Tesla As An Investment Value

 Elmo as a marketing genius.

Back in 2019, Musk said buying a Tesla was an investment, not an expense. “If you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset – not a depreciating asset,” he claimed. The idea was that Tesla would keep raising the price of its FSD package, making used Teslas more valuable.

But reality has gone in the opposite direction. Tesla has cut the price of FSD multiple times since 2023, and used Teslas are now losing value three times faster than the average car, according to recent market data.

I don’t think that’s all because of politics.

In replies to the YouTuber’s post, many Tesla owners shared similar frustrations. Some said they “drank the Kool-Aid too” and bought more than one Tesla and saw each of them lose around half their original value. Others criticized Tesla for prioritizing its future robotaxi network instead of completing promised FSD features “they sold us years and years ago.”

Seems more like Elmo is a snake oil salesman, and was never a tech genius.

Musk has been overly optimistic about autonomy for years. At a 2015 Nvidia conference, he said self-driving was a “solved problem” and predicted that fully autonomous cars would arrive in just a few years.

That timeline has repeatedly slipped. On a recent earnings call, Musk finally admitted that Tesla's current hardware isn't enough to make full autonomy a reality. He said the realization was “absolutely painful and difficult.”

Ross Gerber, one of Tesla’s early investors, summed it up bluntly in a recent post: “My Tesla FSD is like a 12-year-old driving next to a Waymo.”

2015? And still nothing? You probably have tech in your house that’s 10 years old in design, if not in manufacturing. Has it increased in value? Did you expect it to?

Joe Scarborough says Musk should go back to his day job:

Speaking of Musk, we should note today there's a Tesla earnings call," Lemire said. "Some people believe that Musk in that call might reveal how much longer he's going to stay working for the administration."

Host Joe Scarborough said the damage might be hard to undo.

"Their problem is, part of the problem is a political problem," Scarborough said. "Obviously, the very areas where he used to get the most, you know, whether you look at California or, let's just say, bluer states where he'd find most of his [electric vehicle] customers, those cells are drying up.

"You look at France, you look at Germany, you look at the EV sales in Europe getting absolutely pounded because, again, he got involved unnecessarily in far-right politics to little to no effect. In fact, God, have you looked at the numbers in Canada lately? I mean, [Prime Minister Mark] Carney is going to probably win an outright majority there. You look at what's happened across Europe? It's not working."

"All he's doing is damaging his brand, and then China, I mean, if this were just politics, that would be one problem with Tesla," Scarborough added. "The problem is he's getting lapped in China on technology.

"I'm not giving Elon Musk advice, but ... I think it is time to go back to your day job. I mean, he's getting pounded, Tesla is getting routed."

I think Joe’s right. The political tide is turning against Musk’s extremism (not because of Musk; he just misread the tea leaves). But Musk was never on the technological edge. He wasn’t the reincarnation of Steve Jobs, and he was certainly never Steve Wozniak. But people turned him into both, with a dose of Einstein and Nikolai Tesla thrown in (Einstein as a modern avatar of genius, a concept itself proof mythology is still alive and well, and Tesla mostly because he caught the zeitgeist through Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige.” Quick: name one historically accurate accomplishment of Tesla as publicly known as Einstein’s “E=mc squared.”). Arguably Musk’s only stroke if marketing genius was associating the car company he bought with Tesla’s name. And I think that was already there when he bought it, so….

Musk didn’t destroy himself in politics. Tesla was already failing, Musk’s “genius” already proving to be just smoke and mirrors. Musk with DOGE just entered the real world, and proved his stories about working 36 hours straight and sleeping on the floor were not Edison’s magic formula for success, or the triumph of youthful energy over elder experience, but just mindless chaos. He ran Twitter into the ground, but Tesla gave him cover for that; along with distractions like the “Twitter files,” which generated more attention than ever they deserved. Musk is doing the same in government. DOGE hasn’t reformed government nor made it efficient. It’s just taken a chainsaw to a silk tapestry many people spent many years making.

Musk is a fraud. He was always a fraud. And we elected a convicted fraud (both criminal and civil! A hat trick!), who brought him to D.C. and set him loose. 

“A republic, if you can keep it.” And more and more it looks like we can’t.