CNN reported that “Americans expect negative repercussions specifically due to Trump’s cuts to federal programs. Most (55%) say they think those cuts will hurt the US economy, and nearly as many say the cuts will have a direct negative impact on their family (51%) or on the area where they live (52%). Only about a third of Americans say they expect those cuts to help the economy (34%), and fewer expect that they will have a positive impact on their family or community (22% each)… Nearly all Democrats (86%) and most independents (57%), say that Trump’s policies have worsened the economy, while just 10% of Republicans say the same. About 6 in 10 Republicans (61%) say the president’s policies have improved economic conditions, with 30% saying they’ve had no effect.”
And Americans are increasingly turning their ire against Trump’s top conspirator, Elon Musk. Democrats are furiously fanning those flames. Yesterday, Max Cohen and Mica Soellner reported that “In the opening months of Trump’s second term, Democrats are settling on a message— Republicans are looking out for Musk and the mega-rich while ignoring the needs of everyday Americans.”
Democratic groups are already launching midterm attack ads starring Musk. This is “a new Spanish-language attack ad targeting Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-TX) over potential Medicaid cuts. The radio ad accuses De La Cruz of supporting the budget resolution ‘to line the pockets of billionaires like Elon Musk and big corporations.’ The radio ad comes weeks after HMF launched a nationwide TV ad campaign taking aim at vulnerable Republicans on the budget resolution. That large-scale messaging push accused GOP lawmakers of voting “to fund massive tax cuts for Elon Musk and billionaires. Unions like the American Federation of Teachers are also getting in on the Musk attack act. A recent ad from the group plays footage of Musk wielding a chainsaw on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Rolling Sea Action Fund, a Congressional Black Caucus PAC-aligned group, is making Musk a top target too.
“Instead of making things cheaper, Trump has allowed Elon and his billionaire grifter friends to take control of our government,” the ad’s narrator says in a spot, which ran in swing House districts with substantial Black populations. “Trump, Elon and their billionaire friends come first— not you.”
Hill Democrats say they believe the constant focus on Musk will resonate with the electorate.
“Pointing out that Musk is a villain that is plundering taxpayers and corrupting the government is a powerful message because it helps inspire disaffected voters and move independent voters towards our direction,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) said.
DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene (D-WA) says Musk is part of the Democratic message, which she hopes can “broadly” capture how the GOP is governing and highlight DOGE.
“There’s nothing efficient about the Department of Government Efficiency right now, so that’s a piece of [our messaging] too,” DelBene told us.
On the day Trump was inaugurated, Tesla’s stock closed at $411.05. It crept up to $428.22 by mid-January. It’s been all downhill since then, with March watching the price slide around 100 points into the 230s. Yesterday it was down another 2.99% ($7.41), while the NASDAQ was down just 1.11%, as public protests against Musk at Tesla franchises are blooming— worldwide. I live in a Tesla neighborhood but you never see them parked on the street or in people’s driveways anymore. And if you do, they’re all covered in graffiti. Trump is warning that anyone who vandalizes Tesla property will be charged as a domestic terrorist— but I doubt if that includes spray painting “Elon sucks donkey dick” on someone’s Cybertruck (Swasticar). Yesterday, Christiaan Hetzner reported that an attack on Tesla is an attack against the U.S. “Standing on the White House lawn next to a line of Teslas and flanked by Musk nodding in agreement, Trump vowed to bring the full power of his office to bear on anyone breaking the law in an effort to interfere with his administration’s unofficial cost-cutter in chief. ‘Those people are going to go through a big problem when we catch them,’ Trump told reporters. ‘They’re harming a great American company.’ Tesla has become a lighting rod for anti-Musk sentiment, after its CEO and largest shareholder bankrolled Trump’s campaign to the tune of a quarter billion dollars. In exchange, Musk has become a senior unofficial advisor who has led the charge to slash federal spending but is unaccountable to congressional oversight.”
Musk’s relationship with Trump and his role in the administration has sparked protests in several U.S. cities by groups including “Tesla Takedown.”
There have also been multiple cases where it appears that company property has been destroyed by politically motivated actors rather than by common criminals.
Instances include cars spray-painted with swastikas, burned out Superchargers, and vandalized showrooms. One transgender individual, possibly acting in response to Musk’s anti-trans views, has already been arrested by Colorado law enforcement in one incident.
On Tuesday, Trump said his executive branch, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, will be keeping a watchful eye.
Trump likely doesn’t want a repeat of the ugly scenes of lawlessness that marked his first term, when he had to deploy elite border patrol tactical units to quell widespread violence in Portland, Ore., following the George Floyd riots.
“We got a lot of cameras up. We already know who some of them are,” Trump said.
Tesla sales are way down this year compared to last year
Germany- more than 70% down
Australia- 70% down
Portugal- 50% down
Norway- 48% down
France- 45% down
Sweden- 42% down
Maybe they’re up in North Korea, Cuba, Mali, Iran and Belarus?
Musk, wrote Charlie Warzel, looked desperate Wednesday when he made poor Trumpanzyy play the role of used car salesman in a televised infomercial on the South Lawn of the White House. “Wow,” said Señor T. “That’s beautiful. This is a different panel than I’ve… everything’s computer!”
Warzel called it “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency. But you ought not to overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the event… was the ongoing countrywide protests against Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities, protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply— almost 50 percent since its mid-December, postelection peak— on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and fix his mess for him.”
This on top of the Hertz disaster. Hertz, one of the major car rental companies, purchased a significant number of Tesla vehicles and later decided to sell a substantial portion of them. In October 2021, Hertz announced an order for 100,000 Tesla Model 3s as part of an ambitious plan to electrify its rental fleet, marking the largest single purchase of electric vehicles at the time. The deal, valued at around $4.2 billion, aimed to make EVs 20% of Hertz’s fleet and was seen as a bold move to capitalize on the growing popularity of electric vehicles. But… by early 2024, Twitter was so identified with the hated Musk that Hertz reversed course and began selling off a large chunk of its Tesla fleet. Initially, the company planned to sell 20,000 EVs but increased that to 30,000 vehicles by the end of 2024 fire sale. The decision was driven by several factors: higher-than-expected repair costs for the terribly designed and built Teslas, significant depreciation due to Tesla’s price cuts on new models, and lower resale values in the used car market. For example, Hertz reported Tesla depreciation costs of around $537 per car per month, contributing to substantial financial losses.
These ex-rental Teslas, primarily Model 3s from 2022 and 2023, hit the used car market at notably low prices— some as low as $17,913— compared to typical used Tesla prices ranging as high as $39,000. Hertz sold them through its Hertz Car Sales division and offered incentives like the Rent2Buy program. Hertz lost nearly a billion dollars on the venture.
And Tesla isn’t the only Musk venture that’s struggling. SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket has exploded twice this year during test flights. And Ontario, Canada, has canceled its contract with his Starlink internet company to provide service to remote communities, citing Trump’s tariffs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Musk is $148 billion poorer than he was on Inauguration Day (he is currently worth $333.1 billion).
Just 17 days after wielding a chain saw and dancing triumphantly onstage at CPAC, the billionaire looked like he was about to cry on the Fox Business channel earlier this week. He confessed that he was having “great difficulty” running his many businesses, and let out a long, dismal sigh and shrugged when asked if he might go back to his businesses after he’s done in the administration.
…Musk’s deep sighs on cable TV and emergency Tesla junkets on the White House lawn are hints that he may be beginning to understand the precariousness of his situation. He is well known for his high risk tolerance, overleveraging, and seemingly wild business bets. But his role at DOGE represents the biggest reputational and, consequently, financial gamble of his career. Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of the narrative.
And the narrative is everything. Elon Musk is many things— the richest man in the world, an internet-addled conspiracy theorist, the controller of six companies, perhaps even the shadow president of the United States— but most importantly, he is an idea. The value of Musk may be tied more to his image than his actual performance. He’s a human meme stock.
…The image of Musk as a true visionary has proved surprisingly durable. In the early to mid-2010s, Musk took advantage of a different era of technology coverage— one that was more gadget-focused and largely uncritical— to hype his ideas for the future of transportation and interplanetary exploration. At that time, Tesla, his signature project, was coded as progressive and marketed as being in line with climate-change goals. The cultural dynamic of these ideas has changed, but the fundamental product being sold by Musk has not: one man with a singular ability to brute force his way to the future.
…For years, valid criticisms of the Tesla executive came with an asterisk: He’s erratic, crude, even a little unstable, but that’s all part of the larger visionary package. Kara Swisher showcased this dynamic well in a 2018 New York Times column titled “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” “I find the hagiography around him tiresome and even toxic,” she wrote. But also, “Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.” As Swisher noted, Musk’s attention-seeking at the time had a secondary effect of alienating him from some of his peers and fans. But tweet by tweet, Musk found a different audience, one eager to embrace his visionary image, provided he took up their crusade against “wokeism.”
During the pandemic, Musk’s posting frequency intensified considerably as he began to stake out more reactionary territory. He called the COVID-19 panic in March 2020 “dumb” and later that year tweeted that “pronouns suck.” Musk endeared himself to the right wing by positioning himself as a free-speech warrior, a posture that ultimately led him to purchase Twitter. Right-wing influencers and the MAGA faithful saw Musk’s turn as proof of their movement’s ascendance, but what has happened since Musk turned Twitter into X is nothing short of audience capture: Musk has fully become the person his right-wing fanboys want him to be, pushing far beyond a mere dalliance with conspiracy theories and “Great Replacement” rhetoric. It is hardly controversial to suggest based on Musk's posts and blatant political activism that the centibillionaire has been further radicalized by his platform, which he then turned into a political weapon to help elect Trump.
… Musk is used to being leveraged, trading on his reputation or his illiquid assets to keep the flywheel spinning. To his credit, he tends to make it work. He’s flouted the law when that has been advantageous to his business interests and taken advantage of a culture of elite impunity. He’s long been unafraid to get sued or reprimanded by a government agency. But two important things are different in his current situation. The first is the stakes of his reputational bet— rather than alienating himself from progressives or the media, Musk is threatening to meddle with essential government services, such as Social Security, that millions of Americans rely on. Indeed, Musk floated the idea of cutting Social Security benefits in his Fox Business interview on Monday. Whether he’s in charge of cuts or not, as DOGE’s figurehead, Musk risks infuriating countless people who object to the federal firings. Breaking the government is orders of magnitude different than buying a niche but influential microblogging platform.
The second difference is the man he’s tied his reputation to: Trump. Musk’s attention-seeking and fondness for organizational chaos are usually unmatched, giving him an advantage in most of his dealings. This is not the case with Trump, whose shamelessness and penchant for discarding close confidants when they become liabilities are well documented. Musk is rich and powerful, but he is not the durable, singular political figure that Trump is. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where this ends poorly for Musk. The flywheel could reverse: Musk could become universally reviled, causing the protests to increase and his net worth to shrink. The richest man in the world is valuable to Trump, as is the myth of Musk as the modern Edison. But mere billionaires? They are fungible tokens and easily interchangeable dais members in Trump’s eyes— just ask Mark Zuckerberg.
… [T]he most hopeful outcome for Musk is that Trump has too much of his own presidency tied to Musk to throw him under the bus. It’s too early to say.
Yesterday’s White House stunt had all the hallmarks of Trump corruption, but there was something else, too— an air of desperation. It was a tacit admission that the protests are working and that Musk and Trump are rattled enough by current sentiment that they’re willing to turn the South Lawn into a showroom. Watching Musk clam up on Fox Business or quietly idle next to Trump in front of the White House, it’s even easier than normal to see past Musk’s trademark bullshitting and bluster. These moments make clear that this time, Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back— the very myth he created for himself.
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