This is still Elon Musk's presidency

He isn't stepping back. He's loading up. And #TeslaTakedown matters more than ever.

The first thing you need to know about Elon Musk is that he’s a liar. And like Donald Trump, he doesn’t lie to be believed. He lies to be repeated.

He lies because it works. And he lies because when he’s caught, he generally suffers no discernible consequences.

Take his lies about “Full Self-Driving,” please. He has been promising that “FSD” is right around the corner for 11 years now.

“At no point during this tumultuous time have fully self-driving cars ever been a thing,” Erin Marquis at Jalopnik reported. “Not from Tesla, nor anyone else. In fact, Tesla's lawyers recently argued in court that the "self-driving" part of the company's Full Self-Driving Beta software some customers paid over $10,000 for was merely aspirational.”

It is apparently beyond my comprehension, as a simple caveman blogger, to understand how this does not qualify as actual fraud. All I know is that like Trump, Musk is better at lying than anyone is at catching him, perhaps because no one even really tries.

In 2019, CNBC reported, “Elon Musk claims Tesla will have 1 million robotaxis on roads next year, but warns he’s missed the mark before.”

How did that work out?

Well, it’s 2025, and he’s promising to get the first 1,000 out in the next few months, which seems to be a big reason the giant bubble that's Tesla’s unconscionable stock price has inflated again.

Of course, the biggest reason the stock is back up and the company is worth over a trillion dollars again, more than the rest of the entire auto industry combined, is that Elon Musk has claimed he’s stepping back from his role in the Trump regime and politics in general. Something that has been reported by fact and celebrated even by people who know that Elon Musk is a liar.

And at this point, we have to assume people—especially the people who buy Tesla stock—want to be lied to.

On the same day that Musk is supposedly peacing out from politics, he was literally on Capitol Hill. On the same day that Elon was saying he’d “done enough,” Musk was sitting there as Donald Trump was treating the president of South Africa to rants “about the most gutter white supremacist propaganda you can find on the internet,” as Jamelle Bouie described it.

As Trump himself said, “This is what Elon wanted.”

For an Apartheid heir whose family apparently went to South Africa from Canada FOR Apartheid and mysteriously left after it ended, you could say this was the ultimate treat in the goodie bag for summoning $45 billion to elect Donald Trump.

And as Musk says he’s leaving government, what he’s truly doing is what he’s best at—loading up on cash and unearned advantages from the American taxpayer. SpaceX is rocketing toward a monopoly and a $10 billion contract to burn money on a Star Wars-like pretend missile defense. Buying Starlink is now a bargaining chip for countries that want relief from Trump’s tariffs. And Musk is using his seat in Trump’s first official state visit to announce new deals for clinical trials for Neuralink, which so far has only produced new leaps in monkey killing.

What happened is that reports that Tesla was looking for a new CEO were at least somewhat accurate and part of how the board leveraged Musk into pretending he was leaving politics. Meanwhile, you could easily imagine Trump convincing his sponsor, whose poll numbers are even worse than Trump’s, that Musk could rake in more government billions with less scrutiny if his public role as the BILLIONAIRE WHO IS PROUD HE’S GIVEN THE POOREST BABIES ON EARTH HIV diminished a bit.

Will it diminish?

Probably not, but they’ll say it has, and it'll be reported as if it’s happening.

E.W. Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors and one of the keenest observers of Musk alive, described in 2022—years before anyone printed a bumper sticker saying “I bought this before I knew he was crazy—his epiphany that revealed the true Musk, which took place in 2015.

“If my own experience has taught me anything, it’s this: Once you stop taking Elon’s words at face value, you can never see or hear him the same again,” he wrote.

We know Elon Musk, unfortunately, isn’t going anywhere. This is his presidency, which intends to shape America into a nightmare like the South Africa of his youth.

But we should also celebrate Elon Musk’s need to tell this particular lie. We can enjoy stories about his “decline and fall" while knowing our work is not even close to done.

We go once again to Niedermeyer, who wrote the definitive rationale for the #TeslaTakedown, which now must be regarded as one of the most successful non-violent protest movements of the 21st century:

Tesla is the symbol of Musk’s Midas touch, and it’s the source of his tangible cash. It’s also the Musk company that’s most dependent on consumer taste and public goodwill, giving the public countless touchpoints for social pressure of all kinds. The direct line between making the Tesla brand toxic, pushing Tesla into bankruptcy, and bringing Elon Musk’s entire empire down around his ears makes this the perfect lever on which to push back against this unelected oligarch.

Musk is still the reason Trump has the power to doom our lives and terrorize the planet. Punishing him out of revenge would be good enough. But we know he’s a liar.

We know X continues to shape our reality to prevent Trump’s failings from being comprehended by vast swaths of our population (including too many journalists). We know that Elon Musk is not out of government; he’s deep in collusion with the Trump regime, and he’s likely the single biggest beneficiary of American taxpayer generosity alive, possibly ever. And we know he will do everything he can to prop up Trump and vice versa because this regime doesn’t just reflect Musk’s every whim; it’s his only hedge should the market ever decide that Tesla shouldn’t be worth multiples more than Toyota, the actual largest automaker on earth.

The #TeslaTakedown has won, but it's only just beginning. And if we can take away Elon Musk’s license to lie, everything he’s clinging to could crumble.

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