Recent Twitter finds: the sentiment around Tesla is not what it used to be.

TESLA > ELON

Ever since the 2024 election results, I've been asked over and over what I think of being a Tesla owner now.

My friends know that I am a lifelong Democrat. More importantly, they know that I have always felt strongly about wealth in inequality and the damage that it does to people across this country, and around our world. They want to know if I feel any differently about this car, now, in the wake of the Elon Musk/Donald Trump partnership and as the activities of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) play out.

I tell them all the same thing.

“I love my Tesla. But I wouldn't brake for Elon Musk.”

I know that the chances of my paths crossing with Elon Musk’s are slim to none.

And, in truth, I was raised to believe that killing is wrong.

But that statement captures both my enthusiasm for the brand - which has waned only a little since Elon Musk revealed who he truly is - and my feelings about the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few in this country.

From the photo montage above, I am one of many, many Americans who feel the same.

I hate that this vehicle that once had so much potential to do good has more recently become a vehicle for political scorn and derision.

It’s understandable, of course. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, became active in American politics during the last election cycle and quickly seized on the ugliest identity politics he could find. He took the platform he had purchased, Twitter, and re-named it X before transforming it from a place where some of the most important figures of a generation gathered - presidents, kings, generals, members of the media, and many more regularly posted on accounts there - into a magnet for the ultra-right: white supremacists, Nazis, the alt-right, and the like.

Then, in the weeks leading up to the election, he poured more than $300 million into the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, a candidate who once would have seemed to be an odd fit for someone who had previously been associated with being pro-environment. (Trump’s record on the environment flies in the face of Elon and Tesla’s supposed commitment to it - and, as a result, the sentiments of many of Tesla’s early customers).

Ever since Inauguration Day Musk has been working overtime - more hours, it would seem, than the president himself. He’s holding meetings with heads of state in the White House, and lecturing the press in the Oval Office. And, as a part of his DOGE organization, he’s “rooting out government corruption and waste” (if you’re on the right). Or, “recouping his investment in GOP politics and enriching himself” (if you’re on the left).

I’m on the left.

While the end result of Elon and DOGE’S efforts has yet to be determined, those of us who have long loathed income inequality and wealth disparity see warning sign after warning sign - too many ‘red flags’ to be ignored.

That all began with one man pouring millions into politics in the weeks before the election - by the end he was literally paying voters millions of dollars individually - and it was ratcheted up when other billionaires began using their ownership of media platforms (Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) to interfere with the election. In the days after Election Day still other billionaires were offering their platforms for the cause - Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok. It all culminated in a gaudy spectacle on Inauguration Day, when five of American’s richest men were given the most prominent seating behind Trump on the dais. We’ve never had a government more attuned to the needs of the top 1% of the top 1%.

TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS IS A SCAM

I love my country. But I hate what trickle-down economics has done to the American people.

Americans have long been told that, under the ‘trickle-down’ theory, wealth was going to flow downward from those we were basically handing it to - the wealthiest citizens and corporations - to the rest of us.

Instead, wealth shot up like a geyser.

The top 10% wealthiest households now hold over two-thirds of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% hold less than 4%.

The tax cuts passed in 2017 under Trump were skewed enormously to the rich.

And the pandemic saw the world’s wealth rise by about $42 trillion - with two-thirds of that going to the richest 1%.

The United States of America calls ourselves the richest nation in the world - yet we are absolutely awash in problems we claim we can’t find answers to, even as we seem to find plenty of new solutions for the richest among us to make even more money.

To be fair, this has been a problem for a long time - for many years, and through multiple presidential administrations. But I believe that we can expect to see exponentially more profits-over-people starting in 2025, as Elon Musk, a man who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to secure an election for his chosen candidate, begins to recoup his investment, reducing or eliminating programs that aim to help some of these issues under the guise of “taxpayer waste and abuse” - including many of the programs that the middle-class and those struggling with poverty rely on.

Imagine if, instead of focusing on finding the funding for tax cuts for the wealthy, the World's Richest Man™ made it his mission to tackle any one of the plethora of problems average citizens in this country are facing?

• Healthcare - can we at least get more than “concepts of a plan?”

• Homelessness? Housing Prices? Skyrocketing Rent?

• Food Insecurity? Child Hunger?

• Grocery Prices? Gas Prices? Corporate Profiteering?

• Mental Health?

• Drug Addiction?

• Mass Incarceration?

• Underemployment? Unemployment?

• Crumbling Infrastructure? Poisoned Water Supply?

I could go on and on and on. We have a lot of problems in this country.

But, instead of working to solve any of these issues, Elon Musk - and most of the 1% of the 1% - instead point to things like “illegal immigration” as the nation’s biggest crises. Then they furiously 'work to solve “taxpayer waste and abuse” - leaving America’s most vulnerable even less protected as the safety net programs that so many rely on - Medicaid for healthcare, the National School Lunch Program, USAID for farming subsidies, and so many others will all wind up “on the chopping block.”

My main issue is with the fact that we have put the nation’s richest citizen in charge of this task. He’s fired all of the auditors and inspectors general, and taken the task of deciding what programs should be kept and which programs should go. And a portion of the country - Trump’s MAGA base - has convinced themselves that only Elon Musk can accomplish this feat.

Elon Musk is someone who has shown that, above all else, he excels at one thing - enriching himself - has been given unfettered access to, and control of, our nation’s coffers, and all of our data.

With all of the problems this world faces - famine and starvation, genocide, war, and so much more - could it really be possible that extending the Trump tax cuts of 2017 is “the single most important economic issue of the day",” as Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, billionaire Scott Bissent, said during his confirmation hearing?

That, to me, says everything about the true priorities of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Scott Bissent, and the many other billionaires that make up the Trump 47 Administration.

The fact that they’ve fooled so many into believing that Congress can't be trusted, and the media can’t be trusted, and that only America's wealthiest citizens can, is something so very sad to me.

SEIZING ON BIGOTRY AND FEAR

As a lifelong democrat, I also have an issue with the idea of an America for anything less than all Americans.

And that is very much what we are seeing.

In taking a stand on Twitter/X to align himself with the far right, Elon has adopted many of their talking points, railing against diversity, equal rights, inclusivity, the LGBTQ community and trans people, immigrants - even the ‘legal’ ones who were born here and aren’t immigrants at all - and other groups.

Musk makes fun of disabled people, regularly uses the R-word, and slings disgusting slurs at immigrants on a near-constant basis. He peddles falsehoods with abundance, and retweets some of the most fundamentally-dishonest accounts on his platform. There seems to be no depth he won’t sink to as he appears to embrace some of the “mean tweets” strategy previously perfected by his partner in politics, Trump. Just when Elon has sunk to a new low, he finds a way to go even lower.

Elon’s Nazi salute - or, if you’re on the right, his ‘my heart goes out to you’ hand gesture - recently made world headlines. Weeks afterward Elon’s hardcore supporters on X continued to defend it, arguing with absolute certainly that the gesture didn’t mean that Musk was embracing the principles of Hitler. Many of us, though, noticed that, in the weeks since that gesture was made, Musk has done so much more to court the hard right. Like approaching Germany’s ultra-right party, AfD, in a Zoom meeting. He’s also cheered on Vice President JD Vance as Vance chastised our allies in Europe and cheered on Europe’s hard right in upcoming elections. There seems to be no question that Elon Musk is courting the hard right.

Elon and Trump are smart. They know that the MAGA base - Make America Great Again - make up a voting bloc that are, for the most part, aligned with some or all of the same views. Many of today’s MAGA Republicans coalesced behind Trump for that very reason: Trump was against the same people they were against, be they people of color, LGBTQ, or people from other countries.

“Show us your birth certificate, Barrack Hussein Obama.”

“Build the wall!”

Despite it seeming that Elon’s interest and rise in politics happened in a very short period of time, an in-depth review of his Twitter content reveals he’s long been working to divide the people of the United States - and, in fact, Canada, Europe, and other countries. In the US it was easy - we’ve been divided for years, with elections that have been extremely close for a generation. In Europe fomenting division has been harder - but Elon’s been at it, tweeting his predictions of “civil war in Europe” going back to at least 2018.

So when Donald Trump came back into power in January 2025 and immediately began dismantling programs that protect America’s minority communities in the name of “killing DEI,” many of the changes were clearly meant as signals to his alt-right/white voting bloc: MAGA Republicans are re-making America in your image, like we promised.

And leaving everyone else behind.

Just a few of those early executive orders Trump had ready for Day One:

• Ending illegal discrimination - against whites - and restoring ‘merit-based opportunity’ - for cisgendered heterosexual non-disabled whites

• Freezing civil rights enforcement under the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights

• Ordering that the government not recognize the existence of transgendered people - numerous other orders require that their passport applications be frozen and that transgendered female inmates be housed with male prison populations and vice versa, among other things

• Ordering that citizenship of individuals born in the United States be revoked if they are born to immigrant parents - an order that will almost certainly be ignored for European-born citizens and enforced for those from Black/brown countries.

• An order that directs our country to fast-track the immigration status of White citizens of South Africa.

Orders that seek to explicitly disenfranchise Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQ, and other minorities traditionally disenfranchised in the United States for generations, while offering special protections to Whites on at least two continents, is a sign of how far-right the United States’ Republican Party aims to become under Donald Trump’s leadership.

And leading the charge? The world’s richest citizen, himself a product of Apartheid South Africa who is reported to have come to the US under false pretenses and, by any number of measures could be a candidate for deportment himself were it not for his skin color, wealth, and political connections.

An America for anything less than all Americans is far, far less than the America we deserve.

When I first joined Twitter I did my best to avoid politics.

At first it was easy. Most of the content I saw tended to be Tesla shareholders and loyalists excited about the brand, about the products, and about the tech.

Even after Elon purchased the platform and it became more and more a magnet for the alt right, and the Tesla posts I once enjoyed were replaced with content that was almost entirely political, I shied away from wading into politics there.

For months and months I tried to keep my tweets related to my Tesla road trips and the tech.

I knew that, among my small number of followers, I was likely to have some on both sides of the political spectrum. They followed me for the road trips, not for my viewpoints on the news of the day.

Besides, the theme of the ‘Stage IV Tour’, after all, is “Powered by positive thinking… and electricity.”

And there’s nothing positive about watching Elon Musk’s descent from ‘Tony Stark’ guru into a fearmonger and hatemonger sharing the worst content that identity politics has to offer.

Twitter (now X) has become a place that just makes me sad, or angry, as I search through the abyss of horribleness trying to find some ray of light: a tweet from the National Parks Service, or a post from a Tesla road-tripper discovering Teslacamping for the first time.

I stayed on the platform precisely for those posts.

But in the days since the election politics have reached a fever pitch, I’m afraid it's become unavoidable - being on Twitter/X means choosing a side.

It means taking a stand - standing up for Elon and DOGE if you’re on the right (or just an Elon Musk Stan and/or fanboi) - or standing up to the hate and division that has become Elon’s bread-and-butter as he and his friends amongst the Top 1% seek to divide and conquer the rest of us.

Standing up to Elon means I may be one of very few Tesla owners you’ll see not rooting on the right - but I’m okay with that.

I choose to stand up for my friends who don’t fit into the mold of politics that Elon has embraced over the last few years.

Even as I do, I am constantly reminded that none of this is truly about red vs. blue.

The fight for America’s soul is coming - and it won’t be a battle between the left and the right. It will be between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us - the ones that they have pitted against each other for years.

People are just now beginning to wake up to that fact, one I’ve realized for a long time.

And Elon Musk, I believe, is actually doing more to help with bringing the country together than he probably even understands.

It won’t be a ‘culture war’, it will be a ‘class war’.

And our choice will be the 1% of Americans who hold almost all of our country’s wealth and resources and are working together, through Elon Musk and Donald Trump, to concentrate power and absorb even more, and their loyal supporters… and the rest of us.

TAKE A STAND, OR GET RUN OVER

If you follow me on Twitter, trust that I will still be posting car photos and road trip pictures.

In between, though, I’ll be standing up for an America for all Americans.

That’s an idea that shouldn’t really be that controversial, and yet seems to before some reason.

That reason, of course, is the enrichment of the top 1%.

So I’ll be standing up against that, as well.

Unless you’re a billionaire, or a member of the Top 1% of the Top 1%, I hope that you’ll consider giving me a follow.

In this day and age, good people have two choices: take a stand, or get run over.

I’ll be standing up.

“Stand up for what you believe in, even if you stand alone”. - Suzy Kassem

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