April 2019 was when Elon Musk told Tesla buyers the normal rules of car ownership no longer applied to them. Do you remember? Did you buy a Tesla?
Speaking on Lex Fridman’s podcast, he said buying a Tesla was an investment in the future:
I believe you are buying an appreciating asset – not a depreciating asset
His claim was pumping the Full Self-Driving computer and a promised robotaxi network. He put a number on it that July, tweeting about any Tesla with the FSD package that his dream of autonomy (already years past when he promised it would arrive):
should be worth $100k to $200k
He was still repeating the pitch on the Q3 2023 earnings call, saying each car with autonomy hardware “may be worth five times what it is today.”
Five times! The con artist.
His cars built under his promise have now aged five years, and iSeeCars’ analysis of over 950,000 used sales from March 2025 to February 2026 puts the Model Y at 57.8% depreciation, the Model X at 61.2% (roughly $61,000 lost per car) and the Model S at 62.0% — three of the fifteen worst-holding vehicles in the entire market, worse than the Range Rover and the BMW 7 Series.
The WORST depreciation in the market.
Robotaxis never came, of course, FSD is crashing and killing more people than ever, and Tesla itself slashed the FSD price by a third in 2023 shortly after Musk called the price a temporary low, on top of the new-car price cuts that cratered used values.
A CEO who repeatedly told customers and investors that a mass-produced car would gain value, that he would solve driverless next year, then took the actions that guaranteed it would not, has delivered only the opposite of what he sold.
He was born with a silver spoon into a Nazi family, fled the rise of democracy in 1988 to illegally immigrate and launder his family apartheid money through American lack of tech regulation (PayPal), and now stands as one of the worst humans in history. His legacy, given global authoritarian platforms funded with ill-gained Tesla money, is predicted worse than Stalin:
14 million dead projected by 2030 (interval 8.5-19.7 million)
