Tesla influencers leave the “cult”

She believes some of these individuals will never stop covering the company because of their long-term investments. “For me, it’s a lot about the money, and it’s more about the money than Elon — even though they say it’s Elon,” she says.

but no one, Tesla squadrons like Dan O’Dowd are irritated.

The tech billionaire, who founded and serves as CEO of Green Hills Software, has also been a vocal supporter of Tesla vehicles and Musk’s leadership. In 2016, he owned two Roadsters and a Model S. “Big fan,” he says. That year, he was thrilled to hear Musk announce that a Tesla would drive itself autonomously across the United States from Los Angeles to Times Square in Manhattan by the end of 2017.

“He wanted people to believe it, but there was no truth to it at all,” O’Dowd says. At the time, he was still arguing that Musk was a “genius.” But as the 2017 deadline passed and Musk stopped short of offering new timeframes for the cross-country trip, O’Dowd wondered whether it would happen at all. He now believes that “nothing worked at that point.”

O’Dowd also began to notice that Tesla would make splashy announcements about new products with amazing specs — such as an enhanced version of the Roadster and a line of Tesla semi trucks — which were then postponed indefinitely.

He felt that Tesla was losing sight of its most important goal: an affordable, basic EV model. The company scrapped its plans for a long-awaited car with a target price of $25,000 in 2024, and in January of this year, Musk announced that Tesla would stop producing the Model

By 2020, people were sending O’Dowd videos demonstrating Tesla’s beta version of FSD. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, this thing fails a lot.’ “This is nowhere close to being done,” he says, despite Musk’s claims that it was close to perfect. O’Dowd and his team began downloading every available Tesla FSD video to analyze its malfunctions.

In 2021, he founded the Dawn Project, an organization that lobbies against the implementation of “flawed and insecure software” in safety-critical infrastructure and systems. Its first and still key campaign aims to shut down FSD. Project Dawn warned of the dangers of the program in an ad published in The New York Times and commercials that ran during Super Bowl broadcasts in 2023 and 2024, which showed self-driving Tesla cars driving through parked school buses and hitting child-sized mannequins in crosswalks.

O’Dowd says these videos never convinced FSD evangelists of anything, because no matter how the tests were conceived and filmed, Project Dawn is accused of faking the whole thing. Teslarati discredited O’Dowd himself as a bad faith actor. “They say he’s on oil company salaries, works for Waymo, and hates Tesla,” O’Dowd says. In response to the Times’ announcement, Tesla loyalist Omar Qazi, who uses the handle @WholeMars on O’Dowd expected no less when he launched Project Dawn. “I knew what happened to people who objected to Tesla before,” he says. Harassment and abuse come with the territory.