The right to boycott the boys
Musk is having a sad because people don’t want to buy his cars, because they hate him.
Elon Musk — the world’s richest man, who for the past two months has been dismantling or threatening to dismantle government services that help the less fortunate — is having a bad week, and Donald Trump feels sorry for him.
The president’s trade wars have been tanking the stock market, and Musk’s signature company, Tesla, has been along for the ride. The EV behemoth’s shares fell 15 percent on Monday alone, and are down more than 50 percent since peaking in late December. Musk has been melting down as a result, alleging that rival automakers and anyone who prefers them are Nazis, while accusing liberal interests of fueling the Tesla downturn.
He destroys USAID with the result that many people will die of disease or be plunged into poverty or both, and then he whines because we don’t want to buy his expensive car. What a hero.
Musk and DOGE have been recklessly firing thousands upon thousands of government employees and cutting vital programs, all while rigging various agencies to benefit him personally.
The power couple have tried to support their actions by pushing a steady stream of misinformation about waste and fraud. There is of course no evidence that liberal agitators have anything to do with Tesla’s plunging share price, although there is a wealth of it pointing to the actions of Trump and Musk. Trump’s claim that a supposed “boycott” of Tesla is “illegal” is not only false, it is an affront to the First Amendment, toward which the president has grown increasingly hostile since taking office for the second time…
Will he do an Executive Order canceling it?
I’m sure they’ll find a way for the government to buy Teslas. Or maybe a strategic stock reserve consisting of shares of Tesla. I wouldn’t be surprised.
I’m sure that Trump will be replacing ‘The Beast’ with a Cybertruck any day now. Joking aside, I thought that it was the Republican side that was supposed to be pro-gasoline and against EV’s.
He’s already done it.
And consumers making informed buying decisions is not an illegal boycott. It is what free market capitalism means.
https://i.postimg.cc/15NrByKg/2025-03-12-11-59-42.jpg
Besides, Tesla’s doing AOK in Canada, one dealership there claiming to have sold on new Tesla every 2 minutes as they game the government rebate scheme.
One of the world’s great automakers my ass… From all evidence the Chinese EVs are much better and cheaper than anything else out there, including software support.
Also, lawls, three cars?That’s all he could manage to grift?
There was a time, before I knew anything about Musk, when I really wanted a Tesla (*blush*). Now I would rather spend all my money on expired lottery tickets than give a single cent to that piece of shit.
@Rev.’d David Brindley –
the uptick in Canadian Tesla sales appears to be associated with some jiggery-pokery around the Canadian government EV incentive program – https://www.jalopnik.com/1807796/tesla-last-minute-canadian-incentives-eligibility-request/
Considering how deeply despised Musk is in Canada these days, it’s surprising, no, suspicious, that we suddenly have a yen for his Teslas. Especially as Canadian Tesla sales had been nosediving in the preceding months (see: Elon Musk, despised, Canada). There’s even a petition, currently with about 360,000 signatures, to revoke his Canadian citizenship.
Musk accusing anyone of being a Nazi is beyond rich.
It must all be due to Musk Derangement Syndrome. It amuses me that this is the first resort of people who are otherwise full of (iffy) arguments, and clamour about ‘debate’ & ‘free speech’ while not uttering a peep when the principle of free speech is genuinely endangered. Free speech for me and my kind, but not for you.
When the much-missed Mr Nixon was president (really he seems a shining light of patriotism and integrity compared with the present guy) the slogan was “Would you buy a used car from this man?” So it is quite something to see the President peddling cars – though I suppose they are new, rather than used.
I generally avoid buying things that make me a target for criminal behavior.
New Statesman newsletter:-
. Shortly before the president’s inauguration, George Osborne [former UK chancellor of the exchequer] spoke of the mood among Democrats he encountered in Silicon Valley: “There is a real feeling, and it’s quite a contrast to what’s happening in Europe and in the UK, that the animal spirits of capitalism have been fired up, that deregulation is coming, that further growth is coming, that this is, as he himself describes it, a new golden age for America.”
How, you might ask, is that working out? Since Trump entered office, US economic growth forecasts have been slashed (Goldman Sachs projects growth of just 1.7 per cent this year, down from 2.4 per cent) and stock markets have plummeted. The tech billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration have collectively lost $209bn since his second term began.
Turns out capitalism is actually pretty good vs. the Maoist shit at the top. As for the tech billionaires they’ve stopped caring about money so that’s fine for them… it’s the power they’re addicted to.
Once again, this is all entirely consistent with the kleptocratic playbook and the Maduro Model. Why bother going through all the trouble of developing products that people want to buy and competing on an even play field when you can just capture the state and hand out lucrative government contracts to yourself and your cronies? If that means allowing the country as a whole to become poorer, or even enter the category of “failed state”, so what? If the peasants get screwed, that’s their problem. They should have thought of that before making the mistake of being born.
I recommend this Youtube video on the argument in Italy over whether to use Musk’s Starlink satellite system when it can be simply turned off at Musk’s whim:
https://youtu.be/n580HNsoXK4?si=nKvCUFGhnhdvtcdY
I don’t think you need to be suffering from Musk Derangement Syndrome to see the folly of trusting a Ketamine-addled malignant narcissist who is willing to pander to another (wholly unintelligent) malignant narcissist so that he may benefit from his pandering.
I also recommend this, from the Lincoln Project:
https://youtu.be/VhlwPOrccww?si=EUUimrS32HKaCGQQ
And, by the way, did you see the way Musk brought along his little son as a prop again when Trump & he were doing an ad for Tesla? I have seen nobody remark on that, though that, for me, was the most disgusting aspect of that pitiful and dishonest performance. Musk is a wholly revolting individual. He will use anything & anyone to advance his interests.
@Tim Harris: My theory is that Musk drags his son around everywhere as a human shield, because he figures that anyone who wants to shoot him would baulk at possibly shooting a baby. Remember that he said “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
I hadn’t even seen the Tesla ad. Ignorance was bliss.
There’s been a good series about Musk on the Beeb – how he has degenerated over the last few years – he used to be less arrogant and more inquiring. Also how his world view is shaped by 50s sci-fi and Marvel films. The author/presenter says that his idea of a technical fix for all problems is very much Asimov era sci-fi and he really should have read more Ursula le Guin.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0d7q0h8
@KBPlayer: I’m not sure it would have done much good if he’d read le Guin. He claims to love Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels (he’s named some SpaceX drone ships after Culture ships) and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Grok is apparently based on the Guide), but he doesn’t seem to have understood what Banks and Adams were actually getting at.
@Piglet – that is one of the points that this series makes – that the Hitchhiker’s Guide was a very influential book while missing the point of it
.
“Grok” is Heinlen, Stranger in a Strange Land. Also Zaphod would still be a much better president. Or Marvin.
Well speaking of Asimov, I’ve been trying to figure out which one of these clowns is The Mule for months now. We all know what it took to take him down so looks like we’re screwed there.
We know that neither of them is (in Asimov’s sense) a properly functioning robot, as both of them have violated the first two Laws of Robotics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics ), and have rewritten and prioritized the third Law over the two they’ve been ignoring or destroying.