The Enshitification Of Tesla Has Been Turned Up To 11
Musk has found a whole new way to screw things up.
Tesla has been going down the pan for a while now. Most people seem to point to the horrific mess that is the Cybertruck as the beginning of Tesla’s downward spiral. Truth be told, it started years before then. These slippery slopes are all about trajectory. A small moronic change that, over time, goes unchecked and butterfly-effects itself into a complete train wreck. Tesla’s insane decline over the past few years can be directly tied all the way back to 2018–2019, when the Tesla board gave Musk carte blanche to ignorantly micromanage every aspect of Tesla. Musk then actively destroyed everything Tesla had going for it. This also caused Musk to drink his own Kool-Aid, exacerbating his already horrific ego problems and creating the political nightmare he is today. It is all a domino effect: a small, stupid error sets off a cascading chain reaction of crap that eventually turns into a company-crushing poo tsunami. But another one of these small, seemingly innocuous changes has happened, and the first dominoes have just fallen. Musk has announced that Tesla will make FSD (Full Self-Driving) subscription-only from February, and remove the option to buy it outright. This is the early blows of a new, potentially even more ruinous chain reaction. Let me explain.
FSD Is A Failure.
Arguably, FSD is a bigger sales flop than the Cybertruck.
The initial pitch was that as FSD improved and could actually drive the car for you, the price to buy it would increase. Musk even said that Teslas with FSD would become appreciating assets, as the increasing value of their FSD system would outweigh their depreciation. At one point, Musk even said that FSD would be worth $100,000. This pitch not only made the idea of owning a Tesla super attractive, but also made investors salivate over Tesla’s future revenue potential. After all, selling a $100,000 software package to millions of people could bring in trillions of dollars.
But this hasn’t happened at all. For a while, they did try to increase the price of FSD, with it peaking at $15,000. But Musk’s ignorant, egotistical micromanaging kneecapped FSD and made it a fundamentally broken and dangerous product (read more here). So, no one bought it, especially at that price!
So, in 2024, Tesla drastically slashed the price of FSD. It went from costing $15,000 to buy outright to just $8,000, and the subscription went from $199 per month to $99 per month. They even pushed free trials of FSD onto countless Tesla drivers to drum up more customers.
This totally broke Musk’s narrative and promise. FSD wasn’t this insanely valuable thing; It wasn’t going to generate hundreds of billions of dollars for Tesla because no one wanted to buy it.
But, even after slashing the price in half and practically begging customers to buy FSD, basically no one did. YipitData found that in 2024, only 2% of Tesla drivers who took the free FSD trial went on to buy it at this huge discount once the trial ended. The market had spoken. FSD is worth even less than this narrative-destroying discounted price.
But, somehow, it got even worse in 2025. Tesla announced in October 2025 that only 12% of Tesla’s fleet pays for FSD. They didn’t specify whether that is 12% of all Teslas on the road, or only the Teslas with the hardware needed to run the latest versions of FSD. If it is the latter, then there might be as few as 612,000 FSD customers. In fact, Tesla admitted that in Q3 2025, its revenue from FSD was lower than in Q3 2024! They haven’t changed the pricing since the huge cut in 2024, so this means they are losing customers!
Tesla has sunk close to $20 billion into developing FSD, and spends multiple billions of dollars a year on its development. Yet, even after more than a decade of development, it generates only a few hundred million dollars in revenue per year, and that pathetic figure is falling! Arguably, FSD is the greatest commercial flop in history, and it is only getting worse.
So, what does all of this have to do with Musk taking FSD to subscription-only? Well, that is quite literally the “trillion-dollar” question.
