The days leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration, which featured multiple terrorist attacks and apocalyptic wildfires across Los Angeles, won’t be remembered as an especially hopeful time.
However, there’s still plenty to look forward to with the growth of artificial intelligence in the coming years, according to Joe Jefferson, president of the Tesla Owners Club of NorCal-Reno.
Last month, we cruised through traffic in Los Gatos, California, in the custom white and carbon-fiber interior of his all-black Tesla Cybertruck, letting the EV’s Full Self-Driving mode handle the controls.
“To me it’s like experiencing the age of going from trains to automobiles,” he said. “That whole revolution, we’re in that now.”
Just minutes earlier, he’d punched our destination, a nearby Target, into the car’s computer. Then off we went, no humans required. As we chatted, he virtually never touched the wheel, gesticulating with a full cup of coffee instead. At first it felt uncanny, but soon totally normal.
His source of optimism is the man who helped create this space-age vehicle: Elon Musk. The recent election marked the moment that Musk, already the richest man in the world, became the most powerful private citizen in America.
First, he was a key Trump campaign surrogate, crisscrossing the country as part of a personal $277 million commitment to elect Trump and his fellow GOP candidates. Now, with his much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, Musk could have major influence on federal spending and regulatory priorities for years to come, even if the DOGE is technically a non-government advisory body.
For the Tesla owners clubs of California, it’s a good time to be a Musk fan, even if their hero’s new allies are somewhat unexpected.
How can a group of climate-conscious, high-tech, EV-loving, liberal-leaning Californians feel so good as their hero aligns with an anachronistic, 78-year-old climate-denying Republican who wants to increase fossil fuel production? Actually, it’s pretty simple.
The Republican’s campaign made great efforts to seem tech-friendly, choosing a former venture capitalist as vice-president, promising to make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world, and courting support in Silicon Valley. Club members want the same things Musk does—self-driving electric cars, cutting-edge AI made in America, space exploration—and believe Trump will leave Musk alone to achieve this.
Kelvin Gee, vice-president of Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley, the largest Tesla club in North America, said it was initially “disappointing” as a Democrat to see Musk back Trump. Still, he sees the logic behind Musk’s strategy to try and influence a politician who “basically doesn’t stand for much, who flip flops like a fish out of water.”
“I think he is playing chess while everyone is playing checkers,” Gee told The Independent. “If you have trust in Elon, this is probably going to be a very positive outcome, both financially and in other ways.”
Gee, like many in the driver’s club, owns Tesla stock, which has surged since the election, helping make Musk the first human being in modern economic history worth over $400 billion. He said Musk is not always popular when he first says or does things, but history usually ends up validating him.
“He’s almost always right,” Gee added.
Musk does have a habit of over-promising, at least on timelines. He suggested in 2014 we might have people on Mars in a decade, and said Tesla would “for sure” have over a million robotaxis on the road by 2020.
He also has a record for creating things people assumed would be impossible, like a booming American electric car company, or a successful private space start-up. In a particularly symbolic moment, a SpaceX mission has been tasked with rescuing NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who got stuck on the International Space Station in June after riding up in Boeing’s Starliner.
For club members, the billionaire’s appeal goes beyond his companies. There’s a feeling, similar to MAGA supporters’ feelings towards Trump, that Musk, despite his wealth, is actually an underdog.
John Stringer, founder of Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley, argued that Musk probably wouldn’t have defected to Trump had California and national Democrats stopped “snubbing him” at every turn.
“There is no other company that has done more for the climate than Tesla,” Stringer told me.
“It’s very clear, if you peel back the onion a little bit, why Elon has gone the other way,” he added. “It’s completely the Democrats’ fault.”
For instance, there was Joe Biden’s decision to leave Tesla out of a 2021 White House EV summit while inviting and lavishing praise on legacy Detroit automakers, despite Tesla being (and remaining) the dominant U.S. EV-maker.
The snub seemed shocking on the surface, but there the Biden agenda featured a mix of pro-union labor goals and racial justice priorities. Tesla is the only major non-union U.S. automaker, and has faced persistent allegations, which it denies, of racism at its factories.
There were more recent insults this year, too, like California regulators limiting SpaceX launches in Santa Barbara and potential state EV subsidies excluding Tesla. One of the regulators involved in the launch decision recently accused Musk of “spewing and tweeting political falsehoods.” Musk has sued, alleging political bias.
Some Democratic politicians appear to be taking a different approach. Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive whose Northern California district includes a Tesla factory, warned last month that the state shouldn’t “play politics” with Tesla.
“Tesla makes over 550,000 vehicles in Fremont in my district & employs over 20,000,” Khanna wrote on X in November, adding, “It would be foolish to exclude Tesla. Have we learned nothing from snubbing @elonmusk at the Biden EV summit?”
But there’s still a widespread feeling among Musk fans that mainstream journalists and politicians are out to get him no matter what.
They point to the way media outlets seem eager to report on Tesla crashes, in a way they feel is unique compared to other automakers.
It’s not just the media that’s interested though: In October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation after four Teslas using full self-driving were involved in collisions.
And even outside of crashes, Teslas have made their way into the news. On New Year’s Day, an Army special forces member drove a Cybertruck outside of a Trump hotel in Vegas, setting off explosives in the trunk and dying by suicide because he said the country was “terminally ill and headed towards collapse” — although the man expressed support for Trump and Musk.
The Silicon Valley Tesla club, which bills itself as the “most notorious Tesla club in the world,” seeks to spread the good word on Musk and his ventures. They host in-person meet-ups and events, have over a million followers on X, and conduct interviews and podcasts on all things Tesla, including in-depth conversations with Musk himself.
Sometimes that means joining in on Musk’s many public battles these days, whether it’s branding California Gavin Newsom a “clown” over the EV subsidies, or bashing the media.
“𝕏 is the most trusted app,” reads one recent post from the Silicon Valley club. “Legacy media lies and works for maximum clicks.”
(Speaking as a member of said legacy media, the club members were all unfailingly kind and helpful during our interviews. They even gave me a latte on my ride-along.)
For all their support, the Tesla owners say they don’t blindly follow everything Musk does.
Gee argues that aligning with Trump is against the club’s support for renewable energy, given the Republican’s calls to “drill, baby, drill” for new oil.
Jefferson, meanwhile, doesn’t go along with Musk’s aggressive stance towards transgender people.
“You just never know what somebody’s going through,” Jefferson said.
It’s a far cry from Musk, who frequently misgenders his estranged daughter Vivian Wilson, who is transgender, and has described her as being essentially “dead” to him and “killed by the woke mind virus.”
Asked to describe the roots of their support, none of the members cited parts of Musk’s worldview like his embrace of Great Replacement-style thinking, which many view as a racist conspiracy theory, or the entrepreneur’s growing pro-natalism.
After driving around Los Gatos for about half an hour, Jefferson steered the Cybertruck back into the parking lot where we met, tapping a digital map to make the truck park itself automatically, in reverse.
As we said our goodbyes, I noticed a white Tesla had pulled up, unplanned, and parked next to our party, which included Jefferson’s rig and Springer’s customized Cybertruck, which has a camouflage paint job and a license plate with the tagline ‘Mars Rover’ underneath.
Nobody in this Silicon Valley town would blink an eye to see a Tesla squadron like this. Even before the election, it was already Elon’s world in many ways, and we were just living in it.
“We’re not here to worship the guy,” Stringer said, “but is the guy doing a lot of damn good? Yes, sir.”
