Elon Musk’s price of power

Sales are up for Elon Musk, at least in one commodity. Tesla owners are now festooning their Model Ys and Cybertrucks (that look, for all of me, like industrial dumpsters) with anti-Musk bumper stickers. Once-proud Tesla drivers are now embarrassed to be seen in the vehicles they formerly regarded as cutting-edge environmental wundercars. The bumper stickers have become necessary apologias, messages to the world that they don’t like the man who built their cars.

In fact, since the presidential election the sale of anti-Elon bumper stickers has become inversely proportional to the sale of Teslas. Too late, many Americans are awakening to the fact that Elon Musk is a moral sellout to Donald Trump. Sales of new Teslas are down a whopping 7% and falling, a precipitous sudden downturn for any rising car company.

“I thought Elon was progressing our country,” said Mika Houston, a Las Vegas gym teacher who owns a Tesla Model 3, “but he’s turned out to be kind of an evil person. It’s scary for someone with that sort of money to be so close to a politician.” These bumper stickers range in messages from, “Anti Elon Tesla Club,” to “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy,” to a picture of Musk in clown makeup with the words “Space Clown.”

With predictable stupidity, Musk picked the wrong demographic to piss off. Tesla owners are typically believers in global warming, and electric cars were seen by them as a way to wean the world from fossil fuel dependency. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was seen as the enemy of those positions. Many current Tesla owners once considered Elon Musk a kind of environmental hero, making Tesla the most valuable car company in the world. Musk has instead revealed himself to be a hypocrite and a liar, a man who is obviously cozying up to Trump in the name of money and power by betraying everything he once (apparently) stood for.

But it gets worse. Musk has also warned Americans that the Trump administration is going to tank the economy for their own good. There’s some arcane economic theory that Musk knows about (and nobody else seems to) that makes it necessary for things to get worse before they get better. That, of course, is devastating news for people who can’t afford for things to get even marginally worse. In fact, many of them voted for Donald Trump in the vain hope that he would make good on his promise to fix the economy, and not their little red wagons.

Apparently, Musk is applying his new economic “theory” to Twitter X with rip roaring success. The microblogging social networking service is bleeding customers at the rate of tens of thousands of users per day, and usage has dropped by twenty percent. Elon could teach even Donald a thing or two about ruining a company. X is becoming a ghost town only fit for MAGA idiots, rattling around in their very own fascism bubble. Everybody is leaving for Bluesky. (Come follow me at @RAHarrington.)

As if that’s all not bad enough, in two of the most evil posts I have ever witnessed, Musk accused whistleblower Alexander Vindman of “Treason,” and said that he should “be behind bars,” and falsely claimed, without evidence, that Vindman is in the pay of Ukrainian oligarchs. Musk is clearly making these claims with an audience of one in mind, Donald Trump. But however sleazy his reasons are, destroying a man’s reputation and endangering a man’s life and the lives of members of his family by spreading evil lies is a craven and detestable way of going about it. I would relish it if Vindman sued Musk for every penny he has.

Elon Musk is an example of how low someone can go in the courtship of power and money. He has become a Donald Trump whore, and revealed who he was all along. I have been writing anti-Musk articles for years, and I have watched the blowback and protests of those articles diminish quickly. Musk has forever sabotaged his political capital so he can sit at the table of lunacy. May it give him absolutely no comfort when the whole shithouse goes up in flames.