Should the EV Industry Die?

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It’s been quite a week already, and it’s not over yet. Just a reminder to all of my subscribers, I do offer a paid premium tier now if you want more coverage throughout the week. But rest assured I don’t hold back on my Thursday posts, and I’m glad you’re all here. Now, let’s get into it.

In This Issue

• Should the EV Industry Die?

• What About Owning a Tesla Now?

• Ze Germans Know

Should the EV Industry Die?

There is, understandably, a lot of uncertainty right now in the automotive space, especially around electric vehicles. The new President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, on Monday, signed a litany of Executive Orders cutting funding for DCFC installations, banning “EV mandates,” and dismantling elements of what would’ve been the Green New Deal. Additionally, one of the new President’s most important advisors, Elon Musk, publicly showed his support for all of this, even though he’s the CEO of an EV company.

It’s looking bleak — especially short term — for EV adoption in the United States. Maybe it’s something that we should all just let die.

Wait. What?

With all due respect to my industry colleagues, this isn’t meant as a dig at the current state of the industry. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on growing and developing an entire lineup of electric vehicles and the infrastructure to power them. Additionally, I believe they are critical in decarbonizing transportation in a country where other methods of mass transit simply aren’t robust or reliable enough.

We wouldn’t be even talking about the EV industry if it weren’t for the efforts of Elon Musk early in Tesla’s development. But where would we all be if we hadn’t supported Tesla’s development by buying cars, providing grants and loans, and elevating its CEO to a God-like reputation?

Elon Musk spent around $270 million to buy Trump’s return to The White House. He flouted election laws to do it, but he’s no stranger to blatantly violating the law. The government also has a long track record of not bringing any enforcement against him, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s all the government contracts he has that the government is afraid of losing? Maybe the outgoing administration bought into the ruse that he is this amazing genius who is going to save humanity. I don’t know.

What I do know is that Elon’s father was on a podcast recently where he described his ex-wife, Elon’s mother, and his mother’s family as Nazi sympathizers. They were so obsessed with the Third Reich that they’d often make family friends upset at parties. These parties were in apartheid South Africa. Imagine being too outrageous for apartheid?

Elon Musk has publicly supported Germany’s AfD party — a party so Nazi that even the far right in Germany wants nothing to do with them. Elon Musk let Nazis back onto Twitter after he purchased it for $44 billion. He’s shared support for the Great Replacement theory on that same platform and has talked about eugenics being no big deal in helping save the human race.

Conservatives will criticize the left in this country by claiming that their go-to defense is calling everyone a Nazi. Maybe that’s true. But in the case of Elon Musk, if it walks, talks, and salutes like a Nazi duck, it’s a Nazi duck. Elon Musk is, of course, a Nazi.

(If you’re going to email me to say it’s his autism, then stop. It’s insulting to people who have autism to blame Musk’s Nazi-ism on it. There are a lot of people who have autism who don’t Sieg Heil their way through life.)

Friend of the newsletter, and long-time critic of Elon Musk, Ed Niedermeyer, recently shared on Bluesky that he believes that everyone who purchased a Tesla has done worse things for the planet than just buying a gasoline-powered car.

He goes on to say other factors helped, and that it’s possible people bought the car early on without knowing who Musk really is. But he makes an interesting point that has got me thinking.

Musk’s fortune didn’t come from rockets, digging tunnels, or even from PayPal. His fortune came from buying Tesla and going full-on grift. It helped him spend the $44 billion needed to overpay for Twitter (though now it’s obviously a value at that price since it bought him the White House and he’s already made back what he spent). It helped him spend the $270 million to get Trump elected. It affords him the power to buy his way to the top of video game charts and fly around the world in his private jet so he can threaten other governments with what he did here.

Tesla, at this point, is probably too meme to fail. The product lineup is stale. The Cybertruck is likely going to end up being a flop unless the federal government starts buying them en masse. Musk is even going to have an office in the White House complex, taking away even more time from running Tesla.

None of that matters, though. If Tesla’s share price starts to fall, he’ll just tweet about robotaxis or something coming in a few weeks. Analysts at places like Morgan Stanley will fall for it. The stock market will rally around TSLA and the endless cycle of grift will continue.

Even a collapse of Tesla would probably not be enough to break Elon’s hold over our institutions. Telsa is probably impossible to bankrupt at this point, and even if that were possible, he probably has enough money to survive.

Heck, a complete collapse of the entire industry wouldn’t probably be enough to break his Nazi grip over the world. So maybe it is ok for the industry to survive, as there are a ton of significantly better alternatives to most Tesla models out there right now. Even if we don’t end up with Chinese EVs, several automakers are spending the time and money to bring quality EVs to market.

It’d be nice if dealers would want to sell them. Maybe before everything gets really bad, the government will break the dealership lobby and direct sales can be more of a thing. You’d think that’s something Elon Musk would want, but as I think it’s clear at this point, he cares about Tesla as much as he cares about his disowned daughter.

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What About Owning a Tesla Now?

Going out and buying a new Tesla today is an implicit understanding that the CEO of that company is a Nazi. Sure, Ferdinand Porsche worked directly for Hitler, and Henry Ford shared similar views. But today, both of those men are dead. Elon Musk is alive and well, which changes the calculation.