A Tesla driver’s plan to distance himself from Elon Musk’s lunacy just brilliantly backfired in Brooklyn.
When the director of HuffPost Personal Noah Michelson happened upon a bulky silver Cybertruck in his neighborhood, he couldn’t help but gawk at the behemoth.
“It’s always parked somewhere within a three-block radius of my apartment, and because I rarely see them in Brooklyn, I always notice… They’re also just so alien-looking that it’s hard not to stare,” he said.
Upon further investigation, Michelson saw that the car was peppered with several stickers bearing a disclaimer that said, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”
Tickled by the owner’s attempt to rid themselves of Musk’s musk, Michelson posted a photo of the car to social media and mused, “What do you do when you buy a Cybertruck but live in Brooklyn? A lot of groveling and a lot of praying.”
Days later, there was an update.
Someone had crafted a sticker that looked like a community note from Musk’s social media site X and slapped it on the truck’s backside.
The addendum reminded everyone who crossed the car’s path that “Tesla only started selling the Cybertruck after Elon Musk went crazy,” a fact-check which led the photo to explode on social media.
When Musk officially went off the deep end is a matter of debate.
The Cybertruck was unveiled and available to pre-order in November 2019 but wouldn’t be delivered to customers until four years later.
Around the time of the car’s public debut, Musk had more of a reputation as an eccentric entrepreneur than an American oligarch.
But by the time the trucks began rolling out in November 2023, the billionaire was well into his far-right pivot.
By then, he had been reigning over the site formerly known as Twitter for almost a year, allowing bigoted harassment and extremist content of all kinds to flourish because of his anti-moderation stance as a “free speech absolutist.”
Musk himself has publicly said that he was radicalized by his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson’s decision to come out as transgender in 2020.
In a 2024 interview with psychologist and conservative talking head Dr. Jordan Peterson, the SpaceX CEO said he “vowed to destroy the woke mind virus” after his daughter told him she was trans.
And his falling out with his daughter was all before he began to dive deep into absurdly racist conspiracy theories, helped usher President Donald Trump into office as his biggest campaign donor and made a Sieg Heil-like salute during an inauguration event earlier this year.
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The world’s wealthiest man is now wielding unprecedented power over the U.S. government as the unelected kingpin of Trump’s federal budget-slashing endeavor known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
The Brooklyn Cybertruck saga comes as a record number of Tesla owners are trying to trade in their Musk-backed automobiles.
Earlier this week, car shopping website Edmunds found that Teslas accounted for 1.4% of the cars traded in to dealerships through March 15, up nearly 300% from the same month last year and the “highest ever share” of Tesla trade-ins on record.
