Vehicle for Resentment

In the armpit days of the 2010s, the Tesla was marketed as an advance in luxury electric vehicles, a savvy choice for moneyed people moderately concerned about climate change (or gas prices). Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, was viewed as Silicon Valley’s consummate Electric Car Guy, an eccentric in a black T-shirt whose efforts may have even seemed admirable at the time, though many would come to regret their initial dazzlement. 

The only Tesla owner I know personally is my former landlord. I know, it’s perfect, landlords being symbolic of everything that is terrible with predatory capitalism in the U.S. But the setup is problematized when you learn a bit more about said former landlord, whom I really rather love: classic working-class Brooklyn Italian, hates Trump and cops with a passion, ribs me for never going to mass (he goes every Sunday), once blatantly flirted with my mom in front of me (disgusting), then wrote her a $500 check for her priest to fix the heating in the church rectory in Cheyenne, Wyoming. And every time my former landlord and his wife return from visiting her family in China, he inches further towards becoming a card-carrying member of the CCP. (“They don’t let anyone become homeless there,” he asserts, an old-school Samaritanite Catholic to his core.) 

He bought his Tesla about eight years ago, during the Silicon Valley years, and he’s loathed it ever since. The EV stations in his part of Brooklyn are a pain in the ass to get to, and the self-driving mechanism only works if your goal is to get yourself killed; it was a $40,000 mistake, he says. 

My former landlord is the kind of weirdo who would have bought a Tesla, mesmerized as he is by shiny shit like a bird, but he is not the kind of weirdo who would buy a Tesla now. 

I’ve been alerted to a bumper sticker some Tesla owners are slapping onto their vehicles that reads, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” As if such a talisman could ward off any ill-wishers who might be inclined to spray-paint “Nazi” across the trunk. It’s a very Liberal bumper sticker, insofar as it signals the expectation that a mere display of good intentions, and zero action, will afford absolution. 

The concept of a “before Elon went crazy” is absurd, needless to say—that man has always been full of shit, and his “genius” a scam—and that’s even if you don’t know about his history of hijacking actual smart people’s ideas or the family fortune reaped from exploiting South African apartheid.

Elon Musk loves to chat shit to make himself seem smarter and more culturally important than he actually is; with time his statements are usually revealed to be mere garbage. He was going to rescue the trapped boys in the Thai cave with a small submarine, and there were going to be self-driving Tesla robotaxis in 2020, the same year in which he claimed there would be zero new Covid cases. The Hyperloop, a vacuum-powered train that defied the laws of physics, was supposed to suck people between San Francisco and L.A. in 35 minutes; it later emerged that Musk may well have floated the idea in order to kill plans for high-speed rail in California. 

The U.S. has always been prone to believe in myths and delusions, and currently seems to be engaged in many games of pretend simultaneously—let’s pretend these guys are smart, let’s pretend Palestinians are the bad guys, let’s pretend the Left is the problem, let’s pretend wearing a pink blazer and holding an auction paddle that says “FALSE” is an effective response for Democrats in Congress to make to all this. But one thing that’s been impossible for anyone to pretend their way out of is the fact that Tesla drivers are, almost exclusively, big-time losers. 

Teslas are a stand-in for Musk’s hopeless aspiration to coolness, and they often reflect the same quality in their owners. Paradoxically, the sight of a Tesla now guarantees that its driver will automatically be suspected of being a fool, a wannabe, an incel, a sucker, a Nazi, or some combination of the above. Musk has reported that he was bullied as a kid, but according to his father Errol (apparently an unreliable narrator in his own right), Elon mocked a schoolmate whose father had died by suicide, and the boy pushed Elon down the stairs. An unhappy childhood, it seems, resulting in baked-in desperation and resentment.

The idea that wealth can put coolness within one’s grasp is a notion held only by deeply uncool people. Actively wanting to obtain it—let alone trying to buy it—guarantees failure. Desperation is an automatic cool-killer, and it has been Musk’s animating quality for decades. The unfolding of his weird and terrible life has shown once and for all that no amount of wealth can cure unresolved desperation, and shown, too, how it can curdle into vengefulness and eventually, pure evil—the kind of sheer depravity that motivates a father who is known to be paranoid about assassination to routinely carry his five-year-old son on his shoulders in public, or to Ctrl-Alt-Delete an entire government while doing Nazi salutes. Fascism is perpetrated by the most massive twats.

Musk’s February appearance at CPAC, a con for neofascists, was widely covered in the media due to his wielding of the chainsaw presented to him as a gift by Argentine president Javier Milei, a fellow right-wing extremist. The chainsaw was meant to represent the way he, like Milei, was chopping up government funding, but I found it notable because no one has ever looked more like a midlife crisis come to life, his eyes covered by dumbass dark glasses, shouting incoherent phrases and generally behaving in a fashion that would give any respectable ketamine addict pause. It was his embarrassing posting on X, in the flesh—trying so hard to be funny and cool to impress what he considers the in-crowd, and just further exposing, moment by moment, his pitiful thirst. 

That it’s Musk’s bleak, incurable uncoolness—and not his shady business dealings or his horrific treatment of women or of his children—that has caused the mask to drop and the people to wake up shows that we are social animals above all. The benevolent billionaire is one of the biggest myths perpetrated upon us, but it’s finally begun to dissipate; Musk is so transparent in his itchy desire to rule the universe that those of us who retain our humanity have begun to realize he has more in common with one of the bots stalking his social platform than he does with us. (Incidentally, I feel certain that the savvier autocrats of the world have rightfully staked him out as an easy mark.) 

Tesla shares, the main source of this dork’s power, slipped 15 percent on a Monday, a five-year record; by Tuesday, NASDAQ.com predicted it wouldn’t stop there, though a sales promotion held by the president on the South Lawn paused the plunge for at least a day or two. Tesla dealerships all over the world are experiencing an epidemic of destroyed cars, burned-up charging stations, and gunshots through the glass. “Domestic terrorism,” said one remaining Tesla defender. On a Seattle sales lot, a cluster of Cybertrucks were burned to their cores; strangely enough they look cooler than before, their paroxysmal geometry smoothed out by the flames.

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