Last week, Donald Trump hosted an impromptu infomercial at the White House for Elon Musk’s embattled car company, Tesla. This week, Tesla recalled every Cybertruck the company has made since November 2023 because of an exterior steel panel that can separate from the car’s body while in motion and “create a road hazard for following motorists and increase their risk of injury or a collision,” per a notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The recall—which applies to nearly all the Cybertrucks ever sold in the United States—is the eighth that Tesla has issued in the short time the car has been on the market, and the third related to pieces of these cars coming loose. It’s the latest in a string of bad news for a company whose share price has dipped 40 percent over the last six weeks as investors (including Musk’s own brother) dump Tesla stock and sales crater around the world.
Musk has blamed the company’s woes on a “conspiracy” against him, including demonstrations at Tesla showrooms and anti-Tesla vandalism against vehicles, charging stations, and dealerships. (The administration has now vowed to prosecute the perpetrators for “domestic terrorism.”) As Musk complained to Fox News recently, alleged conspirators “want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we’re stopping the terrible waste and corruption in the government.”
It makes sense that people are taking their anger out on Tesla. With Trump’s blessing, Musk is sending legions of asocial goons out to take a sledgehammer to basic government functions. Aside from the threats he poses to Medicaid, Social Security, and lots of other things that keep people alive, Musk is also an unnerving guy to have to pay attention to: an unseemly, anti-charismatic, profoundly unfunny pest with a thin skin and a penchant for substances that exacerbate his most annoying qualities. As a “special government employee,” he is also broadly unaccountable. Whereas most of us will never get the chance to yell at Musk face-to-face, we may well see a Tesla driving down the highway or parked on the street. Protests against Tesla are of a piece with boycotts against companies like Amazon and Target for rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion measures, along with heated Tea Party–style protests at town halls against Republicans (for furthering Trump’s agenda) and Democrats (for not doing more to stop it).
But Musk’s business troubles go well beyond the “TeslaTakedown” protests—whose organizers, for what it’s worth, have denounced violence and vandalism. The myriad safety issues plaguing Tesla point to much broader issues with the company’s business model. Its competitors might just be better at making cars. The Trump administration’s own policies aren’t helping, either.
Tesla shares took another hit earlier this week when Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD announced its “Super e-Platform” charging technology, capable of adding nearly 250 miles of range in just five minutes—half the time of Tesla’s fastest V-4 Superchargers. The company further announced that it will build 4,000 stations equipped with those chargers across China, in contrast to the Trump administration’s costly attempts to dismantle the Biden administration’s modest efforts to expand E.V. charging. The White House’s attacks on consumer-side E.V. subsidies and fuel efficiency regulations, moreover—combined with steep tariffs—could deal a crushing blow to U.S. manufacturers’ ability to compete in increasingly electrified global auto markets.
BYD is further challenging Tesla on self-driving technology, a longtime preoccupation of Musk’s. Whereas Tesla owners in China have to pay an extra $8,000 to use the company’s self-driving features, BYD recently announced that it plans to equip nearly all new models with its own advanced self-driving at no extra cost. The reliability of Tesla’s camera-based autonomous driving technology has also come under scrutiny in recent days after YouTuber Mark Rober showed a Tesla on autopilot crashing into a Wile E. Coyote–style fake wall—painted to resemble a road—and a mannequin of a child.
Tesla’s declining sales in 2024 were buoyed by its performance in China, its second-largest market after the U.S. Its sales there were up 8.8 percent over the previous year, with China accounting for 36.7 percent of the company’s overall deliveries. In February, though, Tesla’s year-over-year sales in China dropped by nearly 50 percent as Chinese customers increasingly opt for cheaper models from BYD and other domestic manufacturers. The company faces declining sales elsewhere too. Tesla sales are down 76 percent in Germany, while Tesla registrations across the European Union and several other European countries dropped by 46 percent between January 2024 and 2025. Sales have fallen by 71 percent in Australia. Tesla sales have dipped by double digits in California, even as overall electric vehicle sales there continue to grow.
Corporate share prices are notoriously volatile but vitally important to Musk given how much of his personal fortune is tied up in Tesla stock. For every $2.43 drop in Tesla stock, Musk loses $1 billion. Thanks to the steep decline in Tesla’s share prices, Musk is estimated to have lost $100 billion since December. While protests may be the least of Tesla’s problems, the anti-Musk backlash and the car company’s apparent difficulty building a product that works are not unrelated: Musk is prioritizing seizing power with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency over his own company’s bottom line. He shouldn’t be trusted to run anything, let alone the federal government.
