1d ago

Tesla complains about being target of retaliatory tariffs, and it was right: it's starting

electrek.co Tesla complains about being target of retaliatory tariffs, and it was right: it's starting

Tesla’s policy team sent a letter to the US government to complain about potentially being the target of retaliatory tariffs...

Summary

Tesla warned the U.S. government that it could face retaliatory tariffs due to Trump’s trade policies, and those concerns are becoming reality.

Canada has started targeting Tesla by excluding its products from EV charger rebate programs, with officials considering removing Tesla from a $4,000 EV purchase rebate as well.

Canadian politicians, including NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, have proposed a 100% tariff on Tesla imports.

Tesla, reliant on Canadian and Mexican manufacturing, now faces backlash over CEO Elon Musk’s close ties to Trump and his trade war policies.

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Takes a special kind of dipshit asshole to fail to recognize the entire reason they are as wealthy and powerful and beyond consequence is that they operate out of a runaway, uncontrolled, corrupt capitalist society and if they Fuck Around outside that box, they may rapidly and dramatically Find Out.
- runaway, uncontrolled, corrupt capitalist
  I would actually argue that the only word I disagree with here is "uncontrolled" because it was very tightly controlled for a long time, which allowed the relative stability that let America be a big bully on the world stage, force the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and lead trading partners to believe we were bullies but mostly trustworthy and would follow through on international deals we made.
  Now we are truly entering the "uncontrolled" territory, and that's why faith from other countries in the US being a reliable partner is faltering.
  
  Yeah, the previous state of flawed democracy was perfect for business and maintaining the status quo. Now they went even further into autocracy and now they're basically at the mercy of Trump's whims. It's throwing long term planning out the window and the new game is just sucking up to Trump and finding novel ways to bribe him.
  Musk basically spent a quarter billion dollars to lose a 100 billion dollars more on top of that.
  
  It reminds me of something only semi-related.
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200727091104/https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/media/04hulu.html
  Dec 3, 2009
  As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories.
  “Mom, you don’t understand. I don’t need it,” her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge.
  That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.
  “You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”
  Like Disney-ABC in 2009, these fucking dinosaurs of companies plan to just use institutional dominance and money to force themselves into the position they want to be in. I suspect it will work about as well as Sweeney's efforts to nail a TV to her daughters wall. (You want to use screws for that anyway, you fucking dipshit, Sweeney) Sweeney was so confident in this approach that she related this story and what she said at a press event. This is how fucking stupid these people are, they're willing to relate a story like that as though it shows strength and not shortsightedness and ignorance.
  In other words, I don't expect it to work out very well at all.
  
  I mean, Disney still managed to leverage their market position to go from nowhere to bring the top streaming service, just on the back of their intellectual property portfolio (which is a government granted monopoly, obviously, because for all their talk of free markets, they don't actually want a free market).
  Still, none of those people seem to think things through or even think long term.
  
  Still, none of those people seem to think things through our even think long term.
  Exactly, this was a full two years after Netflix had already started their online streaming service no less. Disney+ didn't launch until 2019, twelve years later. They could have had that institutional dominance at nearly any point but spend a solid decade pissing it away before they finally made use of that intellectual property portfolio.
- I hope he’s a slow learner. Watching this is too much fun.

53 comments