Chris Hayes Dunks on Elon Musk for Being ‘the Root Cause of All the Damage’ to Tesla

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes had a good chuckle on Wednesday night while talking about Elon Musk and the increasingly bad news for his electric car company, Tesla.

Hayes, eventually joined by fellow MSNBC personality Stephanie Ruhle, dunked on Musk and Tesla a lot, inspired of course by the company’s brutal earnings call on Tuesday.

“The good news is apparently the company is not on ‘the ragged edge of death,'” Hayes said, quoting Musk directly. “So says CEO Elon Musk, quite a message for investors on a day when the earnings figures were bad news.”

Noting how business news coverage of the problem repeatedly notes that Musk’s actions as one of Trump’s key advisers is a huge part of that, Hayes ran down how the company’s profits dropped 71% during the first quarter of 2025.

“As one analyst put it, ‘this is the worst performance I’ve seen in Tesla’s history,'” Hayes continued. “Now somewhat oddly, I gotta say Tesla stock was up more than 5% today, because, as I understand it, the glimmer of hope for people that are hardcore Tesla stock enthusiasts, and there are many, came from Musk himself, who said on the earnings call that he was going to start spending more time with Tesla and less time chainsawing the federal government.”

“The problem, of course, is that Musk himself is the root cause of all the damage that Tesla has suffered to its brand,” Hayes said with a smirk. He then noted a new CNBC poll showing that while “Republicans still overwhelmingly approve” of Elon Musk and Tesla, “everyone else, not so much. Democrats, Musk is down 82%. Now that’s a bit problematic for Tesla, given that, according to that same poll, those Democrats who overwhelmingly dislike Tesla are the most enthusiastic and most likely to buy an Electric Vehicle. Flip side of that, as a Republican pollster said, is that where Tesla is strongest is among the people least likely to buy an electric vehicle.”

And then, as he welcomed Ruhle, Hayes noted, “I have never quite seen any company do to its brand what Tesla has done to its brand, what Musk has done to the brand of Tesla over the past year.”

You can watch the entire clip, including a fun bit where they mocked Musk’s constant, shifting predictions of “self-driving cars” that never come true, below:

The post Chris Hayes Dunks on Elon Musk for Being ‘the Root Cause of All the Damage’ to Tesla appeared first on TheWrap.