The Tesla protests are working

We found Elon Musk's Achilles heel, at least, and have wiped out $150 billion of his net worth in a matter of weeks while driving him insane.

Elon Musk said something on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week—a cursed opening sentence, I know, but bear with me—that I think pretty well explains the situation the country finds itself in right now. In a back and forth rant about the evils of immigration (except for that of white South African farmers, whom we now welcome), Musk said this: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

I think most of us already knew from basically all the evidence laid out before us that Musk is missing the empathy chip, and also that it would be impossible for anyone to become the richest man in the world while also carrying a shred of concern for other human beings. But it was still stunning to hear those words directly come out of Musk’s mouth, echoing a 1942 Joseph Goebbels column titled "Don't Be Too Fair!," as Jon Schwartz pointed out.

Musk’s lack of empathy and ideological alignment with Goebbels would also explain, for instance, why he publicly laughed at a meme of himself and Donald Trump being likened to Hitler this week after the Democrats rather ineffectively protested Trump’s address to Congress.

Of course, empathy is not a “bug in Western civilization,” but an aspirational feature of it as well as a foundational principle of the United States. As I wrote for The Washington Post back in 2020, the entire point of this country is that blue states and red states subsidize each other. Blue states fund red states most of the time so that when a crisis like the COVID pandemic or the Los Angeles wildfires throws a blue state into disproportionate emergency, that generosity comes back to help us. That system, which is heavily rooted in empathy, is good and worth defending.

Naturally, when two billionaires who lack empathy seize control of the government, they try to remake the country in their own image—as one that no longer gives a shit about its neighbors or its poor or its immigrants or anyone being slaughtered in a genocide abroad. One that pits red states against blue states and the United States against Canada and that decimates any notion of “public good.” And this damage will be very hard to undo, if we even manage to hold another free and fair election.

So yes, Musk is a very bad and dangerous man who must be stopped; but it’s very hard to take down someone who has enough money to buy an entire United States election himself. This brings me to the Tesla protests. In case you missed it, Tesla dealerships across the U.S. and Europe have been protested and vandalized and set on fire over the past couple weeks over Musk’s hostile takeover of the government. Tesla and Cybertruck owners have also been putting “I bought this before Elon went crazy” bumper stickers on their vehicles to preempt the Nazi salutes and middle fingers they’ve been getting from Musk critics on the road, and two Cybertrucks were bullied out of a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

Tesla’s stock has been dropping precipitously along with protests, to the tune of a $150 billion YTD loss for Musk, who has 60% of his wealth wrapped up in Tesla stock. He’s so freaked out about the protests and concurrent loss of wealth that he begged his army of incel fans on X to present him evidence that the protests are being financed by a handful of Jewish people—but two of the people he named (Sandler and Bauman) turned out to be dead. And ActBlue is a payment processing platform, of course, not a funder of protests, so this entire excuse is bogus.

Musk’s post reeks of desperation, and I smell a bit of blood in the water here. He wants desperately to be cool and admired, to remain the richest man in the world, to be seen as a financial genius. His power over Congress depends on his ability to threaten to fund primary opponents for Republicans who vote against Trump’s agenda. Watching Tesla charging stations go up in flames across the world, being humiliated by celebrities like Sheryl Crow getting rid of their Teslas because the brand has become so toxic, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in a week, and having to answer to investors about his plummeting stock while he rides his little hobby horse in Washington may be the best shot we have right now to get an arrow through his armor.

So please, for the love of god… no more headlines like this. And keep in mind that no one is actually being hurt in these protests besides Elon’s ego and bottom line, and that one cannot commit “violence” against a Cybertruck, because a Cybertruck cannot feel pain.