Like a lot of Tesla owners, I’m sickened by Elon Musk’s metamorphosis into a mega-funder of extreme right wing political aspirants. Since acquiring Twitter in October 2022, his gleeful unleashing of armies of vile miscreants who had been blocked by Twitter’s previous management policies is rapidly turning it into a toxic sewer.

Like many others, my own Twitter following began haemorrhaging as people bailed in disgust at what he unleashed (including his own rancid posts) and his desecration of the platform’s functionality and culture. Today, I rarely use it, having moved to the fresh air on BlueSky.    

At first many of us resisted the name change from Twitter to X, but we must now acknowledge that Twitter is dead and what remains, X, is a very different beast. To refer to it as Twitter is to deny Musk’s destruction of what was a vibrant town square.

The oceans of money he poured into Trump’s re-election campaign turbo-charged his X disgrace. His fascist-style fist-pumps and salutes on Trump’s inauguration day removed any scintilla of doubt about Musk’s values.

If I ever buy another car, it would certainly be an EV, but not a Tesla. I fully support efforts to raise awareness of Musk’s mendacity and to urge potential EV purchasers to think hard about their choices.

But that said, there’s a good deal of simplistic Manichean thinking being flung about here. And not a little hypocrisy when, as is highly likely, many of the Tesla haters continue to do their bit to fund Big Oil when they continue to fill their fossil-fuelled cars and motorbikes.

So should those who are disgusted by Musk all feel mortified about driving our Teslas? Should we all get rid of them and spread the word? It’s now common to hear people remark that while they understand how excellent Teslas may be as an electric vehicle, they would never buy one because of all Musk stands for. The implication here is that if you have a Tesla, you are somehow declaring yourself as a Musk fan and have lined up with all other Tesla owners to enrich him. You need to feel shameful, apologise and seriously think about selling your Tesla. This video lays out that case.

Tesla also makes Powerwall batteries, with 600,000 sold worldwide by early 2024. Many competitors have now entered the rapidly expanding market.

Tesla also owns Starlink the high speed internet service which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX, a major Musk company. Among its many uses, is its ability to provide internet access in remote locations inaccessible to Australia’s National Broadband Network. The Starlink Mini is a compact, portable internet kit. An ocean sailing friend tells me there is currently no alternative for affordable internet access far away from land.

So presumably, those arguing that buying Tesla vehicles helps fund Musk’s agenda would also count purchasers of his batteries and Starlink internet as equally complicit and shameful.

Tesla was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Erberhard and Marc Tarpenning. From February 2004, the PayPal multi-millionaire Musk led fundraising and had been chairman and principal fundraiser for Tesla, then CEO from 2008. Today he’s the world’s wealthiest person.

Teslas have been on sale since 2008. We’d used one on a holiday to France in 2016 and had been immensely impressed but until the Model 3 was launched in 2017, found the price way out of our league. We bought our Model 3 in June 2021 for $AUD52,000 after a $15,000 trade-in on our sedate little Mazda. This outlay was similar to the cost of many decidedly non high-end petrol-fuelled cars.

Three motivations to buy our Tesla

We bought the car to reduce our carbon footprint, to save serious money on fuel and servicing and to enjoy a driving experience that is endlessly wonderful.

Transport vehicles are the leading source of anthropogenic carbon emissions and the only source where these emissions are rising  (see European data below). A typical fossil fuelled car emits 4.6 tonnes of CO₂ a year from its exhaust. EVs of course have no exhaust and emit nothing once manufactured.

Like ICE vehicles, EV manufacturing entails emissions. The chart below shows US EPA lifetime greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) estimates for ICE and fully electric vehicles.

# “feedstock” here refers to materials like liquids, cloth, rubber etc used in manufacturing

So in summary, reducing vehicle emissions is of immense importance in reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and EVs are hands-down winners over ICE vehicles when it comes to emission reductions.

Cost savings

The savings involved in EV ownership can be huge. Our experience of the car has been beyond outstanding. It is a fantastic thing. Our only outlay in 3.5 years has been two $60 wheel rotations. That’s all. No fuel (saving $1500 a year), no servicing and engine part repairs (saving perhaps $2500 in a typical year), 90% of our charging is done free off our solar roof during sunny days, with most of the remainder done during cheap off-peak times overnight.

A recent post on Australia’s Tesla owners Facebook page (81.6k members) from a guy who uses his as a rideshare business and has done 334,893km, explains how he’s still on the original brake pads which are more than 85% of original thickness, thanks to regenerative braking (ie: the electric motor turns into a generator and slows the car — charging the car! — when you decelerate).

This week I noticed and responded to a post on BlueSky

So let me parse the ethical issues involved. Three issues arise here for me.

First, while it is true that Musk benefits directly from every Tesla new car sale, he’s by no means the single beneficiary. The company’s market capitalisation on 26 Jan 2025 was $1.27 trillion. Musk owned 20.5% of Tesla’s stock by the end of 2024. So 79.5% of its global market capitalisation benefits other investors via dividends and stock value increases. With pension and superannuation funds being massive investors, there will be millions of ordinary working people who will be also benefitting beside Musk. Then there are the more than 100,000 Tesla employees. They probably feel good about working for a company that today makes the world’s #1 selling new car (the Model Y) and playing a role in inspiring competition from most other vehicle manufacturers which is seeing massive uptake of EVs. 18% of all cars sold in 2023 were EVs, up from 14% in 2022 and only 2% in 2018.

Ninety five percent of 2023 new EV registrations were just three markets: 60% in China (1 in 3 of all new registrations), nearly 25% in Europe (1 in 5), and 10% in the USA (1 in 10).

This is nothing but a positive development. Whatever Trump might try to do in the US, there is a massive, moving global wall of green EVs, rooftop solar, windfarms, home batteries, new green buildings and city design which is pushing forward hard. Bizarrely, Musk is in the front row in this while his buddy Trump is lining up with oil interests.

The huge curve ball being thrown here, is that Musk/Tesla is a massive contributor and stimulator to efforts by his competitors to reduce greenhouse emissions. But he is at the same time an odious stimulus to politics that may take humanity back to very dark periods.

Second, if I were to sell our Tesla and buy another EV make, I would lose an estimated $25-$30k off the purchase price. Competition since 2021 has seen the new price for the Model 3 fall to be competitive with and burgeoning cheaper alternatives in other manufacturers’ models. So pfft to “retaining value” — few cars ever do that and Teslas are no exception. But Jacoby glibly counsels me here that “progress always requires sacrifice”.

So, if I follow this, I’m supposed to take a $30k haircut in order to achieve …. what precisely?

Sydney’s roads would have one less Tesla reminding people of Elon? Oh wait, no. Whoever bought ours would fill the Tesla ownership gap we vacated.

So I’m left wondering what I asked Jacoby: what possible benefit selling our Telsa could ever be argued to bring?

Third, Jacoby did not answer about his own driving choices. If he drives a non-Tesla EV, great. But if he drives an ICE (internal combustion engine), I’m hoping that he has also counselled cyberspace to put notices under all ICE car and truck wipers to remind them of their moral turpitude in generating CO₂.

I put this to one of Jacoby’s other respondents who wrote:

The oil industry spent $US445m in the last election cycle to help re-elect Trump and from day 1, Trump has begun thanking them with his “drill, drill, drill” war cry on the environment.

By the very same argument being used by those rallying against Musk and Telsa, anyone still driving an ICE vehicle is polluting the earth’s atmosphere while lining the pockets of Big Oil which, like Musk, is facilitating the Trumpian politics that will put major lead in the saddlebags of the global race to reduce greenhouse emissions.

To my mind, that’s the first question that anyone trying to shame Tesla drivers needs to answer.      

Selling our Tesla wouldn’t result in any fewer Teslas on the road, whereas buying a new one would. So for as long as Elon is at the helm, I won’t be buying a new Tesla. In the meantime, I’ll keep driving my zero-emissions vehicle… and I’ve ordered a sticker from Etsy that says “I bought my Tesla before we knew Elon was a Nazi.”