About

Tesla Cult is a pejorative slang term used to describe owners and fans of the car company Tesla, run by Elon Musk, who defend the company and its cars online to a palpable degree when they receive negative press, including when the cars are allegedly responsible for the deaths of their drivers. In some cases, Tesla owners have maintained that they still love the brand despite surviving a life-threatening situation due to the car's failures. The term saw increased usage in early 2024 following two stories where Tesla cars were allegedly involved in both the near-death experience of a driver and the death of billionaire Angela Chao.

Origin

Tesla owners developed a reputation for being zealous defenders of the brand against critics starting in roughly the mid-late 2010s. This led to the company and its fans being described as a "cult" by their critics online in response to myriad news stories.

Early, tweeted examples include an April 18th, 2018, tweet by Twitter / X user @oldauntfannie^[1] in response to Tesla owners banding together to attempt to buy Elon Musk a couch (shown below, top) and a May 28th tweet by @MuskFanboy^[2] who commented on a Tesla fanatic saying some people might have to die to improve the cars' self-driving technology (shown below, bottom).

Discussion of a "Tesla Cult" tends to spike when the owner of a Tesla is spotted online explaining a problem they are having with their vehicle but still avow their loyalty to the company. One early example of this was posted on December 11th, 2019, when Twitter user @benshooter^[3] noticed a Tesla owner in China begging Tesla to give him a "loaner" car because the Tesla he owned would be out of service for nearly a year (shown below). Their tweet gained 15 retweets and 100 likes in four years.

Spread

In the 2020s, the fanaticism around Tesla began making headlines. On October 7th, 2020, InsideEV^[4] covered a story about how a Tesla owner wrote on Reddit^[5] about how the roof of their new Tesla had blown off within hours of it being delivered. They posted a video showing the result (shown below).

On social media, the user was subsequently accused by Tesla fanatics of faking the video through CGI or Photoshop.

In August 2022, a video posted by Twitter user @TaylorOgan purported to show Tesla's autopilot not stopping for cardboard cutouts representing small children. This led user @WholeMarsBlog to petition users in the Bay Area to volunteer their children to stand in front of his auto-driving Tesla to prove that the vehicle would stop for it.

In November 2022, @WholeMarsBlog again went viral for saying that Tesla's autopilot would definitely attempt to kill their drivers by turning into oncoming traffic and that users of Tesla autopilot would need to stay on the alert. However, they still insisted that the autopilot is "safer" than driving normally (seen below).

March 2024 Stories

In March 2024, two stories in which Tesla fans and owners defended the vehicle despite their involvement in highly publicized accidents spread as examples of the "Tesla Cult." The first happened on Twitter on March 3rd, 2024, when Twitter user and Tesla owner @chiarelloERISA wrote that he had experienced a "catastrophic failure" with the steering and brakes of his Cybertruck while his wife and toddler were in the car, and that service was not open. He still insisted he "loved" his Tesla (screenshot of tweet shown below).^[6]

Though the tweet was deleted, several popular responses to the post remained on Twitter. For example, on March 4th, Twitter user @dumbbailguy^[7] pointed out that Tesla is an industry leader in "customer satisfaction" despite having the highest amount of complaints per 100 cars sold, calling Tesla ownership a "literal cult." The tweet gained over 940 retweets and 13,000 likes in 10 days (shown below).

On February 12th, 2024, it was reported that billionaire Angela Chao had died in a car accident.^[8] On March 8th, the Wall Street Journal^[9] reported on the circumstances surrounding her death. Chao was attempting to make a K-turn (three-point turn) in her Tesla vehicle but accidentally put the car in reverse instead of drive, a mistake she had made previously while attempting to navigate the car's gear system, which is operated through a touch screen rather than a traditional gear stick. Once the car had fallen into a pond, Chao could not break or operate the windows to escape the vehicle. Emergency crews also could not break into the car to wrest Chao free.

Despite this, Chao's husband apparently did not blame Tesla for the crash and considers himself a friend of Elon Musk, a source told the Wall Street Journal.^[9]

Search Interest

External References