The Enshitification Of Tesla Has Been Turned Up To 11

Musk has found a whole new way to screw things up.

Photo by idea inc. on Unsplash

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.

The “trillion-Dollar” Question

As I have covered in a previous article, Musk’s $1 trillion pay packet is a load of bollocks. It isn’t worth $1 trillion, and the conditions Musk has to meet to get this pay packet are not only lower than his own promises, but worded so that Musk can meet them without actually delivering any tangible growth. This is the small, stupid change that kick-starts a new poonami because as Business Insider put it, “You get what you measure.”

One of these conditions is that Tesla will “reach ten million active subscriptions to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD).”

This isn’t actually measuring how well Tesla’s self-driving business is doing at all because it is too loose, too unconstrained, and allows Musk to reach it by making FSD far worse than it already is.

For example, Tesla has changed the definition of FSD. Before, it was a system that would become fully autonomous, so Tesla had a legal obligation to eventually deliver a fully autonomous car to FSD customers. This was core to the promise, value and hype around FSD. But, Tesla changed FSD’s terms and conditions, which you need to agree to use or update FSD, and not only revoked this promise, but insisted FSD is just a driver assistance system, and will never be more than that.

FSD was made worse, and the bar was lowered so that Musk could hit the target that this condition measures, rather than actually deliver value or growth. After all, selling 10 million driver-assist subscriptions is a very different and far easier goal than selling 10 million autonomous-car subscriptions.

Now, driver assist systems are standard or low-cost one-time-purchase options on most modern cars. Indeed, Tesla should follow this industry norm, as that is what the customers and market are telling them to do. The awful FSD sales heavily suggest it is way too overpriced.

But if the price of FSD is slashed even further, then a subscription model makes little sense, as it would be a relatively cheap option to buy outright. This, in my opinion, is why Musk is making FSD a subscription-only feature. It isn’t to force the tiny number of FSD buyers into subscribing. No, it is setting it all up so that he can break, distort and enshitify FSD to meet this arbitrary condition.

It is painfully obvious where this is going.

The price of an FSD subscription will be slashed again, but that won’t be enough to get 10 million onboard. The way things are going, Tesla might only make 12 million cars between now and the deadline of this pay package, so to meet this condition, Musk needs almost every single Tesla customer over the next decade to also buy an FSD subscription.

So, Musk will put other important features behind the FSD paywall. Want to use the heated seats? They work with an FSD subscription. Want your car to charge fast? Buy an FSD subscription, and it will unlock that feature. Want to use all your car’s power? The FSD subscription enables that.

But that won’t make everyone buy FSD. If anything, it will just drive customers away.

So Musk will likely find a way to make FSD subscriptions mandatory for Tesla buyers. Sure, he will probably have to drop the price to virtually nothing and bundle FSD with other stuff, like a service plan, insurance or whatnot, to make this legal. Don’t go thinking Musk can’t or won’t do this. Consumer rights in the US are basically dead, and Musk has done far worse predatory business dealings in the past.

But then, hey presto, he has done it, the condition will be met, but FSD will be a hollow, broken, crap shell of what it was meant to be.

The Enshitification of Tesla

I do genuinely think we will see Musk do all of this in the coming few years. But even if he doesn’t, reducing FSD to just driver assist and removing the on-time purchase option shows that Musk is actively making FSD and Tesla worse to hit these arbitrary goals. It shows he is happily flinging himself down this slippery slope, and where that inevitably leads to the enshitification of Tesla. Or at least Tesla’s current enshitification is accelerating dramatically.

Technically speaking, Tesla isn’t actually going through the process of enshitification. But that isn’t for a lack of trying.

Enshitification, as laid out by Cory Doctorow, has three stages. Stage one, the company operates at a loss, offering a product at a price that is too good to be true, to hoover up as many customers as possible. Stage two, once the customer base has hit a critical mass, they become dependent and locked in, as you have a viable monopoly, so the company starts extracting as much wealth as possible through things like price gouging. These practises can only make so much growth, and when they stop producing growth, stage three starts as the company shifts to a heavy focus on short-term gains to convince shareholders they can still grow. They will implement huge cost savings, even if it makes their product worse, and engage in far more predatory business models to increase revenue, even if it harms customers. Basically, they make their product shit to extract more wealth in the short term.

Musk’s pitch for Tesla was to do just this. Tesla was going to have a monopoly on EVs and self-driving cars. That is why Musk could claim FSD would cost $100,000 and everyone believed him. He was basically advertising that he was going to price-gouge. But he failed to make this monopoly. Tesla hasn’t gone through stage one for stage two of enshitification. Instead, this moronic “trillion-dollar” pay packet has taken Tesla straight to stage three.

What Now?

The other conditions of this inane pay package are just as dim-witted as this FSD one. They can all be reached with enshitification rather than Musk adding anything of value, as I detailed in a previous article. So, what should we expect? Well, Musk is going to destroy Tesla with a constant stream of own-goals, and get richer and richer from it. But this won’t last forever. It’s like a Jenga tower. Musk is taking out the bricks and placing them on top of the tower to make it look larger, but also turning it into a less stable and worse tower. Eventually, one brick will take the entire thing down. Exactly when this will happen to Tesla and Musk is anyone’s guess. But unless something major is done to curb Musk, this is Tesla’s trajectory.

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Sources: BI, BI, Organized Money, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Will Lockett