let’s also not forget that even if he never touched politics again, he would still wield enormous political power. DOGE is using Grok to spy on government employees’ communications, identifying any patterns that hint at anti-Musk or anti-Trump sentiment, and appears to be automatically firing people it identifies, with no human oversight. DOGE is also trying to embed Grok in the US government even further, possibly gaining access to the copious amounts of personal data the federal government holds. So, even if you don’t use Grok, you will still be affected by its political bias. And, because Musk was the one who put Grok there and oversees it, it will portray him as an Orwellian villain.

Musk is bound at the hip to far-right politics; he can’t just step away from it.

Here’s the critical factor, though: Tesla isn’t failing because of Musk’s political actions. Don’t get me wrong; they haven’t helped at all. But the real reason for Tesla’s fall from grace is the company’s direction and failed promises.

The Cybertruck was Musk’s last attempt at winning the EV race, and it has failed. It’s poorly built, expensive, charges slowly, has a god-awful range, and catches fire more than an original Ford Pinto. It’s no wonder Tesla has had to massively scale back production to a fraction of what was initially targeted. Despite that, Tesla is still sitting on an inventory of 10,000 unsold Cybertrucks. Meanwhile, the other models in Tesla’s lineup are ageing like milk, with competitors now offering similar, if not far better, options, particularly outside of America.

Admittedly, the writing on the wall has been there for a while. Musk knew Tesla wouldn’t lead the EV race forever and that its overblown share price would eventually tumble. His solution: self-driving cars!

But, as I have covered many times before, Tesla’s robotaxis are useless (read more here). Because they only use cameras to understand the world around them, they have no redundancy. This makes accidents much more likely, as the AI will interpret things incorrectly, and the cameras will be obscured by rain, snow or even whiteouts. In fact, this is such a well-known issue that the NHTSA is currently asking Tesla how they will mitigate these massive issues when they release the Cybercab to the public, and Tesla’s only response so far is that they will have remote safety drivers. Naturally, it’s not surprising that leaked internal memos found that Tesla itself doesn’t think the Cybercab will make any money.

Tesla is screwed, not because Musk goose-stepped his way into the White House, but because he refused to build on Tesla’s actual success and instead forced the company to bet everything on his misguided and false vision of the future.

In short, Musk can’t step away from politics even if he wanted to, and even if he did, it wouldn’t save Tesla.

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Sources: Reuters, CNBC, The Guardian, Inside EVs, Inside EVs, Forbes, Reuters, Reuters, Reuters, Will Lockett