Lost Down There

I’m supposed to care about Tesla deliveries, and you are too.

There was a time when this wasn’t news, or if it was, it was novelty news. Now, it’s something else entirely, although I’m honestly not sure what. What happens to Tesla matters for the broader market, but it goes well beyond that.

Tesla is a car company, but more importantly, it’s a reflection of Elon Musk’s ability to turn eccentricity into something good and tangible. In an era when the whims of the centibillionaire class are increasingly synonymous with everyone else’s reality, it’s crucial that their eccentricities manifest in positive outcomes. Otherwise, we’re on the fast track to creating real-world supervillains.

To be sure, the rise of surveillance capitalism is pernicious and dystopian. The public’s growing paranoia about the power of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple isn’t misplaced. Although they’ve enhanced our lives in too many ways to count, they also pose an existential threat on many fronts. You could argue, for example, that humans are being robbed of their agency by those companies’ capacity to shape the future. Advertising has always been about targeting groups of consumers and altering their behavior, but the hyper-optimized, deeply personal nature of our interactions with today’s biggest tech firms would’ve seemed morally questionable even to the most hardened Mad Man.

In addition, I should note that just because I personally agree with the way big tech firms have wielded their gatekeeper powers vis-à-vis the culture wars and geopolitics doesn’t mean it’s desirable for a handful of companies to wield that power in the first place.

Musk is new to the surveillance capitalism game, or at least we think he is. Prior to buying Twitter, he already had whatever data he’s able to collect about humans from Tesla’s connected vehicles — that’s not nothin,’ I imagine. Now, though, he’s in possession of God only knows what kind of sensitive data and information about everyone from random citizens to world leaders to government agencies.

It’s not so much that Musk is keen to take the other side of the debate when it comes to social issues and geopolitics compared to his surveillance capitalist peers that’s the problem. Indeed, you could very plausibly argue that Mark Zuckerberg has, at critical junctures, said one thing and done another when it comes to, for example, allowing for the proliferation of state-sponsored propaganda, hate speech and so on. What makes Musk different is the outlandishly overt way in which he’s chosen to promote counter-narrative and controversial positions on the most pressing issues facing not just democracy, but humanity more generally. It’s unnerving, for instance, that a man who builds spaceships, self-driving vehicles and brain implants has suggested prosecuting America’s top infectious disease expert. And so on.

Of course, it’s possible Musk is just eccentric and that what we’ve all witnessed over the past several months is simply a manifestation of a medical condition he claims to have. If that’s the case, the situation is less unnerving, but only a little bit. It’d suggest that if Musk is, in fact, treating the whole of society like he treated Dogecoin — as a toy to bat around, like a cat with a helpless mouse — he’s doing it merely for his own amusement, rather than because he actually wants to create the conditions for societal breakdown.

Whatever the case, there’s something about the situation that feels like personal intent, and that’s highly disturbing. All Zuckerberg derision (well-deserved and otherwise) aside, I doubt anyone seriously believes Mark is bent on harming democracy in a direct and personalized way. Before you scoff, take a moment to internalize what I’m saying. Facebook itself may be a threat to societal cohesion and Zuckerberg, as its creator, will forever be the subject of criticism from those who believe he systematically failed to protect users from various sorts of dangerous content. But nobody worries that Mark will wake up one day and, for example, post a controversial, inflammatory diatribe about Ukraine on his Facebook page, or release a public statement on behalf of Meta suggesting Americans shouldn’t get a COVID vaccine. With Elon, you never know.

Musk has variously insisted that his Twitter adventures won’t impact Tesla, SpaceX, the brain implant company and whatever else he’s got his hands on (and in), but at least some stakeholders are concerned. Tesla’s shares are coming off their worst year ever, and SpaceX’s president was asked last month by NASA whether Twitter was going to be a “distraction.”

Tesla’s delivery numbers, released on Monday, fell short of estimates. The company delivered 405,278 cars globally during Q4, the most ever, but fewer than the 420,760 consensus expected.

For the year, Tesla grew deliveries by 40%, well below its 50% goal.

Questions about demand have plagued the shares recently. In addition to consternation around Musk’s Twitter exploits, reports that the company intended to cut production at its Shanghai facility raised eyebrows late last month, as did news that Tesla dangled discounts to US buyers.

I’m not an expert on Tesla. All I know is that deliveries were short of the average forecast from people who claim to be experts, and that production was higher than consensus expected. That left the widest gap between production and deliveries in at least 16 quarters. Plainly, some of that could be due to logistics and supply chain problems but, as Gene Munster told Bloomberg on Monday afternoon, “Tesla sells cars, and the auto industry is slowing down.”

Musk could step away from Twitter entirely tomorrow and it wouldn’t do anything to boost near-term demand for Teslas or clear up any remaining logistical frictions. And I have no doubt whatsoever that the people running Tesla and SpaceX are highly capable individuals. What I do wonder, though, is whether the public will, over time, develop a deeply ingrained distrust for Musk due to the perception that he’s become chief right-wing provocateur. Do note: It needn’t even be distrust to undermine Tesla’s business prospects. Simple disgust could be enough.

Tesla, as Munster so aptly put it, “sells cars.” Other people sell cars too. At the risk of trafficking in stereotypes, lots of liberal-leaning voters buy electric vehicles. Musk is now engaged in what certainly looks, on many days, like a concerted effort to alienate liberals with caustic rhetoric and some very crude memes. How that can possibly be optimal for Tesla, maker of expensive EVs, is a total mystery to me. To once again risk trafficking in stereotypes, no lower-income American amused by Musk’s anti-liberal editorializing is going to buy a $50,000 electric car shaped like a bubble.

More broadly, I continue to worry about the personal intent point discussed above. I hope (I really, really do) that it’s all nothing — that Musk will eventually turn the Twitter reins over to a new CEO, and eventually lose interest in daily political agitation just like he seemed to lose interest in Dogecoin. The risk, though, is that even if Musk doesn’t harbor any ill intent, he begins to believe his own propaganda. It’s very easy to get lost in that echo chamber, even if — and perhaps especially if — you own it. Once you’re lost down there, getting out is almost impossible.