The movement’s message is simple: “Sell your swasticars, dump your stock, and join the picket lines.” And with Tesla’s shares crumbling by the day, they might not have to work too hard to get their wish.
Tesla’s stock, once the golden goose of CEO Elon [Roman salute] Musk’s empire, is in freefall. Yesterday it closed down over eight per cent, bringing its total losses to nearly 40 per cent since its December peak of just under $490 per share. Bitcoin dropped only 15 per cent in the same period.
Investors have seen Tesla bounce back from brutal drops before, but this time, it’s different—this time, the stock looks fragile.
The worst is yet to come. If Tesla follows previous patterns, it could still fall another 30 per cent to erase the gains it made leading up to Musk’s disastrous political foray. A further 50 per cent drop would bring it back to the lows of April last year, which happened to be its all-time high from 2020.
There’s no reason Tesla couldn’t tumble to those levels. It’s always been a volatile stock, but investors used to believe it would always bounce back—until now. If this slide continues, there’s no guarantee it will ever recover. The market has lost faith in Musk, and Tesla is uncharted territory.
Tesla Takedown isn’t just about making noise. Its best play isn’t just picketing showrooms but targeting what props up Musk’s empire: the stock price.
“Publicly associating them with being a Nazi sympathiser helps the cause,” one protester said bluntly. However, the real move is to urge investors to dump Tesla shares.
As critics have long argued, the stock is the ultimate meme coin, driven more by Musk’s cult of personality than any solid financials.
Even Musk has admitted that Tesla is worth “basically zero without full self-driving.” And after nearly a decade of broken promises, that technology still doesn’t exist. Worse, the version Tesla does have has been involved in fatal crashes, and Musk has spent years dodging legal responsibility for it.
Big investors are getting fed up. Tesla is losing market share fast, especially in China, where it once led foreign EV brands but has now suffered a 22 per cent year-over-year decline in sales.
Tesla Takedown doesn’t need to convince people to stop buying the cars—Tesla is already doing a great job of that on its own. The real battle is convincing investors to cash out while they still can.
Hedge fund manager Per Lekander has been shorting Tesla since 2020 despite its financial bloodbath. In April last year, he claimed it was only worth $14 a share—far from the $302 it closed at today.
That price might sound insane, but if Tesla were valued like any other car company, that’s where it would land. For years, Tesla has ridden high on promises and dreams. It was supposed to be the car for lefties, those who like to knit their yoghurt and protect the environment, not be associated with neo-nazis and extremism.
