My friend’s father bought a 2025 Tesla after my friend begged him not to, but a boomer’s gotta boomer. Suffice to say, it hasn’t gone well for him, so the man went and put this decal on his car. My brother in Christ, you are driving a freshly redesigned car. Nobody is going to believe your swastikar is pre-COVID.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      12 hours ago

      I feel like around 2018 with the mini sub and insisting it be used to save those boy in the cave was a big turning point in the public perception. Maybe more of an inflection point.

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        10 hours ago

        To me it was when he started to sell bullshit and didn’t deliver that it became clear he’s a lying piece of shit. So when I first heard about him. When he forced himself into important positions while being horrible in everything he did except for hyping up dumb people who gave him their money. He’s a sleazy salesman who has shown time and time again he will do anything at any cost to achieve his goal, which consists of money, fame and power. He doesn’t care about the people he harms or deceive. He doesn’t have great ideas himself, he steals other’s ideas and claims them as his own. And this showed when he pushed himself into the tesla company and he became a more public figure, or at least to me he did. I never trusted the guy, I always warned people about him because he’s a lying charlatan. Looking back at older footage of him, it also shows clearly (with the whole old X - PayPal disaster which he lies about, or the game he copied). If anyone thinks he wasn’t crazy before, they are just dumb and/or extremily ignorant.

        • UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          He took all the credit for Tesla and sued the guys that started the company so that only his name was attached to it. I remember reading about the Lotus based Tesla before I knew about him.

          The original creators of the Tesla car were engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who founded Tesla Motors in 2003. While they were the company’s founders, Elon Musk became the company’s first major investor in 2004 and was later granted co-founder status after a lawsuit settlement, which also included other early executives like J.B. Straubel and Ian Wright.

      • RobotsLeftHand@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Yeah, the “pedo guy” comment was completely revealing. That’s not just a moment of weakness or slip of the mind. Thems the words if a verified sociopathic narcissist.

    • P1k1e@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Less obvious if your not paying attention to him and only hear things about him from his fans…or atleast back in 2017. Now it’s basically impossible not to notice he’s a twat

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    I kind of think this is valid. If you have a Tesla, you need to apologize for it

    I’m not getting down in the weeds, seeing when you got the Tesla and how that pans out. I don’t care, maybe you have your reasons. I don’t know you

    But it is not optional to disavow Elon

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    Even people who have no issue with Musk put these on their cars. They know Musk is unpopular and do this to avoid vandalism.

    • Soulg@ani.social
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      15 hours ago

      General public sentiment was very positive around 7-8yr ago. We know you’re very smart and special for disliking him before that, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people liked him still.

      For my part I got off the train after those kids that got trapped in the cave.

      • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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        The cave thing was 7 years ago. No one’s gonna judge you if you caught on to Elon’s grift late but some of us follow this kind of news habitually and there have been a whole lot of us “smart and special” types for well over a decade.

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        12 hours ago

        I disliked him before that, but that was more like “he overworks his employees and there’s lots of injuries because he prioritizes aesthetics over safety in his factories”, not like “he’s a full blown nazi”.

        Back then you could convince yourself the end justifies the means, but one could no longer justify that stance after his Twitter addiction fully took hold. Which was around the time he called that cave diver a pedo.

        • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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          11 hours ago

          He was always a grifter type. He created an entire company “Boring company” just to undermine the highspeed rail projects.

          • bus_factor@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago

            Same deal there. Back then the Boring Company seemed misguided, later it was shown to be actually malicious.

            • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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              9 hours ago

              Misguided? Right… “lets put self driving cars in a tunnel”… you mean like a subway invented 100+ years ago?

              • bus_factor@lemmy.world
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                8 hours ago

                The original concept was a train in a vacuum tube. There are massive challenges with maintaining the vacuum, especially when letting passengers on and off, so it’s quite unrealistic. But eliminating air resistance would be cool in theory.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        14 hours ago

        after those kids that got trapped in the cave.

        I hated him quite a bit before that, but no so much that the OG teslas were off my want list.

        To this day, I kinda want to buy one of the used cheap fire sale ones and build a kit car out of the motors and batteries. There’s some good engineering here and there, just not as a whole car and not relying on that company for anything.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          OG Teslas were off my want list because even though Musk crowed about “open source,” they weren’t actually open in the way that mattered. AFAIK there’s DRM you have to work around if you want to use Tesla parts in a kit car, and it shouldn’t have to be that way.

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            11 hours ago

            See that sounds like a fun time, if I could trust my self to not screw everything up. Get a classic car, re-kit as electric, enjoy style AND the benefits of electric.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            12 hours ago

            I’ve seen some people do a nice job on some electric VW bugs, kinda hard to hide the batteries though.

    • Kellenved@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      Ya he is raised by an apartheid era emerald mine owner. Basically imagine the son of a plantation owner in antebellum south

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    23 hours ago

    Elon went crazy in 2018 at the latest (the Thai cave rescue thing). Anybody who bought one of his cars after that knew what they were getting into.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Depends on, I personally know otherwise very political people who didn’t know about the Thai cave rescue controversy, while others still think he’s “just a bit upset that his child transitioned”, because they read “non-loony lefty sources”, that downplay his transphobia.

      • Don_alForno@feddit.org
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        22 hours ago

        Ok, I’ll rephrase: Anybody who bought one of his cars after that only has themselves to blame for being ignorant and shouldn’t expect any absolution from me.

    • kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      As long as Elon has been in the spotlight I’ve read about what an awful company Tesla is, how innovative SpaceX is but at the same time has horrible leadership to work for.

      It was even before 2017 when I tried talking my brother out of buying one because of how clear it was they were cutting corners, hiding behind minimalism to excuse their lacking plastic covered interior.

      I refuse to give anyone a pass for buying one, the writing has been on the wall since day one. Any Tesla owner is just another slave to the zeitgeist.

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    20 hours ago

    I have no respect for anyone who drives a Tesla at this point. I would have sold mine already on principle, if I had one, no matter how old it was.

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    22 hours ago

    Honestly I feel sorry for anybody driving an older Tesla. I remember maybe 8, 9 years ago i had a long talk with some guy who owned the first (?) model, and I have to admit we shared the enthusiasm. Wasn’t many E-cars on that level back then.

    I didn’t follow Musk in the media and I missed the Thai cave rescue & pedo calling disaster, so it took me a few months longer to start to realize what sort of person he really is. When exactly? Must’ve been before he bought Twitter. Sometime during Trump1.0.

    And then it all came in like a retroactive flood. How he stole Tesla from the people who really started it, how delusional all his space projects are, how deeply corrupt/entwined he’s always been with the government…

    But I don’t like those stickers, no matter how old the Tesla is.

    Tesla is not the only option anymore.

    If you’re serious you sell it. I know you can get other e-cars relatively cheaply nowadays, much cheaper than a new Tesla. So, what would the resell value be on any Tesla?

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      I don’t get the “just sell it” crowd. Your solution is playing hot potato with a car. Like someone is still getting that car. Unless you manage to sell it to Tesla themselves I guess, but it’s my understanding that they only take them on trade-in.

      So the choices you’re proposing are: Sell a car so it’s now Someone Else’s Problem, which isn’t a great look for you. Or scrap a perfectly usable car creating a bunch of waste, which isn’t a great look for you.

      Just let people have their old cars, geez.

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      18 hours ago

      I plunked down $1000 sight-unseen in March 2016 for a first-run Model 3. I had driven a Model S (no way I could afford one) and was obsessed with Tesla. I finally received my 3 in early 2018 (I believe) and loved that car like a newborn baby. I was a rockstar in the area, people wanted to see it. Kids wowed when I drove by. The future of transport was looking bright and I was at the forefront.

      Over time, Elon’s actions became more unhinged, and for a while I had the “separate the art from the artist” attitude. The Salute was the final straw. I had gotten more and more embarrassed by my car as it symbolized everything I hated, due simply to the actions of the insane CEO. When he helped elect Trump and became butt buddies with him, I knew my car’s days in my garage were limited. I sold it to Carvana for $18300 and bought a used Audi for the same price.

      Man, I miss that car. It was everything I wanted. The FSD web of lies pissed me off, but the car was objectively great.

      I have a reservation for a Rivian R2 now and I can’t wait to get it. I’m getting the same feeling all over again. So, what I guess I’m saying is, please RJ Scaringe don’t turn into a Nazi.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        It’s not the same, but Rivian has been able to survive in a big way because of another asshole billionaire, Jeff Bezos. They were smart up mostly keep their branding off those Amazon vans, especially since most have been damaged by poorly trained drivers at this point.

        • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
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          12 hours ago

          Very true, but at least he doesn’t own or run the company. If you’re going to get a large loan to start a company, you’re gonna have to deal with an asshole billionaire.

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        I plunked down $1000 sight-unseen in March 2016 for a first-run Model 3.

        I’m guessing you missed a 0 there? If so, you got $8300 more out of it than you paid, 8 years later? That can’t be true.

        There’s a chinese company whose name eludes me that makes e-cars that look almost supiciously like Teslas, and another called CUPRA, apparently a branch of Seat (Spain). Just saying.

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        9 hours ago

        Yeah, omg, how it’s this still a thing (better than the older models, but still).
        The production value on not-that-cheap cars is bad, but folks just don’t care?
        (It used to be that ppl thought fancy or rugged cars were fancy/rugged bcs of how they were built, not bcs someone in an ad told them so even after they’ve seen the car irl.)

        It’s like the industry didn’t learn anything from Toyota’s infamous entry into the USA production market.

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      20 hours ago

      Looks of a tesla are the last of my concerns personally…

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        17 hours ago

        imo they blend into traffic. i don’t even think they look bad. however, when you buy a new Tesla your money goes to a very dangerous nazi pos.

        there are many ways one could come into the ownership of a vehicle but if you’re buying one new and charging at Tesla stations you’re financially supporting that scum and enabling his objectives.

        flip-off your local cybertruck drivers and give the benefit of the doubt to the used teslas methinks

        • 87Six@lemmy.zip
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          7 hours ago

          Yea but I meant that even while taking out Elon and his bullshittery, the cars are still fucking trash.

          The panel gaps are huge and weird, the paint is INCREDIBLY thin and sensitive, and don’t get me started on the hassle of an EV to someone like me who lives in an apartment. I also hate the entirety of the user interface and controls, I despisd touchscreens, and I despise all else including the door handles. The whole car is a huge no to me even ignoring the nazi.

        • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlOPM
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          17 hours ago

          Buying a used one still helps the brand survive by maintaining its relevance.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlOPM
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      16 hours ago

      Hate from ignorance, thats always dangerous.

      I agree. Please share your wisdom. Please share how funding the world’s richest man, who is actively trying to do harm at every turn (today, not in 1942), by purchasing a Tesla vehicle (new or used) is an excusable action.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      15 hours ago

      Dude. Elon Musk is alive and funding Nazi groups.

      VW and AUDI leadership in the 30s died decades ago.

      You will have a bad time looking up Japanese companies that made bombs for WW2. They had no choice in the matter.

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      15 hours ago

      Yes, can’t afford one, that’s why last time I was looking at new cars, I got a Mercedes, and now that my incredibly expensive to maintain ex is out of the picture, I’m looking at BMW and Volvo.

      Which, yes, are companies that were ran by nazi families decades ago, but you know what? Those nazis are now dead, and those companies know how to make cars, Tesla knows how to make really fast (in a straight line) smart refrigerators. They were awesome 10-12 years ago, now they’re just meh.

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    17 hours ago

    I get that people like to hate on stuff, but I think the Tesla thing should have really passed by now. If I had to put a sticker on all types of shit I buy and the manufacture of which lined the pockets of devilish CEOs and billionaires I would go bankrupt on buying stickers. Sure a Tesla has always sort of been a statement and it is a big investment, but I really think that one year after Trump’s election and Elon “going crazy” we shouldn’t lynch people for having one.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlOPM
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      17 hours ago

      Tesla is literally funding Elon and all his misdeeds. His entire net worth is tied to Tesla.

      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        His networth from SpaceX and xAI is worth more than Tesla at current prices.

        It’s probably easier to take loans out against his Tesla shares being a public company, but his networth is not remotely tied entirely to Tesla.

        All his Tesla shares could suddenly vanish, and he’d still likely be worth more than Zuckerberg and be the 3rd or 4th richest person.

    • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      15 hours ago

      We can pass on when Elon no longer has financial ties to the company. Or he somehow makes a massive turnaround as a human being (not likely, but we can always be generous and leave open the possibility). We don’t ignore issues just because time has passed.

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      13 hours ago

      It’s the insane price tag of it (given that it’s a car) combined with the fact that beyond the usual evil ceo shit he’s politically active and manipulating public discourse in favor of fascism.

      • halvar@lemy.lol
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        15 hours ago

        Exactly what I’m talking about. I could be Karl Marx himself but if I question whether hating on people for the car they use is correct then I’m accused of being a fucking nazi.

        • falseWhite@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          “Hating on people for knowingly supporting Nazis”

          And

          “Hating on people for defending Nazi supporters”

          • halvar@lemy.lol
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            15 hours ago

            no you are hating people for using a car. you could be hating people for using a car in general, you could be hating people for using amazon or facebook or buying groceries in a chain owned by “a nazi”, but hating people for using a tesla is more focused. it’s easier. belive me i too think elon musk is an asshole but targeting people for owning a fucking car is a bit over the top if you ask me or i assume any reasonable man. i wouldn’t buy one. it’s overpriced, stupid and run by an asshole, who sure you could call a nazi. but not caring is a right anyone in a democracy has. you bought a tesla because you like elon? fuck you sure. you bought one because just? not very cool to not give a shit about elon being a nazi, but sure, you have the right to do that.

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              14 hours ago

              Who’s targeting them? What exactly do you mean?

              Are you saying I should stop calling out Nazi supporters for supporting Nazis and just be quiet?

              It’s not like I go damaging their cars or hurting them in any way, other than calling them fucking nazi supporters. Which is what they are.