Summary
Elon Musk gave Donald Trump a scripted sales pitch during a White House event where Trump inspected Teslas.
Photographers captured Trump holding notes with phrases like “SAFEST car” and “affordable.” The stunt followed a 15% drop in Tesla’s stock, linked to backlash over Musk’s involvement in DOGE.
Trump defended Musk on Truth Social, blaming the decline on a “Radical Left” boycott.
Meanwhile, Musk’s other ventures, including X and SpaceX, are struggling with outages and test failures.
I’m also curious to see if Trump’s cult leader power can overcome decades of oil and gas brainwashing. Conservatives have proven they’ll quickly throw away their beliefs when Trump tells them to, but it’s not always reliable.
For example, in 2020 conservatives were all for Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” to find a COVID vaccine. But as soon as Biden won and the vaccines rolled out in 2021, many conservatives took an antivax stance. Later, Trump got booed at one of his rallies for suggesting that people get vaccinated.
So he can steer the cult agenda, but not always successfully. I guess we’ll see how this plays out.
Yeah, my feeling is this one will fail. While they can paint the backlash against Tesla as the “radical left”, the adoption of electric cars more broadly is still very much seen as a lefty, pro-environment kind of thing. Since they’re still very much against all those things, I think it’ll be hard to square that with the idea that Teslas are suddenly great.
Plus, even his base don’t really seem to love Elon all that much.
Looks like TSLA is up 8% today. So seems to have solved Elon’s immediate problem of the stock tanking.