Tesla’s last quarterly report revealed that deliveries had declined for the second year running and, for the first time, annual revenues had fallen. “It is starting to look as if Tesla is finished,” concluded a piece in The Spectator.
To what extent Musk will succeed can’t be known, but his track record demands thoughtful uncertainty at the least
If you felt you’d read about Tesla’s death before, you would have been right. Success in one arena guarantees nothing in another – brilliant men, such as Tesla’s boss Elon Musk, harbour reserves of mediocrity and can be bafflingly stupid. Writing them off too soon, though, can become a bad habit.
Having run up massive debts in America through backing bad ideas, Mark Twain was in London raising money when he received a message from New York asking if rumours about his health were true. He replied that “the report of my death was an exaggeration,” although history has improved the quote.
Musk’s failure has been forecast so often it’s become its own genre. I had heard of the company earlier, but my earliest memory of reading about Tesla was a 2018 piece in the Economist. That talked of bankruptcy and bluster, said the company’s history was one of repeated failures, and painted a picture of imminent demise. Negative stories sell, but Musk attracts noticeably more than most.
Coverage of his takeover of Twitter was not warm. A BBC journalist challenged him over the wave of hate speech that had resulted, but was memorably unable to answer Musk’s request either for evidence, or for a single example. As a pseudonymous user of X, posting pictures of cats and food to a small audience, I mainly noticed exits to Bluesky by the virtuous. My conviction is that defending hate speech is essential, since without that there’s no freedom of speech at all. Regardless, the predictions of X’s death, like those of so many about Musk’s ventures, have not been borne out.
Much of what’s written about Musk’s work is a badly disguised verdict on the man himself. Christopher Hitchens spoke proudly of defending David Irving, a man he found repulsive, and not merely in his Holocaust denial. Whether you like somebody, Hitch was pointing out, is often not the key issue. Free speech is worth nothing unless you defend what you loathe, and you don’t evaluate a business on the basis of whether you like the CEO. When it comes to judgements on Musk’s companies, moralising gets disguised as objective assessment, and the audience and the speaker connive not to notice. “Musk is not a Nazi,” said Stephen Fry, “Nazis made really good cars.”
After a Starship launch ended with a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’, the headlines crowed. “SpaceX Loses Control of Starship, Adding to Spacecraft’s Mixed Record” said the New York Times. “SpaceX Starship rocket fails to deploy satellites and explodes on re-entry,” said the Financial Times. Bloomberg said the failed launch meant the company had actually gone backwards. But engineers learn from their failures, and know to expect them. Journalists too often do neither, and one need not admire Musk to grow weary of the premature obituaries.
Google’s Waymo is ahead of Tesla in self-driving taxis, and Musk’s predicted timescales for Tesla’s version keep slipping. But once Tesla gets it right, they won’t just have a few of Waymo’s specially modified Jaguar I-PACEs: they’ll have an entire fleet, capable of operating independently. Robotics, AI, chip manufacture, automated manufacturing, and energy solutions: Tesla is no more just a car maker than Apple is a phone manufacturer. Waymo’s Jaguars are now prowling London, mapping our zebra crossings and noting our patriotic conviction that jaywalking is a foreign term. Tesla’s gamble is that a more feral AI, which doesn’t need to map the world before venturing forth, can do better.
To what extent Musk will succeed can’t be known, but his track record demands thoughtful uncertainty at the least. The media may not agree, but the market does – Tesla’s share price has stayed resilient despite last quarter’s news. Stock markets demonstrate how often the wisdom of crowds can be wildly wrong, but media outlets do the same. Tesla shares sell for a massive price to earnings ratio, and at least the people betting on the company’s growth have put their money where their hopes are. Many journalists have boosted their income by saying Musk is going to fail, but I don’t recall any boasting of having gotten rich by short-selling Tesla – and if they had, they would.
There’s nothing wrong with approaching the world full of prejudice. You have to begin somewhere. The key is to adjust ideas after they collide with reality. Rushing to paint Tesla or any other of Musk’s ventures as a failing business is a mark of that most comfortable type of intellectual dishonesty, that of the fervent ideologue. I have friends who believe Keir Starmer had an unsuccessful legal career, Boris Johnson has no talent with words, JK Rowling cannot write fiction, and Musk is an incompetent businessman. These are people who fit their view of life to their ideas. Their despatches from the front lines of reality are unreliable.
Musk has said he wants to die on Mars – just not on impact. I wouldn’t bet against him. Self-driving cars seem like wilful fantasy until you get in a Waymo, and find it navigates the utter chaos of Bay Area roads with such aplomb that following it with a chauffeured Uber feels distinctly unsafe – an impression the data supports. Of all the companies making cars, picking out Tesla for its struggles suggests ulterior motives more than market insight. And, for what it’s worth, I drive a Skoda.
