Nobody Wants a Nazi Electric Car

Tesla is dying. The company's fourth-quarter earnings read like a eulogy for the electric dream. Revenue crawled up just 2% to $25.71 billion, missing analyst estimates by over $1.5 billion. Automotive revenue - the heart of Tesla's business - collapsed 8% to $19.8 billion. Operating income cratered 23% year-over-year to $1.6 billion. The operating margin withered to 6.2% from 8.2% a year earlier. These are the vital signs of a company in free fall.

Tesla's brand value evaporated by $15 billion in 2024. The company posted its first annual sales decline in history. While industry analysts murmur about aging product lines and increasing competition, they're deliberately obfuscating the core truth: Tesla has mutated from an electric car company into a megaphone for Elon Musk's fascistic fever dreams, and the market is responding accordingly.

As competitors raced to build better electric vehicles, Tesla's CEO became a political performance artist. He promoted Germany's far-right AfD party weeks before crucial elections. He made Holocaust jokes on social media. He became President Trump's loudest cheerleader in Silicon Valley, securing himself a position leading the president's government efficiency board. Tesla's brand corroded further with each inflammatory tweet, public spectacle, and political provocation.

The company that once united Silicon Valley innovators and environmental activists under a single banner is now one of the most divisive companies in the world. Tesla has become the golden child of self-inflicted wounds, offering a step-by-step how-to guide for alienating core customers while your competitors eat your lunch. Ford's electric Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning are gaining ground. Hyundai and Kia are capturing environmentally conscious buyers with sleek, affordable EVs unburdened by political baggage. BMW and Mercedes offer luxury electric vehicles to customers who prefer German engineering without a side of neo-Nazism.

Remember 2015? A Tesla parked in your driveway announced something specific: innovation, environmental consciousness, and a stake in the future. The cars weren't perfect, but they meant something. They represented hope - for clean energy, American manufacturing, and a world beyond fossil fuels. That Tesla is dead. Elon Musk killed it. He took it out back and strangled it with his sweaty, bare hands.

Nobody at Tesla headquarters voted to alienate their customer base. No board meeting decided to turn their electric car company into a political lightning rod. The retail investors and the early adopters didn't get together on Truth Social and devise a cunning plan to rebrand Tesla as a rebranded NSDAP. Instead, Musk did it himself, all by himself, tweet by inflammatory tweet, controversy by manufactured controversy, until the brand became inseparable from his personal crusades.

Will his "strategy" work? The market is already rendering its verdict. This is a company losing ground on every meaningful metric. Driving a Tesla in 2025 means something fundamentally different than it did five years ago. The cars haven't changed - but the company has become unrecognizable.

You don't buy a Tesla because you believe you're saving the planet - after all Musk's ecological bloviations, Tesla's car sales have contributed to the election of the most regressive, anti-environment administration in history. You don't buy a Tesla because you want to show you have a heart; Musk can't use the phrase "my heart goes out to you" without attaching it to a Hitler salute. There's no progressive, technological, empathetic cultural cachet anymore.

And the Republicans Musk has courted as his new fanboys? They're not buying Teslas, either. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 71% of Republicans would not consider purchasing an EV, compared to 17% of Democrats. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey revealed that 69% of Republicans perceive EVs as less reliable than a traditional gas-powered car. The MAGA cheering squad isn't going to ditch their oversized trucks for one of Musk's toy cars. No matter how racist his rhetoric, they still won't loosen their purse strings.

Elon Musk could have redefined transportation, reshaped cities, and written the future. Instead, he chose to be a 4Chan-guzzling reply guy with a failing car company, hemorrhaging value while screeching about pronouns. While he sets fire to his credibility, his competitors are engineering the products he was too busy shitposting to build. And so, the final chapter of Tesla isn't about innovation. It's about the hubris of a white supremacist who thinks he rules the world. The brand that once promised to save the planet is now a study in how fast one ketamine-addled man-child can drive a company off a cliff.