Having spent many weeks protesting every Saturday in front of the local Tesla store, it seems strange to only now be sitting down to write, as concisely as possible, the basic argument for the Tesla Takedown. 

After all, there are already so many people turning up to protests at Tesla facilities around the world, every hand-made sign offering a new reason to be angry at Elon Musk. People don’t need to understand why to be angry at this unelected oligarch or his hideous impact, they need to understand how he is vulnerable. That, for me, is what Tesla Takedown is all about.

I want to be clear at this point: I speak only for myself. There is a Tesla Takedown organization, but I do not speak for them. These are my own personal views (but they can be yours for too, an extremely reasonable price).

Elon Musk was not elected to any public office. He clearly purchased his position via unprecedentedly large donations to the president’s election, but alas our society remains too much in transition for this blatant corruption to suffice as the official story. This being Elon Musk, there is of course a ready narrative at hand to justify his clumsy gutting of the federal government: he’s a genius entrepreneur, a legendary businessman, uniquely equipped to 80s-movie-montage our government into fiscal fitness.

The crux of the Tesla Takedown is a fittingly epic irony: this seemingly titanic strength, backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in notional paper wealth, is in fact Elon Musk’s great weakness. Elon Musk is in fact so bad at business that his entire fortune balances tortuously on a single company, the one company he has built into something resembling an actually sustainable business. And that company, Tesla, is barreling toward bankruptcy.

Neuralink and Boring Company don’t even pretend to be anything resembling real businesses. To the extent they deserve to be mentioned, it’s as red flags: obvious stock promotion schemes, conceptually and ethically challenged, with nothing resembling real businesses underneath. These brainfart companies are basically memecoins that torture monkeys and make insanely inefficient transit systems.

SpaceX is more complicated, and it’s where people whose cousin totally worked there are most convinced that Elon Musk has a cash-printing business that he never brags about. This claim disproves itself: Elon brags about the chickens that are going to hatch from eggs that have been in the fridge for three months. If SpaceX were really, sustainably profitable, the easiest way to do that would be to release audited financials. Oh, and not raise cash nonstop for the last however many years.

The reality is that SpaceX has most of the global launch market, but still has to be its own customer to fill half its launches. They claim Starlink is profitable,but only if you simply don’t count launch costs, which strikes me as a particularly obvious shell game. Lower cost isn’t growing demand for launches, so SpaceX is having to soak up its own scale, with a business that can’t scale density. After more than 20 years in operation, SpaceX is, per Musk, a binary bet on Starship, which can launch the bigger Starlink satellites needed to be sustainably profitable.

Similarly to SpaceX, Tesla had a lot of things going for it as a business, and was even sustainably profitable for many years. This is the only time a company Elon Musk built was really, sustainably profitable, and the vast majority of those profits were recorded during the unique conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Peak EV hype, the release of the Model Y, and (most importantly) the first major global undersupply in the auto industry since World War II all made Tesla a money-printer.

Those days are over. Tesla has lost its way, failing to build, methodically, on the success of the Model 3 and Y, failing to re-invest in its lineup, or even expand to more affordable, practical vehicles. Instead of the affordable commuters, spacious family haulers, and basic creature comforts that more and more competitive EVs now offer, Tesla offers mild reskins of its same, old penalty boxes… and the Cybertruck. Just as at SpaceX, the core of what could be a real business is being thrown away for a janky metal monstrosity.

As a result, Tesla’s earnings are a disaster. Automotive revenue was down 20% in Q1, meaning only regulatory credit sales kept Tesla from its first red quarters in years. This is a return to the bad old days, when regulatory credits papered over Tesla’s shabby fundamentals… only now the growth is over. Musk says there is another new update to the existing vehicles, but otherwise he is all-in on the absurd robotaxi hail mary, which he says will be a real business within the next year. This is just another Musk wunderwaffe, and Waymo’s hard-won 200k driverless rides per week (to say nothing of their departed competitors) prove that it won’t be easy or profitable any time soon.

Tesla is the heart of Musk’s empire because it’s the source of Musk’s cash. Because he doesn’t want to lose his stake in the company he avoids selling his stock, preferring to borrow against its value (he also avoids capital gains taxes this way). Though this provides him with a huge amount of cash by any reasonable standard, the exact amount of which is unknowable, it’s a fraction of his paper wealth. Between late 2021 when he sold roughly $20b in Tesla stock and 2022 when he dumped it all into the Twitter deal, may well have been the absolute peak of his cash-on-hand liquidity.

That means if Tesla goes bankrupt, Musk has a cash crunch. Before that happens, once Tesla stock goes below a certain price, Musk gets a margin call that forces him to sell more stock, fueling a death spiral. When that takes place, Musk can only sell chunks of his remaining non-businesses to the most desperate chumps he can find, effectively burning the furniture for firewood. All of that wealth represents confidence, not functioning profitable businesses, and once confidence starts to ebb it tends to do so with accelerating speed.

Tesla is the symbol of Musk’s midas touch, and it’s the source of his tangible cash. It’s also the Musk company that’s most dependent on consumer taste and public goodwill, giving the public countless touch points for social pressure of all kinds. The direct line between making the Tesla brand toxic, pushing Tesla into bankruptcy, and bringing Elon Musk’s entire empire down around his ears makes this the perfect lever on which to push back against this unelected oligarch.

This is not taking on the cash-printing machines of Facebook and Amazon, which are also products that are relatively difficult to get people to boycott. Tesla is a failing company selling expensive EVs, for which there are many perfectly adequate alternatives. By taking it down, we have the opportunity to bring down a billionaire who is doing untold harm on our government, and the world. The combination of possibility and impact is hard to beat.

Protests are only one way to implement the Tesla Takedown. Anything legal that reduces Tesla’s revenue or increases its costs helps bring this unique opportunity a little closer. Most importantly, spreading information, pushing back against the thoughtless repetition of his mythology, is how we attack the root of the problem. Musk’s empire rests on Tesla’s stock price, which rests on the perception that he must be good at business. When that illusion finally shatters, everything will fall apart.

In the meantime, I’ll see you at the next Tesla store protest.