Owners of Cybertrucks are no different than the dudes who drive muscle cars with no mufflers, as if being obnoxiously loud makes them more of a man. Their desperation for attention becomes apparent at every red light, when they put the car in neutral and gun the engine.
I view the vehicles as an even larger version of MAGA hats, yet another way for the owner to announce to the world, “I’m an asshole!”
Since Elon Musk’s self-promotion to Trump’s Fluffer-In-Chief, his car company is floundering. Sales in Europe are down 75% in Spain and 45% across the rest of Europe. His hand-picked board of directors can’t be thrilled by those numbers, yet they’ve remained silent thus far. But shareholders are fleeing, with shares of Tesla stock dropping 24% in just the last month.
As for the cars already sold, there are reports every day of Tesla owners, who bought the vehicles because they’re eco-conscious, trying to sell them because they don’t want to be seen as Musk-ovites.
There was a time when I admired Musk. His advocacy for electric cars helped push an important industry to new heights. The scientists and engineers he hired at SpaceX have done things no other private company has accomplished.
But either the power and money twisted Musk’s brain or the rise of his public facade unveiled the absolute jerk underneath. Like so many of the uber-wealthy, he swims in a sea of sycophants, with nary a voice to restrain him — even inside his own head. No wonder he fits perfectly into Trumpworld. His purchase and destruction of Twitter gave him a platform on which his ego can run wild, allowing him to proclaim himself a free-speech advocate while banning and down-playing posts he doesn’t like.
One other thing about those Cybertrucks — they remind me of the Hummer phenomenon. When introduced in 1992, every guy with too much testosterone had to have one, gas mileage be damned, because they thought it made them more like their hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But thirty years later, how often do you see one of those monstrosities rolling down the road? Perhaps they’re all in a warehouse somewhere ready to be used for the invasion of Greenland.
I won’t be surprised when Musk convinces Trump to replace the presidential limousine with one of his oddly-angled geometric abhorrences — with no muffler, of course.