Divesting from Tesla immediately is the only responsible choice

Join the “Divest Public Dollars from Elon Musk Campaign Kickoff Call” on April 24, 2025, at 8:30 PM EDT.

No matter how bad you think it is, you’re probably underestimating the damage Elon Musk has done to Tesla. And there’s an excellent argument that the damage has not yet shown up in the stock price.

The still exorbitant value of the company’s shares, which are selling at a 111.61 price-to-earnings ratio compared to industry leader Toyota’s 6.47, should remind you that the company's value is based entirely on “brand.” And not the brand of the cars, but the brand of the company’s CEO and largest shareholder.

And it’s hard to decide which brand is worse—Tesla’s or Elon Musk’s.

It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Musk has shorted his car company, which no longer makes up the bulk of his wealth. Honestly, that would be less harmful to the company than he has done over the last five years.

The biggest flop of all time?

“Cybertruck has barely been out for a year, and Tesla is already slapping five-figure discounts on the hood to move metal,” poasted E.W. Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla. “Biggest automotive flop of the 21st Century by far, and strongly in the running for the all-time title.”

The remarkable failure of the Cybertruck is bound to be seen as even more embarrassing as time passes and as the truck, like Musk’s personality, becomes more anachronistic, boorish, and clumsy every day.

Musk bet his company’s future on a vehicle that looks like it was drawn in 1989 by a nine-year-old who was given two crayons and a ruler and told to draw a flying car that has wheels, for some reason, and a dumpster for a rear. The prototype was introduced in 2019, precisely as Musk could have used the market advantage he’d created for the company with taxpayers’ massive backing to create an affordable EV. Instead, Tesla announced in April 2025 that the stripped-down Model Y was delayed—again.

In the last five years, Musk has allowed the EV industry to catch up with and, in many cases, surpass Tesla.

Meanwhile, he’s made two of the worst business decisions in human history—the Cybertruck and the purchase of Twitter. Suppose you can accept the destruction of tens of billions of dollars of value. In that case, you can still see buying Twitter as a brilliant tactical move, allowing him to capture the presidency through Donald Trump to capture billions more in subsidies.

But even that portends poorly for Tesla.

Musk’s sick government grift

You can argue that Tesla’s value is now based on Model Y somehow returning the company to growth as Elon moves on to the new industries of Robotaxis and actual robots. I mean, that’s the con.

In that case, you’re still betting entirely on a man who has lied about the underlying technology of self-directed vehicles for over a decade and seems to be abandoning the free market.

Musk seems almost eager to destroy his car company’s brand with the people most likely to buy the cars. You can attribute this to a ketamine-throttled suicidal instinct, or you can come to the obvious conclusion that he now sees his future entirely entwined with a Trump regime that has no plans to leave power willingly.

It’s clear that SpaceX, Starlink, and possibly Neuralink—companies Musk has a far bigger stake in than Tesla—he hopes to lock in a series of taxpayer-funded grifts that serve nothing but his Gilded Age ambitions. Take “Musk to Force Pentagon to Build and Then Pay Him to Use Network of Killer Satellites,” for instance. Actually, please, Congress, don’t.

The sick M. Night Shyamalan twist is that he’s planning this heist of untold taxpayer wealth in the name of “cutting government.” DOGE is a cookbook for consuming the good government does and turning into Elon’s chud to rechew forever.

The case is clear: Musk is willing to do to Tesla what he did to Twitter to advance his political ambitions, which are now entirely married to his financial ambitions.

And as bad as Musk and Tesla’s brands are, things could get far worse.

Musk’s connection to Donald Trump, who seems intent on out-Herbert Hoovering Herbert Hoover (in addition to all the other damage he wants to do to our government), could stop being a buoy and sink to new depths as an anchor.

When should you have known he’s Elon Musk?

You’ve probably seen some version of this bumper sticker parodied here by Stephen Colbert:

For people who’ve followed Elon Musk, there is a never-ending list of opportunities when it should have been clear that this man should be opposed with every cell of decency in the universe.

It could be when he nonsensically called a cave diver who helped save 12 boys trapped underwater a “pedo” in 2018. It could have been in 2020 when he became one of the world’s worst Covid forecasters. It could have been in 2022 when it became impossible to ignore that he was not only a union-buster but a CEO who at least tolerated a culture of ancient racism and discrimination.

The moral rot of Elon is now so overwhelming that it’s hard to make sense of the PR that shrouded his depravity.

It continued through 2024. Walter Isaacson—author of semi-hagiographies of Einstein and Ben Franklin—had direct access to Musk as Elon engineered twin business disasters and leapt into far-right politics so deep that he would end up endorsing literal German fascists and throwing up a couple of Sieg Heils on the day of Trump’s inauguration. And Walt still gave Elon the Da Vinci treatment.

Just get out

But let’s pretend you’re amoral. When, based on dollars, which are crashing thanks to the guy Musk elected, should you have dumped Tesla?

It looks like very early 2022 or early 2025. But ‘22 seems the obvious answer if you have an opposition to fascism coming to America with a stiff arm.

Notably, much of Tesla’s biggest growth is based on freak events.

“In a very real sense, Donald Trump may have become president and Elon Musk may have taken the reins over the key infrastructure in the federal government, setting off the Trump-Musk Payments Crisis, simply because index funds exist and the 2020 jump in Tesla’s stock price led to Tesla’s inclusion in indices like the S&P 500,” researcher Nathan Tankus wrote. “Try not to think about it too much.”

Then, there was Trump’s election, which seemed like the most fantastic news ever for Tesla stockholders, but now, it looks likely to lead to the stock's ultimate crash.

Let’s be honest: morally, there’s no case to hold Tesla or any fund that holds Tesla. And there hasn’t been for at least years.

However, extracting all money from a stock that has capriciously been treated like an industry stalwart based entirely on the inflated value of Elon Musk as a human is not easy. It’s still in many of the most-held mutual funds in the world.

Seriously, now

But financially, economically, this is the best time to get out if you're not yet, and many of us aren't—thanks to investments made by local and state officials on our behalf. And getting out is likely to get more expensive every day.

Convincing our cities and states to divest from Tesla may not change the world, but it’s the least we can do. So let’s do everything we can to make that happen, knowing that we will never do as much damage to Tesla as Elon Musk has.