A new protest movement against Elon Musk has emerged, and whether it is having a tangible impact or is just a sign of the times is of secondary importance to the fact that Elon’s golden goose is looking more cooked by the day. Tesla Takedown is a movement to start protests at Tesla showrooms in an attempt to get people to “Sell your Teslas, dump your stock, and join the picket lines,” and the world is making progress towards Tesla Takedown’s goals every day.
Tesla stock, perhaps the most over-valued asset in human history and the primary source of Elon’s wealth, is just getting annihilated lately, especially today when it closed down a little over eight percent. After peaking at its all-time high of just under $490 per share on December 14th, Tesla stock is down nearly 40 percent since (to compare, Bitcoin is down just 15 percent over the same period). As bad as these past several weeks have been for Tesla shareholders, one look at the chart details how far it still can reasonably fall.
Chart by TradingView
There’s a technical phrase I learned in finance school for charts that look like this: yikes. Mega-yikes, even. That’s a multi-year double top-style structure with clear rejections both times at similar levels, and it’s still sitting above the bulk of the range it traded in from 2020 to 2024. It’s another 30 percent drop from its close today to retrace the move it began making shortly before Musk purchased himself an election, while Tesla would need to fall another 50 percent from today to reach the lows it hit in April of last year, which also are its all-time highs from November 2020 when it began its march to being the most fundamentally mispriced stock of all time.
Frankly, there’s no reason it couldn’t reach both those illustrious figures since it has made similar moves before. Tesla has always been volatile, but the market’s assumption has been that it will remain resilient until it doesn’t. We might be in the “until it doesn’t” part, because if this thing sprints to the gates of hell like it looks like it wants to, there is far from a guarantee that it can make any kind of comeback to its previous highs. Tesla is a very fragile stock given how expensive it is, and given the change in sentiment around it, this dramatic fall in its stock price is fundamentally different from all the other times that has happened. Tesla is in uncharted territory.
The savviest part of Tesla Takedown’s demands isn’t protesting the actual cars, although publicly associating them with being a Nazi sympathizer definitely helps the cause, but the request to divest from Tesla. The stock is the ultimate memecoin, and as I explained when Elon royally fucked Tesla over with his lowball offer for OpenAI, the last thing Tesla investors ever want is for it to be valued like a car company. Even Musk admits that without full sell driving, Tesla is worth “basically zero.”
And it doesn’t have full-self driving. Its self-driving kills people while Elon tries to skirt any legal responsibility for it. He’s promised this feature every year for nearly the last decade and investors have bought the stock believing that this time he may not be lying. There are plenty of big institutional investors who are sick of the power that Tesla has over the market and the utter hype it runs on, and they are less willing to suffer it in an increasingly uncertain world where Tesla is losing market share everywhere you look, especially in China where it used to be its leading foreign brand before experiencing a 22 percent year-over-year decline in sales. No one needs to protest Tesla into falling sales, the company is doing that just fine on its own, the key here is divestment. It’s not hard to make the simple case that there is very little juice left to squeeze from a stock this big up nearly 1,000 percent since 2020, and people in profit should take their profits.
So sell your Tesla stock. It rode this wave by being a functional monopoly, as people associated electric vehicles with its brand the way that Kleenex and Band-aid are synonymous with their products. Now that real car companies make electric vehicles, there’s just no way that Tesla can maintain its previous unchallenged market share, and that’s before you factor in their CEO being a Nazi who is destroying his company’s brand with the people most likely to buy his cars.
The hedge fund manager Lekander has been shorting Tesla stock since 2020 (which cannot be profitable, I must add), asserting in April of last year that the stock is actually worth $14, not the $302 it closed at today. While that may sound like the hallucination of a mad man, that’s just around the price its stock would have to be if it were valued like other car companies at its current earnings. Tesla’s inflated stock price is propped up entirely by hopium and lies. Now that the lies have been exposed in Elon’s rolling coup, it’s time for the folks behind movements like Tesla Takedown to strike at the heart of Elon’s empire, and prove to everyone that owning Tesla stock isn’t just a moral failure, but an economic one too.
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