Today we’re talking about the protests against Tesla, which have been branded on social media under the hashtag Tesla Takedown. The protests are, of course, a reaction to Elon Musk, who has managed to install himself as basically a not-so-shadow president who is tearing the federal government apart, leaving confusion and destruction in his wake.
A lot of people are deeply unhappy with this state of affairs. And because Musk is not an elected official but is, on some level, a car salesman, many of those frustrated and angry people are taking aim at the most visible and accessible symbol of his power and wealth: Tesla itself.
To help pull this all apart, I asked Ed Niedermeyer to join me on the show. Niedermeyer published a book about Tesla in 2019 called Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and he hosts a podcast called Autonocast, about autonomous vehicle technology. His sizable following on Bluesky has also made him one of the leading organizers of the Tesla protests in Portland, Oregon, where he lives. So I wanted to bring him on the show to talk me through what he sees with both the big picture of Tesla as a company and on the ground with the ongoing protest movement.
There’s a lot happening and the story is changing fast, even since Niedermeyer and I talked at the beginning of the week. But that bigger picture — the disconnect between what he calls the “myth” of Tesla and the reality, and how that reality is now manifesting into a global protest movement — is shaping up to be the defining story of Tesla’s next chapter.
If you’d like to read more about what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:
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