From Stock Plunge to Protests, Why Elon’s Tears Tell Tesla’s Tragic Story

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/elons-oval-office-meltdown-leaked?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

Posted by ControlCAD

25 comments

  1. >I’ve seen some wild shit in my day, but nothing—nothing—prepared me for the leaked audio of Elon Musk sobbing to Donald Trump about Tesla’s nosedive. The world’s richest man, the guy who’s spent years cosplaying as Tony Stark, was reportedly bawling his eyes out in the Oval Office, begging the former President to save his crumbling empire.

    >Tesla’s stock, once the darling of Wall Street, is getting hammered. As I write this on April Fool’s Day (ironic, right?), TSLA is sitting at $222.15 after a brutal 15% drop in a single day last month—the worst since 2020. That’s down from a mid-December peak of $480, a jaw-dropping 50% haircut in just a few months. Investors are bailing, sales are tanking, and the public? Oh, the public hates Elon right now. Like, spray-paint-swastikas-on-Cybertrucks level hate. And this audio? It’s the sound of a man who knows the jig is up.

    >I’ve got no sympathy for the guy. Elon’s spent years building Tesla into a symbol of innovation, a middle finger to Big Oil, and—let’s be real—a cult for tech bros and stock pumpers. But he’s also spent the last year tying himself to Trump tighter than a MAGA hat on a hillbilly rallygoer, and that’s where the wheels started coming off. The backlash isn’t just loud; it’s visceral. Protests are popping up everywhere—hundreds of them, from Seattle to Miami, London to Berlin. The “Tesla Takedown” movement hit all 277 U.S. showrooms last weekend, with crowds chanting “Elon Musk, shame on you” and waving signs like “Honk if you hate Elon.” They’re not just mad; they’re organized. And they’re hitting him where it hurts: his bottom line, with the goal of “ZEROING” Tesla stock.

    >The numbers don’t lie. Tesla sales in Europe dropped 45% in January compared to last year—76% in Germany alone. Australia’s down 72%. China, a key market, is slipping too, thanks to competition from cheaper EVs and Elon’s cozying up to far-right politics. Used Tesla prices are cratering—Cybertrucks are fucking DISASTER —and trade-ins are at record highs, according to Edmunds. Owners are ditching their cars, slapping bumper stickers on them that scream, “I bought this before Elon went nuts.” Hell, even Sheryl Crow sold hers. That’s how toxic this brand’s gotten.

    >And the violence? It’s next-level. Charging stations torched near Boston. Shots fired at a dealership in Oregon. Molotov cocktails in Colorado. Swastikas scrawled on cars from Pasadena to Clermont. Trump’s calling these folks “domestic terrorists,” threatening 20-year sentences in El Salvador’s mega-prison, but it’s not slowing down. If anything, it’s escalating. The progressive group Indivisible’s out there with protest guides, and Hollywood’s jumping in—John Cusack’s railing against Elon, and Valerie Costa, a Seattle organizer, got personally targeted by Musk on X with zero evidence. He’s lashing out, and it’s pathetic because he’s pathetic.

    >Which brings us to the Rose Garden Tesla infomercial. Remember that?

    >Trump turned the White House driveway into a car lot, plops into a red Model S with Elon riding shotgun, and starts reading a sales pitch—complete with pricing—off a damn script. “Beautiful!” he says, like he’s auditioning for QVC. Fox News cronies like Sean Hannity jump on the bandwagon, buying Teslas as a “gesture” of solidarity. It was part therapy session, part emergency PR stunt—Trump trying to prop up his biggest donor after Elon’s MAGA tears soaked the Oval Office carpet. The stock ticked up that day, sure, but it was a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Analysts like Dan Ives from Wedbush called it—Tesla’s a “political symbol of Trump and DOGE,” and that’s poison for a brand that used to sell eco-dreams to liberals.

    >Why’s this happening? Easy. Elon bet the farm on Trump, dumped $290 million into his 2024 campaign, and took a gig running the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), slashing federal jobs and DEI contracts like a one-man wrecking crew. People saw it—a billionaire buying his way into power, saluting like a wannabe dictator on Inauguration Day (his daughter called it a Nazi move), and they snapped. Tesla’s not just a car anymore; it’s a lightning rod. Every dollar spent on it feels like a vote for Elon’s dystopian bromance with Trump, and folks are done.

    >The leaked audio’s the cherry on top. Picture it: Elon, red-eyed, voice trembling, whining about how “extreme public hatred” is killing Tesla. Trump, probably half-listening, nodding along like a bored uncle. It’s humiliating. The guy who once launched a car into space is now crying to a reality TV star turned President because his brand’s in freefall. And Tesla? It’s not coming back from this anytime soon. The stock’s a rollercoaster to nowhere, the protests are relentless, and the infomercial didn’t fix shit—it just made Elon look weaker.

    >I’ll say it: Elon did this to himself. He traded Tesla’s soul for political clout, and now he’s reaping the whirlwind. The audio’s out there, the numbers are grim, and the streets are screaming. Tesla’s not just going down—it’s crashing hard. And all the tears in the world won’t save it.

  2. “My actions are hurting me…sniff…it’s bad. This is bad.”

  3. The fun thing is, even if the board fired Musk tomorrow, which they won’t and they should, it’s over for that brand. It will forever be associated with the Nazi from South Africa who helped ruin the United States. No one will want to be associated with that.

    Edit: for all the people that are going but what about this car company and what happened to them and what about that car company and what happened to them and they’re doing just fine, this is not remotely the same thing. There is no other CEO of a car company that has stepped in and single-handedly helped destroy the US literally from the White House with the president’s encouragement. This is the huge difference here why people are not going to want to be associated with Teslas. Teslas will always equal Elon Musk. Always.

  4. Let’s talk about the tariffs and the effects it has on the manufacturers of this country.

    Assume for a minute that you wanted to bring back some manufacturing to the USA, which of course is a huge assumption compared to manufacturing outside the country like we do as a company.

    Which I will get to in just a moment.
    This week alone the stock market lost over US$9 trillion which means every single manufacturer that has a US corporation is part of that loss. Which goes to show you that Trump‘s logic is about as efficient as his spray tan.

    If these companies even had a thought of coming back to the United States, all of their cash has now evaporated because of the loss in the stock market so who’s going to finance these new manufacturing plants that Trump keeps talking about, that are going to come back here make the economy great?

    Now goods have gone up in price in some cases doubled already this week which means the consumers are going to be buying less. Companies are going to begin layoffs, because they’ve lost a huge portion of their cash reserves. Their businesses are going to be diminished some because of the lower purchasing rate and the higher pricing.

    Bringing manufacturing back to the United States at this point with this approach has been almost completely eliminated.

    All you have to do is go back and look at what happened during the depression when they tried to institute tariffs causing the depression to take even a further nose dive and adding years into the depressive point. It’s such a joke that they used it in the movie Ferris Bueller‘s Day off where the teacher was talking about how bad tariffs are and how they caused the depression to go down, which goes to show you that if they use it as a punchline, then it obviously cannot work.

    With our business, we were building some manufacturing plants in the United States and now have had to put it on hold because of the tariffs. As an example, each of our production lines has a manufacturing cost of a little under US$5 million, we did try to price it in the United States but we found quotes anywhere from $12-$16 million for the same exact production line that we are having made in China. So we couldn’t make the equipment in the United States, but we were going to import it and set up manufacturing plants.

    One of them was in Arkansas where the state is somewhat depressed. Now we have put that project on hold with approximately 1800 people we were going to hire.

    The reason for that is not just the tariffs, from the equipment if you think about it a piece of equipment that cost me $5 million is now going to cost me about $9 million. Each production line generates about US$35 million of revenue so it’s not just a tariff in my situation it’s the fact that for $9 million I can have practically two production lines generating $70 million of income compared to the same $9 million generating $35 million worth of income, with a much lower profit margin because of the labor cost in the United States along with all the taxes and liability issues that you carry because of the litigious nature of the United States operating.

    So tariffs do not work, they hurt the economy. The only thing that they do on the surface is generate more tax dollars for the US government, but they diminish and wipe out the middle and lower class.

    Do you want to bring manufacturing back to the United States?

    You’ve got to do something about all of the litigious actions, you have to lower healthcare cost, lower pharmaceutical cost, have to educate more so that children can grow up and learn trades.

    You have to find ways to lower the cost of living and once you start doing that then laboring jobs will become available again.

    The next problem is the taxation situation is off-balance. We have structured our tax code so that the wealthy and the publicly traded companies that offer stock options instead of salaries, which is taxable make it almost impossible to collect tax.

    Take Musk for an example from Tesla.

    They talk about his $300 billion worth but it’s all in stock and that’s unrealized gains paying no taxes. What he does is he goes to the bank and he borrows money against that stock portfolio, borrowed money is non-taxable income and then he uses that money to live and buy things like he bought Twitter for $44 billion with borrowed money, no taxes paid at all.

    And then what he does from there to pay off those loans is he borrows against other portfolios and he just keeps borrowing deferring the taxes.

    $300 billion and no taxes paid whereas the employees that work for all those companies have taxes taken out of each paycheck.

    Just look salaries up of the top executives around the country and you look at their income, you’ll see that their salaries are generally between one hundred and two hundred thousand US dollars but they earned anywhere from ten to a hundred million dollars a year all in stock options and then they keep those options in stock and then borrow against them so their tax base is almost nothing.

    you want to fix the economy. You have to find a way to tax the rich, you’re not going to make them poor, you’re just going to make them help to strengthen the economy.

    I almost forgot, tariffs funds go directly to the administration for spending (trump and his team), whereas taxes go through congress for spending.

  5. Their cash flow is lower because they have to pay higher tariffs. How are they going to generate cash or get a loan to invest in an American supply base while their costs are higher, sales are lower due to reduced consumer confidence. These are not theoretical thought exercises.

  6. So much encouragement and feeling from agent orange

  7. If you watch my face, *really, really close,* you can easily physically see how much I don’t give a shit about what happens to a nazi billionaire who is actively trying to destroy America and STEAL EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT NAILED DOWN, LIKE SOCIAL SECURITY, FOR RUSSIA.

    Some people call it a smirk, and *LUCKY ME,* I get one for free with every schadenfreude.

  11. Wasn’t it Elon who said, “Americans must feel some hardships to cut 2 trillion from the deficit”?

    Time to heed your own advice there fella

  15. Was there something else? It doesn’t sound like he’s tearing up but I don’t usually listen to him so I don’t know how he typically sounds. However, I find it difficult to believe that the Russia asset would say anything empathetic. That’s a bit of a stretch.

  16. Crocodile tears. No one’s falling for it, except maybe Drumpf.

  19. It never had to be this way. You could of just kept twitter, go all in on spaceX, or maybe just play the video games you hire people to play for you. Just pay some taxes, abide by a few regulations, and just live with your head down.

    But no, you kicked off a massive economic recession by firing hundreds of thousands of people, slashed safety nets left and right, and cut off the most petty of expenses (like libraries and food pantries) while funneling contracts to spaceX. Then you broke into numerous agencies and stole countless terabytes of personal private info. The tariff and diplomacy crisis are just adding fuel to the massive pile of deadwood you made in washington. So while *those* things arent your fault, its the one-two-three combo thats gonna kill America. You are a main component to this failure.

    And now you bitch that people dont like you, and tesla (that you have stopped paying any attention to since mid 2024) is dying. Once maga figures out that social security and the aca are going to be trashed, who do you think trump will throw under the bus? Blaming biden only goes so far and he sure as shit aint gonna say it was him.

    That nazi salute was chefs kiss by the way. Post screen grabs of democrats waving all you want. You single handedly killed your brand. Nothing can change this.

    All you had to do was sit down and shut up.

  20. I’ll wait until this is confirmed as real.

    But if it is real, then my main concern is how someone is making secret recordings in the Oval Office.

  21. Elon sucks but there is no evidence that “leaked audio” is real.

  22. Have we got a second source for this?

    I’m not running with an April 1st article, based on a few seconds long TikTok video. Regardless of how much it sounds like Elon and Trump. When AI can make parents think that the person on the phone is their children.

  25. Guys, I want this to be real, but it’s not. Look on Snopes, there’s no evidence it’s a real leak, and AI detecting software indicates that it’s most likely fake.

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