Tesla Has Develop into The Humpty Dumpty Of Model Fame

Join CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and excessive degree summaries, join our day by day e-newsletter, and/or comply with us on Google Information!

Final Up to date on: twenty sixth April 2025, 08:02 pm

Critics have been charging, time and again, that Tesla CEO Elon Musk turned the golden model of Tesla right into a textbook case of reputational disaster after he agreed to run level on Trump’s “DOGE” budget-cutting workplace. In truth, tales about Musk, DOGE, and Tesla’s model repute have turn out to be so stale and repetitive that persons are bored with listening to about it and so they have stopped paying consideration — oh, wait, now they’re paying consideration once more….

Extra Undesirable Consideration On The Tesla Model

A brand new flashpoint for Tesla popped up on Friday when The New York Occasions and everybody else with Web entry reported that Trump’s “DOGE” workplace has saved simply $160 billion for this fiscal 12 months whereas costing taxpayers $135 billion, in line with an accounting by the nonpartisan good-government group Partnership for Public Service.

That works out to a ultimate financial savings of $25 billion, which is not any small potatoes. Nonetheless, it’s nowhere close to the $2 trillion Musk initially promised to shave off the the federal price range via his place as head of Trump’s “DOGE” workplace.

In previous years, the distinction between the how-it-started $2 trillion and the how-it’s-going $25 billion wouldn’t be thought of a failure on Musk’s half. In spite of everything, the admiring press and public have all the time deferred to Musk’s behavior of creating predictions that don’t all the time work out as simply one other quirk of a mind too highly effective for the banal realities of unusual life. It’s all the time simply been Musk being Musk, the Genius at Work.

That kind chasm between promise and actuality has been Musk’s inventory in commerce at Tesla, however now that his fingers are within the wallets of the taxpaying public, there is no such thing as a glossing over. No matter he does at DOGE is there for everybody to see, and if seeing is believing, the outcomes name his CEO-ing of Tesla into query.

Partnership For Public Service Vs. Trump, Musk, and DOGE (and Tesla).

In the event you’re questioning what Partnership for Public Service is, that’s an excellent query. The group launched in 2001 with a mission to organize the federal workforce for effectiveness within the technologically evolving panorama of twenty first century, working with Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Having come up towards the brick wall of Trump, Musk, and DOGE this 12 months, PPS has been clapping again each step of the way in which, main one to marvel why Musk didn’t merely seek the advice of PPS, or any one other established authority on authorities effectivity, earlier than taking a hacksaw to the federal workforce.

Again on February 11, PPS President and CEO Max Stier referred to as out Trump’s government order on workforce cuts, charging that mass firings “actually won’t create a smaller or more practical authorities.”

“The federal workforce is about the identical dimension because it was in 1969 and as a proportion of the general inhabitants it’s considerably smaller,” PPS additionally factors out.

“Roughly 80% of the federal workforce is situated outdoors the D.C. metropolitan space, which means these cuts can be felt in communities throughout the nation, together with in states like Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania which are every residence to tens of hundreds of federal employees,” PPS provides.

“About 30% of the federal workforce are veterans, which means those that have served our nation in two important methods stand to be affected,” they add once more for good measure.

However, What Does All This Have To Do With Tesla?

Even when, by some miracle of accounting, Musk does ship $25 billion in financial savings immediately again into the wallets of the US public, his actions at DOGE have already reduce the underside out of these selfsame wallets.

The PPS estimate of $135 billion in DOGE-related prices doesn’t embrace different bills Musk dumped on the shoulders of the general public. On prime of the human prices of sudden termination — lack of earnings, emotional heartbreak, psychological and bodily stress, entry to medical health insurance, childcare circumstances, little issues like that — the ripple impact of employees cuts on federal providers has but to be toted up, together with the expense of answering the lawsuits raised by Musk’s cavalier angle in the direction of labor legislation.

The affect on state-based bills associated to mass layoffs additionally wants a reckoning, as detailed in a lawsuit towards the Trump administration by 20 state lawyer generals.

As for what this has to do with Tesla, effectively, all the things. Musk constructed up the Tesla model right into a glowing ball of investor-attracting goodies through the years, together with FSD, the Cybertruck, robotaxis, the Semi Class 8 heavy obligation truck, and a 50% EV gross sales enhance yearly. All of those have been delayed, fallen in need of expectations, or fallen method in need of expectations, with out anybody significantly questioning Musk’s judgement. The federal authorities is a special ball of wax. Now that PPS and different organizations have lastly begun defining Musk’s purported accomplishments at DOGE in {dollars} and cents, the reputational cat is out of the bag.

No matter Occurred To The Reasonably priced Tesla?

Talking of unfulfilled guarantees, the Tesla of at this time was itself constructed on an unfulfilled promise.

Tesla, in fact, was not based by Musk, though he enjoys the repute of being the genius who dreamed it up. Martin Eberhardt and Marc Tarpenning launched the EV startup Tesla Motors in 2003, partly impressed by GM’s failed EV-1 enterprise of the 1990’s. With a fortune already in hand, Musk signed on as a Tesla Motors investor and board member in 2004, later to take over as CEO in 2008 on the heels of a excessive profile energy wrestle.

For all Musk’s genius-hood, Tesla shouldn’t be a very good instance of entrepreneurial bootstrapping. In its first years the corporate targeted on the life of the wealthy and the well-known, producing a restricted run of dear electrical sports activities vehicles, which is hardly the stuff of transformative mobility. In spite of everything, electrical autos have been in frequent use from the late nineteenth century effectively into the 1930’s earlier than they lapsed out of favor.

The turning level got here in 2010, when Tesla nailed down one of many very first loans issued by a newly funded authorities company, the Mortgage Packages Workplace within the US Division of Vitality. LPO was established throughout the Bush administration via the Vitality Coverage Act of 2006, although it was not up and working till President Obama took workplace in 2009.

With the $452 million mortgage, LPO anticipated Tesla to provide reasonably priced EVs for the mainstream auto shopping for public.  Pfffffft went that mission. Tesla repaid the mortgage in 2013 however by no means did produce an “reasonably priced” zero emission car for the plenty.

Reasonably priced EVs or not, the mortgage rocketed Tesla to a singular place within the world auto trade throughout the early years, when it was just about the one producer to provide electrical sedans and SUVs at scale. That standing enabled Tesla to gather billions in regulatory emissions credit from legacy automakers within the US and elsewhere across the globe, whereas coasting on numerous government-subsidized EV tax credit.

And now, having made a hash of the identical federal workforce that was instrumental within the rise of Tesla, Musk is reportedly making ready to pare again his ill-fated sojourn in public service and return to his CEO duties on the firm. Based mostly on his efficiency at DOGE, although, hopes for a model refresh are considerably misplaced.

Oh the irony, it burns. So does the opportunism. In case you have any ideas about that, drop a word within the remark thread.

Photograph: The Tesla model continues to undergo the slings and arrows of CEO Elon Musk’s tenure at DOGE, and Partnership for Public Service has the receipts (by way of CleanTechnica archive by Carolyn Fortuna).