What The Hell America!

How much does it cost to drive a Cybertruck?

The base sticker price for Tesla’s electric truck is $70,000, but that’s not the real cost. The real cost is the depreciation. When you go to trade in your Cybertruck, how much is it worth?

We have some answers. But before we get to the math, let’s go big-picture: Why should we care about the depreciation on a Tesla?

Because it’s part of a counterrevolution.

When Elon Musk allied with Donald Trump, he transformed his companies into explicitly political projects. Musk leveraged his wealth into political power. In turn, he used that power to carry out a revolution inside the federal government.

If you listen to the MAGAs, their revolution sounds Maoist. They want to depose the elites (researchers, academics, professionals) and create a New Man. This New MAGA Man will eschew decadent knowledge work and instead labor in glorious factories, putting tiny screws into iPhones.

Mind you, it’s not clear how many of the people in Trump’s orbit believe this stuff. Howard Lutnick and Peter Navarro might. Trump himself cares nothing for ideological projects—he just wants power and money. And Musk seems to want America to be a feudal system.

But sincerity doesn’t really matter. The point is that Musk helped Trump win the election and then became the vanguard carrying out a cultural revolution inside the government. Like a good Maoist, Musk dispatched cadres of young zealots to purge and reeducate on his behalf.

How do you stop such a man? You need a counterrevolution that attacks his power structure. Which in Musk’s case is: Tesla, the company.

The anti-Tesla movement is one of the most successful cases of social coordination in American history. In the span of six months the Tesla brand has been made radioactive.

This isn’t a subjective view. You can see it in the data.