What Happens to Elon Musk and Electric Cars if Tesla Dies?

Tesla had a rough 2022—to say the least.

Everything from the economy, to inflation, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine dealt body blow after body blow to the electric carmaker—and the rest of the tech and auto industry at large. However, the recent actions of company CEO Elon Musk, following his reluctant purchase of Twitter, have only dragged the beleaguered Tesla further into the deep trenches of a financial crisis. In fact, Tesla has lost nearly 70 percent of its market cap over the year to date.

It’s a whiplash shift from just a year ago when the company, valued at an eye-popping $1 trillion, seemed like it could do no wrong. Some are questioning Musk’s leadership, while others are going further—speculating that this might just be the beginning of the end of Tesla.

There’s no denying the impact that the company has had in both producing and selling electric cars. After all, it did something that once seemed impossible: convincing the public that EVs are pretty damn cool, actually. Now legacy automakers are playing catchup to get customers to buy their own takes on electric cars.

Tesla revolutionized the way the world sees and drives EVs—but with its back against the wall and the financial situation looking more and more bleak by the tweet, we might very well soon find ourselves in a situation where the biggest name in the game has gone belly up.

Let’s be clear: there’s a fairly low chance of that happening… but what if it does?

How to Make (and Burst) an EV Bubble

To understand the impact Tesla’s disappearance would have on the future of EVs, it’s important to wrap our minds around how exactly we got here.

“I give Elon Musk a lot of credit. He almost single-handedly made electric vehicles glamorous and sexy,” Ragunathan “Raj” Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and autonomous vehicle researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told The Daily Beast. “People associated them with the person who was transforming the automotive industry and doing the right thing for the planet.”

However, this was a double-edged sword. Musk hyped Tesla up through lofty—if a bit unrealistic—promises and shitposts on Twitter. He cultivated an army of Elon stans willing to go to war for him online to defend his companies from the smallest of slights. Meanwhile, the cars were finally selling well. All this resulted in the perfect mixture to fuel the rise of Tesla’s stock into the stratosphere like so many SpaceX rockets.

But the value was always tenuous at best. It’s not like other automakers weren’t ever going to make electric cars. So Tesla’s market cap became a bubble of epic proportions.

One of the people who held a needle was Musk himself—which he wound up popping with the acquisition of his favorite social media platform,…