Insider interview with ex-Tesla manager reveals it could soon be 'game over' for Elon Musk's Tesla: 'I don't think that there's anything he can do'

Yahoo

4 hours ago

A former Tesla general manager has turned heads with a shocking new interview in which he laid the struggling EV maker's troubles squarely at the feet of CEO Elon Musk.
Once a five-year Tesla employee and still a Tesla owner, Matthew Labrot lost his job just days after founding the group Tesla Employees Against Elon, according to the Hard Reset Substack, which conducted an exclusive interview with Labrot. Futurism shined additional light on the story, highlighting how Labrot went as far as to say it's "game over" for Tesla under Musk.
"It's time to say the quiet part out loud," Labrot originally wrote in an anonymous letter to other Tesla workers prior to being fired, per Hard Reset. "Let's be clear: we are not the problem. Our products are not the problem. Our engineering, service, and delivery teams are not the problem. The problem is demand. The problem is Elon."
Despite being passionate about the company's mission to deliver electric vehicles to the world, Labrot said his concerns grew as Musk's public antics became more political and more controversial.
"We noticed customers, return customers, shying away from us a little bit," Labrot told Hard Reset. "And that's when I started to see the things he was putting on Twitter and the political views he started to have."
Labrot became increasingly disillusioned as Musk's politics aligned him with the very people, industries, and policies that were in direct opposition to Tesla's core mission as an electric-vehicle company.
"The people that he was choosing to support were the exact people we had been fighting against while trying to accelerate sustainable energy," Labrot told Hard Reset.
Data backs Labrot's observations about customer enthusiasm, with a huge drop in Tesla's sales coinciding with an increase in Musk's public-facing political activism.
Year-over-year sales figures in Europe, a key market for electric vehicles, showed a staggering 49% drop in April, per CNBC. The decline came even as overall electric-vehicle sales increased by 34.1%.
Globally, Tesla sales plunged 13% in the first quarter of 2025 as compared to the year prior, according to Yahoo! Finance.
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Tesla's slumping sales are bad news for consumers and the environment. In 2024, the Tesla Model Y outcompeted the Toyota Corolla to become the world's number-one-selling vehicle, according to Statista.
Removing the world's best-selling vehicle from many consumers' list of viable options means fewer choices available and perhaps not purchasing the vehicle that otherwise would have been best for them and their families.
As a result, some of these would-be Tesla customers could end up purchasing pollution-releasing, dirty-fuel-burning vehicles instead of an EV, further delaying the transition to a clean-energy future.
Thankfully, people looking to purchase an electric vehicle have more options now than ever before.
While the EV market more broadly continues to grow at a rapid rate, Labrot did not foresee such a rosy future for Tesla, once the industry's dominant player. Short of Musk completely departing the company and selling all his shares, Labrot didn't think there was much Tesla could do at this point to alter perceptions.
"I don't think that there's anything he can do to change the people's opinion that have decided they're not going to support Tesla outside of him leaving," Labrot told Hard Reset. "I think for Tesla, as far as vehicle sales go, it's game over."
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