Elon Musk is Having A Public Meltdown for The Ages

**John Johnston** (0:00)
Hi everyone, JJ here. Welcome back to The Lounge. Well, Elon Musk seems to be having a public meltdown for the ages, as Electric points out here. Tesla's Elon Musk is having a generational meltdown. I mean, maybe it's got something to do with Tesla being down 31% for the year, and his investors, including retail investors, his Tesla stockpumpers doing their best, but really feeling it, I think. Or SpaceX, of course, which had a massive IPO and has just been losing ever since, down 30% as well, but the IPO price 135 is now 112 with these lockups from insiders. Insider lockups coming due soon, so we will have to see what happens to that. But some people say that Tesla, that he wants it to go down so it can be rolled into SpaceX, so that is something too. That's not the only thing. This here, Musk went to war, sought jail time for X ad boycotts. Remember that when he had a meltdown over that, another public meltdown. But case ends with a whimper.
Remember that when he bought X and people, there was an ad boycott and he just lost it over that. And this one too, Tesla hits 10 million vehicles, but its EV growth has stalled. Now I'm old enough to remember when the Tesla bull people, the pumpers were saying that it will be 10 to 20 million cars made a year. I think 10 million by 2026, not 10 million total, 10 million a year. So Elon not having a good year. Well, he became a trillionaire. Now he's a former trillionaire. Maybe that's got something to do with it too. Says he doesn't care about money, but so obviously he does. It's all about money and power. And it seems he's getting back into politics as well, funding the midterms. So that will be something that really senses public popularity way down as well if he carries on with that. I mean, it happened last year like that. And he did say in a recent interview, that economist interview, that he went too far into politics. Then a week later he's diving in with huge funding. You know, let's see what Electric says here. This is Fred. Yes, Fred Lambert. Now I think this is a really good article, which is why I want to get into it. I'm going to react to it along the way. I think he's saying some very good things here. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent 2026 turning his X feed into a problem no investor relations team can fix.
His posts have escalated from trolling into open white nationalism. And this week his AI company sued the state administrator to block a log targeting non-consensual deep fake images. You know, those Nudify images that he's been doing or the XAI has been doing and that he doesn't mind. I mean, it's just unbelievable what he's been getting into there. The board of a public company would have fired the CEO for just a fraction of the stuff Musk is posting these days, Fred points out. And yes, when he owns the company, he owns X, it's become his propaganda platform, right? And some of the stuff on there is just unbelievable what he's posting these days. However, Tesla is not a normal company. Shareholders have given full control to Musk and now they have to live with it. Yeah, I think people are going to live to regret that. Investors and SpaceX as well. A lot of control of SpaceX. Mark Zuckerberg's got control, as Elon pointed out in that interview too, but Elon is a bit of a loose cannon. Does this whole thing don't bet against Elon? Well, betting against Elon and his companies has been paying off lately. A mild interview lit the fuse, and I did do a video about the interview, part of it, the Economist interview, where a journalist or the editor-in-chief did push back on him, and it was pretty lively to say the least. He just crashed out in that. A lot of the latest escalation traces back to one sit down on July 23rd. The Economist editor-in-chief is Zanny Minton Beddows. What a name, an amazing name. Interviewed Musk.
Elon Musk is a pretty amazing name too. It wasn't a hit job. This was no Epstein question. There was no Epstein question. She calmly pushed back on his claims about Europe. She did, she did a good job telling him London is a much safer place than any city in the United States, and that violent crime in the UK is coming down. She pointed out that he'd painted the UK as overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants with rape on every corner despite not having visited in years. She asked him point blank, when was the last time you went to the UK? He went, oh, a few years ago.