Last week political commentator Jonathan V. Last (2025d) declared that Elon Musk’s close association with President Trump has “killed Tesla.” That was happy news to Last, who had previously argued that a good way to fight the president was by attacking Tesla, which is a major source of wealth — and thus power — of ally Musk (Last, 2025a, 2025b).
After itemizing Tesla’s recent woes, Last (2025d) concludes that it is “a company in real trouble. Tesla might pull off a pivot to some other business — maybe it becomes an AI company. Maybe it becomes a B2B operation or a government contractor. But as a consumer automotive company? It’s dead.”
Last (2025c) has stated that he sees his job as “helping you see around corners,” so I am not surprised that his punchline is lacking in tentativeness. And he is hardly alone in this tendency. My impression is that the stature of American political pundits all too often hinges on the confidence with which they express their takes.
Whatever the reasons for the definitiveness of Last’s views about Tesla, I would suggest that they are premature as both a factual matter as well as a basis for political strategery. Yes, Tesla appears to face challenges big enough to potentially imperil Musk’s leadership of the automaker. However, I suspect that we may need to see how things play out for at least six months before a clear trajectory emerges.
By the same token, it doesn’t make sense for Musk’s political opponents to declare Tesla dead just yet because that may encourage rank-and-file activists to turn their attention elsewhere. If I were Musk that’s exactly what I would want to see happen because it could give him breathing room to regroup.
JVL overplays the Cybertruck’s importance to Tesla
In his recent columns about Tesla, Last has done a reasonable job of running through the data about the automaker’s travails. However, his latest piece focuses too much on the Cybertruck as an indicator of the automaker’s viability. Yes, the controversial model is selling so poorly that its resale value has collapsed. Forbes went as far as to declare that the Cybertruck is “Elon’s Edsel” — the U.S. auto industry’s biggest flop in decades (Ohnsman, 2025).
Last (2025d) draws from the Forbes article to point out that one reason why the Cybertruck was such a big gamble was that Tesla tooled up to build 250,000 units per year. “That capacity will never be used because the Cybertruck is DOA in America,” Last declares, but the truck was “engineered to specs that make it impossible to sell overseas.”
It’s true that the riskiness of the Cybertruck has been accentuated because it is too big to be sold in most other markets and shares minimal components with other Teslas. However, the automaker has already started to shift plant capacity from the Cybertruck to the Model Y (Lambert, 2025a).
In addition, the damage that the Cybertruck does to Tesla’s bottom line may be limited partly because it is a high-end halo model. It would be a bigger red flag if the automaker’s Model Y saw its sales collapse in the coming year.
This is not to say that the Cybertruck’s failure should be ignored. This is an inevitable result of Musk’s management style, which he hinted at in 2019: “I do zero market research whatsoever” (Ohnsman, 2025). Being a buccaneer may make sense in a startup, but not in an established firm facing stiff competition.
JVL overplays Tesla’s sales drop in the U.S.
Last (2025d) also argues that Tesla sales “have fallen off a cliff — for the first quarter of 2025 they were down 9 percent. That might not seem like much, except that overall EV sales in the United States were up by 11 percent.”
Those figures were estimated by Cox Automotive because Tesla doesn’t release quarterly sales by country. Electrek’s Fred Lambert (2025b) speculated that 2025 numbers could be on the high side — and the drop may have been closer to 15 percent. This would be a major decline, but not as catastrophic as Last suggests.
Also see ‘Tesla’s ‘code red situation’ is obscured by forms of denial’
For one thing, the fate of automakers is typically not determined in three months. In addition, the size of a sales drop can matter less than how well an automaker retrenches. Tesla has made staffing cuts for the last year (Jones, 2025).
Just as importantly, even if Musk had avoided political controversy, Tesla would likely have still seen its share of the EV market fall because legacy automakers have been broadening their offerings. This was going to be a crunch time for Tesla in much the same way as it was for American Motors in the early-60s when the Big Three entered the compact market.
Can Tesla dramatically shift its customer base?
Musk has recently argued that he sees no problem with demand for Teslas — and that while the automaker has “lost some sales from the left,” it has also “gained some from the right” (Alvarez, 2025).
Lambert (2025c) rejected Musk’s rosy picture. “We know Tesla’s sales are down in virtually all markets. To counter the declining demand, Tesla is offering record discounts and incentives in most markets” while reducing production.
In Musk’s defense, he does appear to get the importance of brand image — and that Tesla’s future viability may depend upon its success in cultivating sales among those who align with his current political stances. The big question is how much — and how fast — can Tesla shift its customer base?
Some movement may be occurring. A recent EV Politics Project (2025) survey found that between November 2023 and 2024 there was a 14-percent drop in the proportion of Republicans voters who thought that “EVs are for people who see the world differently than I do.”
That said, the voters who viewed Musk most favorably were men who drive gas-powered trucks. Can Tesla make major inroads with them, particularly when its only truck is decidedly unconventional looking?
Could Musk be pushed out if Tesla loses more altitude?
Perhaps the most revealing thing Musk has said recently was that he was committed to leading Tesla for the next five years but sought to own a larger bloc of shares (Lambert, 2025c).
“It’s a reasonable-control thing over the future of the company, especially if we’re building millions, potentially billions of humanoid robots,” Musk reportedly said last week. “I can’t be sitting there and wondering about getting tossed out for political reasons by activists. That would be unacceptable. That’s all that matters” (Fortuna, 2025).
This suggests that Musk may be looking over his shoulder even though the Tesla board of directors denied a recent Wall Street Journal report that it had put out some feelers to find a successor (Roy and Dey, 2025).
Also see ‘Which EV startups will succeed in crossing the Valley of Death?‘
Lambert (2025c) stated that Tesla’s shareholders would most likely support Musk continuing as CEO because of his championing of autonomous vehicle technology. That was even though he has promised “unsupervised self-driving on millions of vehicles produced since 2016 and not being able to deliver on this promise.”
The bottom line is that even if Musk’s unpopularity hadn’t tainted Tesla’s reputation, the automaker would likely have struggled over the next year or so with an unusually large number of challenges, such as heightened competition, the likely end of EV subsidies, tariffs that hike costs and disrupt supply chains, and maybe even a recession.
Add all that up and Tesla’s prospects can look problematic enough that Last’s conclusion could turn out to be correct. However, I don’t think it is either accurate or helpful to Last’s political goals to prematurely declare Tesla dead.
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RE:SOURCES
- Alvarez, Simon; 2025. “Elon Musk on Tesla vehicle sales: ‘We see no problem with demand.’” Teslarati. Posted May 20.
- EV Politics Project; 2025. “A Political X-Ray of Elon Musk.” Posted Feb. 4.
- Jones, Cristela; 2025. “Tesla contractor lays off dozens in new reductions.” mysanantonio.com. Posted May 17.
- Lambert, Fred; 2025a. “Tesla throttles down Cybertruck production, shift workers to Model Y.” Electrek. Posted Jan. 16.
- ——; 2025b. “Tesla’s US sales are worse than what is reported, here’s more accurate data.” Electrek. Posted April 11.
- ——; 2025c. “Elon Musk lies about Tesla’s demand, seals its fate as he says he’ll stay CEO with more shares.” Electrek. Posted May 20.
- Fortuna, Carolyn; 2025. “In A Revealing Interview, Musk Evades Responsibility For Tesla’s Decline.” Clean Technica. Posted May 22.
- Last, Jonathan V.; 2025a. “How to Win the USAID Fight.” The Bulwark. Posted Feb. 7.
- ——; 2025b. “Tesla Is Elon Musk’s Soft Underbelly.” The Bulwark. Posted Feb. 10.
- ——;2025c. “Joe Biden Isn’t Your Scapegoat.” The Bulwark. Posted May 19.
- ——; 2025d. “Death of a Cybertruck Salesman: How Trump Killed Tesla.” The Bulwark. Posted May 20.
- Ohnsman, Alan; 2025. “Elon’s Edsel: Tesla Cybertruck Is The Auto Industry’s Biggest Flop In Decades.” Forbes. Posted April 3.
- Roy, Abhirup and Bipasha Dey; 2025. “Tesla chair denies report that EV maker seeks new CEO to replace Musk.” Reuters. Posted May 1.
Well the Cybertruck was released to a lot of WTFs and endless social media memes. It was not aimed for the jacked up F 250 crowd or as work vehicles. People like me mostly have the pickup bed empty but when I need to carry some 4x4s or 30 bags of topsoil nothing else will do? Not me particularly I’m not an early adopter type. A halo car that people can gaze at in awe or stunned disbelief? Elon’s worth about 1/4 TRILLION dollars. You’re not going to bankrupt him by boycotting the Cybertruck. He’ll get bored with DOGE and go on to his next big idea. Just hope it’s not something to do with the stormtroopers Trump delivered to him. That’s enough politics for me. I’m probably the leftest person here. What I would like to discuss is the Cybertruck a missed opportunity to reinvent the pickup truck as Canoo attempted?
The difference between the Edsel and the Cybertruck is that while the Edsel allegedly caused FoMoCo a loss of then-$250 million Dollars (actualized in current money to around $2.5 billion), it was a largely conventional run-of-the-mill full size car that shared almost everything with the corresponding Fords and Mercuries (sheetmetal aside).
On the other hand, the Cybertruck probably does not really share that much with the rest of Tesla’s lineup, considering that even the engines have to be built in such a away to withstand enough strain from any substantial towing capacity (unlike passenger cars).
What I don’t like about Teslas, after having seen a few around, is that as years passed interiors went from “interesting even, considering we live in dark-plastic-21st-century” to “rental car stereotypes – condensed edition”.
Those are good points about the Edsel. However, that was such an expensive misadventure partly because it wasn’t just an additional model — the Edsel was an entire car line with a new brand name and a separate dealer network. In addition, the Edsel was initially run by a new division. All of this added significantly to the car’s costs. In contrast, the Cybertruck is just another Tesla product sold through existing channels. That would make it a lot less complicated to discontinue than the Edsel, where Ford had to deal with such things as franchise agreements.
I agree that calling Tesla “dead” is definitely premature–and I’d put any blame on Musk’s shoulders, not Trump. And I’d agree that the Cybertruck failure, like the Edsel failure, won’t bring down the entire company by itself.
That being said, I don’t agree that “the damage that the Cybertruck does to Tesla’s bottom line may be limited partly because it is a high-end halo model.” A vehicle for which to plan to build a quarter of a million units is not a halo model–and its unique construction (stainless steel, “exoskeleton”, and no paint) means that converting that capacity to build Model 3s and Ys is a non-trivial expense.
I’d also note that, while the US sales dropoff may not be precipitous, other markets are showing bigger drops. European sales dropped 49% year-over-year in April–and that’s after Tesla assured us the rollout of the updated Model Y would reverse the Q1 sale declines. In China, Tesla’s April sales were down 8.6% vs 2024 but market share plunged from 11.5% in March to 5.1% in April.
And, while competition is increasing, Tesla has exactly zero new retail models on the horizon–just a two-passenger EV targeted at fleets and a decontented Model Y. That’s as big problem as the Cybertruck.
Adam, you make some good points. Part of what makes the Cybertruck hard to talk about is it is a category buster . . . and Tesla got over-optimistic in its production-capacity planning (a downside of not doing market research). I would consider the Cybertruck to be the truck equivalent of a “personal coupe” — it has more of a specialized niche than a Ford F-150 Lightning or even a Rivian R1T because of its unusual design. Although Musk initially promised a fairly low price, that’s not how it turned out. One result is that the Cybertruck has been one of Tesla’s more expensive products. Add together those two factors and the Cybertruck was unlikely to come anywhere close to the Model Y in sales.
I suppose we can debate how high the production a vehicle must have to stop being a halo model. Last year BMW’s U.S. sales topped 370,000 units, and Mercedes-Benz’s Alabama plant reportedly has a capacity of around 300,000 vehicles. Or, if you are willing to look back in time, the Ford Mustang topped 600,000 units in 1966.
Wherever you choose to draw the line, I think that the production capacity of the Cybertruck’s plant illustrates how Tesla wildly misread the market. And while the automaker may need to spend a goodly amount of money to shift capacity to other vehicles, that strikes me as being a reasonable investment over the long run — at least if Tesla can maintain adequate sales to keep the plant humming.
Of course Tesla’s sales drop off in other markets was more substantial than the U.S., which was my focus. Musk has argued that Tesla has turned the corner; I suspect that this is classic Muskian spin, but let’s see what sales look like over the next six months.
I have mixed reactions to the idea that Tesla has been starved for new product. The original VW Beetle sold remarkably well for a positively ancient design because Volkswagen focused on improving its functionality and promising superior build quality. The challenge is that you have to offer a uniquely valuable product. That becomes more difficult when the competition heats up with lots of flashy new entries.
If Musk had not dabbled in politics and instead focused on improving the quality of the Tesla ownership experience, I could see the automaker powering through the next year or so just fine without much more than a refreshed Model Y (recognizing that some EV market share loss was inevitable). But now that Musk has lit a match to his standing with Tesla’s traditional customer base, he’s got a much tougher situation. I wonder whether this year Tesla will go through a similar experience as Studebaker did in 1961, when it simply didn’t have the firepower to compete with all of the new Big Three compact-car entries in a generally down market.
When it comes to the CyberTruck, Tesla should have seen this coming. Proper market research could have shown this to be a very polarizing design. With Rivian, and soon Scout, there will be formidable competition in the marketplace for high end electrics, not to mention the GMC Hummer which sports a familiar and more successful design. Electric trucks like the new Chevy van and F150 lightning offer commercial promise. Trucks are big market, for now. That is likely going to change soon. Trucks are simply too expensive now. There’s a reason why the Maverick has been so successful. Look at the SUV market. The RAV4 and CRV is the where the market lies. We need more vehicles reasonably (I.e. family) priced vehicles. Something you can finance and pay off in 5 or less years and that will still be around in 10 years.
My opinion toward Tesla remains unchanged. I have zero desire to own one, just the same as any other electric car. I’m just not impressed enough to buy a high depreciation vehicle that will be repair totaled sooner and not later. Being libertarian/right, I don’t want them forced on us by the nanny state either.
I think that there would be a reasonable chance that Musk is pushed out as the leader of Tesla by his own board. There already need to be questions about his focus between Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and the big Nevada battery operation.
As for the Tesla operation, it may be time to move to fully professional management and away from the entrepreneur. There becomes a point when a more structured approach becomes necessary as all the competitors descend upon the Tesla market. Trailblazer make great stories but they don’t always do well in the transition to being a long term continuing company.
As for the Cyber Truck, that has all the hallmarks of being an ego game of showing how different one can be just for the sake of being different. The reality of it going to have a limited market acceptance should have been obvious to every one of the Tesla executives that approved it for production. Maybe they did, except for the one person.