Earlier this week, Donald Trump staged what historians believe to be a presidential first: a stilted, fumbling White House press conference convened to boost the fortunes of a valuable donor’s floundering car company.
“Wow, that’s beautiful!” Trump said to Tesla CEO Elon Musk as they climbed into a red Model S parked on the South Lawn. “Everything’s computer!” Holding a scripted sales pitch touting the brand’s safety features, self-driving technology, and low monthly payments, Trump assured reporters that Tesla is “a great product, as good as it gets,” and complimented Musk as a “great patriot.” He promised to buy a car himself, and pay with a personal check. In what I am sure is an unrelated story, Musk, who has spent most of his time of late laying waste to the federal government at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, is reportedly preparing to donate $100 million to Trump’s political operation.
Trump did not stage this glorified infomercial because of his passion for hawking overpriced consumer products. Across the country, people have taken to registering their displeasure with Musk’s presidential cosplay by using the one tool available to them: protest. Demonstrations outside Tesla showrooms have become weekly events. Many Tesla owners, embarrassed to be associated with Musk, are trading in their cars, often at a loss. Tesla cars, dealerships, and charging stations have been targeted by vandals wielding everything from Molotov cocktails to dog poop. As it turns out, when the act of driving to the grocery store incurs a real risk that angry strangers will flip you off, cars manufactured by companies that aren’t helmed by too-online reactionaries become much more appealing.
The backlash has made a bad year worse for Tesla shareholders, who have watched the stock plummet from an all-time high of around $480 in December to $220 as of Monday. Tuesday’s little dog-and-pony show helped the price to recover a bit, but by Friday afternoon, shares were trading at about $250—roughly half of their value just four months earlier. Musk, Tesla’s largest shareholder, has paid dearly for this collapse: His net worth, which Bloomberg estimated at nearly $500 billion in mid-December, now sits at around $315 billion. The company’s sales numbers, which are down by double digits in key international markets, do not suggest that a robust performance-based surge is on the horizon anytime soon.
Pledging to buy a Tesla is not the only way Trump has used his bully pulpit for Musk’s benefit. Also on Tuesday, the president vowed to treat Tesla vandalism as “domestic terrorism” and to put perpetrators “through hell,” dispensing with typical politician rhetoric about bringing people to justice. In a March 10 post on Truth Social, Trump excoriated “Radical Left Lunatics” for “trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla,” which raises the possibility that the president believes people have a legal duty to buy cars to ensure that the world’s richest person stays that way.
Tesla’s struggles, which yielded the enduring image of Trump grimly answering press questions in front of a hulking Cybertruck, expose the toll of Musk’s unpopularity in ways that the fates of his other companies cannot. X, the social media platform he bought in 2022, is a right-wing echo chamber where Musk can speak directly to an audience of acolytes willing to lap up any excuses for his failures like dogs on a warm afternoon. Earlier this week, Musk shrugged off a temporary X outage by blaming a “massive cyberattack” originating from Ukraine—an explanation that experts dismissed as “wholly unconvincing” and “pretty much garbage.”
SpaceX, which has also sustained setbacks of the explosive variety of late, is a privately held company that relies heavily on government contracts worth billions of dollars. Even if this particular administration weren’t in Musk’s pocket, much of SpaceX’s business would be relatively safe, as there are only so many companies that manufacture rockets that deliver cargo to the International Space Station.
Tesla is different. As a publicly traded company that manufactures consumer products, its performance is a pretty good barometer of the approval rating of the man who leads it; the numbers, as they say, do not lie. Trump is trying to bail out the company because it would be embarrassing for him, the Business Genius President, to preside over the spectacular implosion of the source of a valuable political ally’s wealth. Musk is glad to accept the help, of course, because the reality he’d otherwise have to confront is that normal people do not like it when an unelected, unaccountable tech executive attempts to take their jobs, splinter their communities, and ruin their lives. Protestors might not be able to stop Musk from hollowing out another agency, but if they can persuade fewer people to buy his ugly cars, they can at least make sure he pays for it.
Shareholders have watched Musk’s extracurricular activities create and destroy value before: In late 2022, for example, Tesla’s stock price plunged to a two-year low after Musk took over at Twitter, as investors wondered if a man suddenly preoccupied with doing cringe memes was simply out of EV-related ideas. If you’d bought the dip and sold today, you’d still be doubling your money.
But the furious national response to DOGE’s lawlessness is manifesting in the real world in ways that fleeting concerns aboutTwitter’s disintegration did not. Tesla’s brand is becoming more poisonous with each passing week. Tesla owners who aren’t yet ready to sell their cars are searching desperately for interim half-measures, slapping “I GOT THIS BEFORE ELON WENT CRAZY” stickers on bumpers. A few owners have even tried adorning their cars with other logos in an effort to go incognito—a gambit I cannot help but admire, given that putting Rivian iconography on a Cybertruck, one of the most distinctive-looking vehicles on the road today, is roughly the equivalent of affixing novelty cat ears to a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Maybe the most ominous sign for Tesla’s future is that this time around, the investment community appears skeptical that Musk’s packed schedule of playing video games at the office will give him time to course-correct. A recent Morgan Stanley survey found that 85% of respondents believe Musk’s venture into politics has had a “negative” or “extremely negative” impact on the fundamentals of the business, and a bit more than half expect Tesla shares to continue to sink in 2025, or, at best, to remain flat. Because Musk has often obtained capital by borrowing against the value of his Tesla holdings, the company’s continued struggles could force him to sell off his shares, which would only cause the price to fall further.
To a certain extent, Tesla’s value has always been inflated by Musk’s carefully curated image as a once-in-a-generation business talent, which he managed to parlay into the sort of household-name celebrity status that most CEOs only dream of achieving. Part of the reason Trump brought Musk into his inner circle in 2024—besides that sweet, sweet Silicon Valley cash—is that Trump built his political career on the idea that strong, respected businessmen possess the wisdom to govern in ways that career politicians cannot. Musk’s failures reveal just how wrong this premise has always been, which is why Trump was out on the South Lawn, demanding that people buy Teslas and pretending to marvel at a touchscreen panel: plutocracy is harder to maintain when the plutocrats look this feckless.
