Elon Musk has a Nazi problem. Since he bought Twitter and rebranded it X, he has allowed right-wing extremists, hate speech, antisemitism, and islamophobia to run rampant on the platform.
Now Musk – after deliberately doing a Hitler salute twice after President Donald Trump’s inauguration – is the Nazi. At least in the minds of a new backlash against his various companies, especially Tesla, which have become known as “Swatsticars” or “Swastikars” in memes online.
Musk now runs the Department of Government Efficiency – whose acronym Doge is pronounced “doggie” by the great tech journalist Kara Swisher – and has since taken a “chainsaw for bureaucracy” to the US federal government. After firing or forcing retrenchment on hundreds of thousands of government workers, several major US agencies have been shut down completely or denuded of any real power.
Apart from hiring people who would never have passed any of the previous US government’s vetting, Doge’s numbers are highly suspect. It claimed on its “wall of receipts” that it had cancelled an $8 billion contract, only for fact-checkers to reveal it was really an $8 million contract.
In San Francisco, home of the Tech Bros, a Tesla Cybertruck was spraypainted with a Swastika – an idea that has gained some traction not just in the US, but around the world too. Tesla owners have stuck on stickers saying “I bought this before Elon went crazy,” while others have sold their cars at a loss.
Tesla stores are now regular sites of protests, while many dealerships appear to have removed the actual cars from their property after many instances of Molotov cocktails being thrown over fences, causing numerous cars to be destroyed.
That can’t be good for any brand.
But this brand inferno is just one of Tesla’s problems, as it faces increasing pressure from Chinese electric vehicles (EVs).
Tesla’s fortunes have declined steeply this year, even though Trump held what looked like a Tesla sales event on the White House lawn. He was photographed holding notes that read like a Tesla infomercial. Its sales in February dropped 44% in 25 countries, including the UK, Norway, and Switzerland, according to researchers Jato Dynamics. Sales in Germany alone plunged 76% – where Musk has vocally backed the far-right AfD party and caused huge controversy in a country still grappling with its… troubled history.
Overall, Tesla sold 13% fewer cars in the first three months of the year, it reported.
“We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” said J.P. Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman in a widely quoted note to investors in March. Tesla’s problem in the United States is that Musk donated $288 million to Trump and other Republicans last year, clearly alienating the most left-leaning buyers of electric vehicles.
A good place to see the real damage is Norway, which is seen as the world’s most advanced EV market. Last year, Tesla had half of Norway’s market. In January and February, it fell to 9% – behind Volkswagen and Toyota.
“Norway is always a good place to look into the future,” said Will Roberts, an analyst who tracks EVs at research firm Rho Motion, to the New York Times.
Tesla has lost half of its value since it peaked in December, wiping off over $100 billion of Musk’s personal value. According to Forbes, he had lost $121 billion in early March.
“This quarter was an example of the damage Musk is causing Tesla,” says Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “The more political he gets with Doge, the more the brand suffers, there is no debate.”
Apart from Musk’s increasingly political and destructive behaviour, analysts politely point to model refreshes for a drop in Tesla sales. But nobody wants to drive a car linked to someone whose actions are increasingly right-wing and racist, makes Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration, and oversaw nearly a quarter of a million US federal works losing their jobs, and whole agencies, like the excellent USAID, being fed into the “woodchipper”. Musk’s words.
Many of those agencies he has ransacked were investigating Musk’s businesses, including USAID. The conflict of interest issues are multiple and manifold, but will likely never be ventilated or resolved.
Meanwhile, in another of his weird, Muskian corporate tricks, he has sold X (the once-thriving social network known as Twitter) to his AI start-up, xAI. The deal was worth $33 billion without its debt, giving it a $45 billion valuation. This is $1 billion less than when Musk bought it.
“Elon Musk is opportunistically using the very high valuation he has for his xAI business in order to make his investors in Twitter whole,” Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, told Forbes. “Nobody benefits more from the merger than Musk himself,” it pointed out, calling it a “$33 billion windfall for Elon Musk.”
Having calculated his net worth at $342 billion for Forbes‘ annual World’s Billionaires list, his estimated 74% stake in X/Twitter was worth $7 billion while his estimated 53% stake in xAI was valued at $26.3 billion. His estimated 59% stake in the new xAI Holdings is now $66.4 billion.
“That’s double the combined value of his stakes prior to the merger. His net worth is now $374 billion,” wrote Forbes. The AI firm is now valued at $80 billion, up from $50 billion last November.
Musk may have to stand down as a special government employee, however, it was reported by Politico this week, because such workers are only allowed to be employed for 130 days. But he has done unending damage to his reputation as an innovative thinker and a business entrepreneur. The Nazi salute and his “doggie” blitzkrieg will be his enduring legacy. History will not be kind to Musk, whose actions concerning USAID alone, and its knock-on effects for Africa, will record that millions of people will die from these heartbreakingly unethical decisions. People will die.
At one of the 200 or so protests outside Tesla showrooms last month, one banner read: “Burn your swastikar before it burns you.”
This column first appeared in Business Day
