Tesla’s Remarkably Bad Quarter Is Even Worse Than It Looks
www.theatlantic.com
Reality is catching up with Elon Musk.

Yesterday evening, Tesla reported first-quarter earnings for 2025, and they were abysmal: Profits dropped 71% from the same time last year.

Musk sounded bitter on the call with investors that followed, blaming the company’s misfortune on protesters who have raged at Tesla dealerships around the world over his role running DOGE and his ardent support of far-right politicians.

“The protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized. They’re paid for,” he said, without evidence.

Non-paywall link

  • pivot_root@lemmy.world
    12·
    3 days ago

    Bro, if people hate you and you company enough to employ and pay others to protest, then you and your company must be an all new level of shitty.

    His people—conservatives—don’t follow logic. They have a victim complex and see anything that negatively affects them as someone else’s fault and not the consequences of their own actions. If there isn’t an obvious perpetrator, they scapegoat one into existence.

    I’ve debated some of these people and it’s hopeless trying to get them to connect the dots. You can keep presenting them with logic and evidence, and they keep shifting the goalposts and changing the topic to justify their beliefs. A summary of one of my attempts to convince someone that Trump isn’t universally beloved by average Americans went roughly like this:

    • “Trump has improved the average citizen’s quality of life”
    • “Then why are there 5 million protesters coming out every month?”
    • “I haven’t heard of any large protests”
    • (links to 50501 Wikipedia page)
    • “They’re ‘protesters’ funded by the left”
    • “All 5 million of them? That would be extremely expensive, even if it’s just $100 a person. Nobody could afford that.”
    • “Remember, all the billionaires are Democrats” (Thiel? Musk?)
    • “That’s not even their playbook. It’s cheaper and more effective for them to lobby for changes that benefit themselves.”
    • “But they can’t do that anymore because Trump is in charge, so now paid protesters are their preferred choice”
    • “Suppose they are paid. With 5 million people, there’s absolutely no way that they’re being paid will remain secret.”
    • “OK fine, maybe it’s only a couple hundred thousand being paid.”

    I don’t doubt that some tiny handful of people would be paid to protest for some reason or another, but I highly doubt it’s anywhere close to what MAGA conservatives think. IMO, it’s more likely that protesters would be paid by the other side to make the protest violent so they could crack down on them.