Tesla Has Become The Humpty Dumpty Of Brand Reputation

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Last Updated on: 26th April 2025, 08:57 pm

Critics have been charging, over and over again, that Tesla CEO Elon Musk turned the golden brand of Tesla into a textbook case of reputational crisis after he agreed to run point on Trump’s “DOGE” budget-cutting office. In fact, stories about Musk, DOGE, and Tesla’s brand reputation have become so stale and repetitive that people are tired of hearing about it and they have stopped paying attention — oh, wait, now they’re paying attention again….

More Unwanted Attention On The Tesla Brand

A new flashpoint for Tesla popped up on Friday when The New York Times and everyone else with Internet access reported that Trump’s “DOGE” office has saved just $160 billion for this fiscal year while costing taxpayers $135 billion, according to an accounting by the nonpartisan good-government organization Partnership for Public Service.

That works out to a final savings of $25 billion, which is no small potatoes. However, it’s nowhere near the $2 trillion Musk initially promised to shave off the the federal budget through his position as head of Trump’s “DOGE” office.

In past years, the difference between the how-it-started $2 trillion and the how-it’s-going $25 billion would not be considered a failure on Musk’s part. After all, the admiring press and public have always deferred to Musk’s habit of making predictions that don’t always work out as just another quirk of a brain too powerful for the banal realities of ordinary life. It’s always just been Musk being Musk, the Genius at Work.

That sort chasm between promise and reality has been Musk’s stock in trade at Tesla, but now that his fingers are in the wallets of the taxpaying public, there is no glossing over. Whatever he does at DOGE is there for everyone to see, and if seeing is believing, the results call his CEO-ing of Tesla into question.

Partnership For Public Service Vs. Trump, Musk, and DOGE (and Tesla).

If you’re wondering what Partnership for Public Service is, that’s a good question. The organization launched in 2001 with a mission to prepare the federal workforce for effectiveness in the technologically evolving landscape of 21st century, working with Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Having come up against the brick wall of Trump, Musk, and DOGE this year, PPS has been clapping back every step of the way, leading one to wonder why Musk didn’t simply consult PPS, or any another established authority on government efficiency, before taking a hacksaw to the federal workforce.

Back on February 11, PPS President and CEO Max Stier called out Trump’s executive order on workforce cuts, charging that mass firings “certainly will not create a smaller or more effective government.”

“The federal workforce is about the same size as it was in 1969 and as a proportion of the overall population it is substantially smaller,” PPS also points out.

“Roughly 80% of the federal workforce is located outside the D.C. metropolitan area, meaning these cuts will be felt in communities across the country, including in states like Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania that are each home to tens of thousands of federal workers,” PPS adds.

“About 30% of the federal workforce are veterans, meaning those who have served our country in two vital ways stand to be affected,” they add again for good measure.

But, What Does All This Have To Do With Tesla?

Even if, by some miracle of accounting, Musk does deliver $25 billion in savings directly back into the wallets of the US public, his actions at DOGE have already cut the bottom out of those selfsame wallets.

The PPS estimate of $135 billion in DOGE-related costs does not include other expenses Musk dumped on the shoulders of the public. On top of the human costs of sudden termination — loss of income, emotional heartbreak, mental and physical stress, access to health insurance, childcare circumstances, little things like that — the ripple effect of staff cuts on federal services has yet to be toted up, along with the expense of answering the lawsuits raised by Musk’s cavalier attitude towards labor law.

The impact on state-based expenses related to mass layoffs also needs a reckoning, as detailed in a lawsuit against the Trump administration by 20 state attorney generals.

As for what this has to do with Tesla, well, everything. Musk built up the Tesla brand into a glowing ball of investor-attracting goodies over the years, including FSD, the Cybertruck, robotaxis, the Semi Class 8 heavy duty truck, and a 50% EV sales increase every year. All of these have been delayed, fallen short of expectations, or fallen way short of expectations, without anyone seriously questioning Musk’s judgement. The federal government is a different ball of wax. Now that PPS and other organizations have finally begun defining Musk’s purported accomplishments at DOGE in dollars and cents, the reputational cat is out of the bag.

Whatever Happened To The Affordable Tesla?

Speaking of unfulfilled promises, the Tesla of today was itself built on an unfulfilled promise.

Tesla, of course, was not founded by Musk, although he enjoys the reputation of being the genius who dreamed it up. Martin Eberhardt and Marc Tarpenning launched the EV startup Tesla Motors in 2003, partly inspired by GM’s failed EV1 venture of the 1990s. With a fortune already in hand, Musk signed on as a Tesla Motors investor and board member in 2004, later to take over as CEO in 2008 on the heels of a high-profile power struggle.

For all of Musk’s genius-hood, Tesla is not a particularly good example of entrepreneurial bootstrapping. In its first years, the company focused on the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, producing a limited run of pricey electric sports cars, which is hardly the stuff of transformative mobility. After all, electric vehicles were in common use from the late 19th century well into the 1930s before they lapsed out of favor.

The turning point came in 2010, when Tesla nailed down one of the very first loans issued by a newly funded government agency, the Loan Programs Office in the US Department of Energy. LPO was established during the Bush administration through the Energy Policy Act of 2006, though it was not up and running until President Obama took office in 2009.

With the $452 million loan, LPO expected Tesla to produce affordable EVs for the mainstream auto buying public. Pfffffft went that mission. Tesla repaid the loan in 2013 but never did produce an “affordable” zero emission vehicle for the masses.

Affordable EVs or not, the loan rocketed Tesla to a unique position in the global auto industry during the early years, when it was virtually the only manufacturer to produce electric sedans and SUVs at scale. That status enabled Tesla to collect billions in regulatory emissions credits from legacy automakers in the US and elsewhere around the globe, while coasting on various government-subsidized EV tax credits.

And now, having made a hash of the same federal workforce that was instrumental in the rise of Tesla, Musk is reportedly preparing to pare back his ill-fated sojourn in public service and return to his CEO duties at the company. Based on his performance at DOGE, though, hopes for a brand refresh are somewhat misplaced.

Oh, the irony, it burns. So does the opportunism. If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread.

Photo: The Tesla brand continues to suffer the slings and arrows of CEO Elon Musk’s tenure at DOGE, and Partnership for Public Service has the receipts (via CleanTechnica archive by Carolyn Fortuna).