Elon Targets His Competitor with DOGE while Annual Tesla Sales Decline for the First Time Ever

The government is fond of providing subsidies to clean energy companies, as the over $3 billion given away to Tesla over the years demonstrates, and the Biden administration is continuing that policy with a $6 billion loan to the electric car company Rivian. Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk’s sweaty co-compatriot in the fake government entity the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said last month that specific loan is “high on the list of items” that he wants to cut.

In what is definitely related news, Tesla sales fell on an annual basis for the first time ever. Despite spending the year offering customers zero percent financing, free charging and lower priced leases, Tesla’s sales declined 1.1 percent from last year as its stock has fallen as much as seven percent today while most of the rest of the market is up. While these perks were enough to set a quarterly record for sales in the fourth quarter, it was not enough to make up for the sluggish start to the year.

Tesla is the picture of first-mover advantage. It obtained immense subsidies from the government to build the first major electric vehicle company, and it benefited greatly from being the only player in town. Now that major car companies have entire fleets of electric vehicles while Chinese competitors like BYD challenge Tesla’s spot as the world’s top selling EV maker, the shine has come off the company a bit. Add in the fact that Tesla’s cars are older and more expensive, and Musk has an uphill climb to keep his spot at the top of the mountain.

Which is why he’s begun pitching Tesla not as a car company, but as an AI company. When deliveries plunged earlier this year, Musk promised new vehicles, “including more affordable models” in “early 2025,” yet here we are in the new year and as the Wall Street Journal notes today, this promise “is unclear whether it is a new model or an update to an existing car in its lineup.”

Anyone who has paid attention to Tesla’s history knows that Elon Musk is a serial liar and has failed to live up to a litany of his promises. In 2015, Musk said his cars would reach “full autonomy” within three years. The next year, he claimed a Tesla would make an autonomous cross-country drive by the end of 2017. In 2019, he told investors he would have one million self-driving taxis on the road by 2020. None of those things happened.

So if you can’t innovate, I guess the next best option is to just buy the government and use cost-cutting as a bullshit excuse to take out your competitors. Musk is in favor of Trump’s desire to rescind the $7,500 electric vehicle credit, which he says will hurt his business, but I suspect he believes it will hurt other EV businesses more whose CEOs are not shadow president. The fact that a loan to Elon’s direct competitor is high on the list of items for DOGE to eliminate is unimpeachable proof that Musk’s government takeover is at least in part driven by a desire to eliminate competition.

Why would he want to do that? Well, despite being a liar with a drug habit that reportedly worries his investors, Musk has actually been pretty clear-headed about the shell game he’s created with Tesla. Two years ago, he said, “the overwhelming focus is solving full self-driving. That’s essential. That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.”

Deep down Musk must know that his cars are widely regarded by car people as gigantic hunks of shit with a cool engine that no self-respecting car company would build. In 2018, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Sandy Munro, the founder of Munro & Associates, a small firm that disassembles new cars piece by piece, concluded that the Model 3 costs about $2,000 more to produce than a similarly-priced BMW i3 and may have additional cost problems in its assembly plant. Some compact cars and family sedans produced by conventional automakers don’t make $2,000 in total profit per vehicle.”

These cost and quality problems stem from “unconventional choices made by Elon Musk.”

Looking on forums like Tesla Motors Club reveals that this build quality issue still persists, even as acknowledged by Tesla fans. The company could get away with this poor quality for years since they were the only game in town, but given that you can walk into practically any dealership in America and walk out with an electric vehicle now, Tesla might actually have to worry about having to compete with other firms.

But that’s what DOGE is for. Musk’s promise of a new vehicle in early 2025 looks pretty suspect at this point, as the only new vehicles he has unveiled so far are the Robotaxi Musk said the company will produce by 2027 and the Robovan it unveiled alongside it that has no slated release date. I would be willing to bet that the new 2025 vehicles promised by Musk are just a cheaper version(s) of its current fleet, given that pretty much all of Elon Musk’s promises to date about Tesla have proven themselves to be lies.

There is an immense conflict of interest in Trump’s government with Musk controlling subsidies going to his competitors, but that’s the inherent dynamic of the incoming Trump administration. America elected a kleptocrat and this is the kind of corruption we can expect in Trump’s America. Elon Musk proves yet again that the last thing that capitalists ever want is competition, as he is willing to buy the government and roll back progress on electric vehicles, all so he can protect his declining profits on a car company he says is worth zero without self-driving, another promise that Elon has failed to deliver.